Electronic – DMX: How to do with ground and shield

For the shield to be effective, it requires as low impedance connection as possible to your shield ground. I think those recommending resistors, or not connecting it to ground at all, or strictly talking about your digital logic ground, and assuming you have a separate shield ground. If you have a metal enclosure, this will be your shield ground. At some point, your digital ground must connect to your shield ground. For EMI reasons, this single point should be close to your I/O area. This means it's best to place your USB connector with any other I/O connectors around one section of the board and locate your shield to logic ground point at that location. There are some exceptions to the single point, rule, if you have a solid metal enclosure without any apertures, for example, multiple connection points can be helpful. In any case, at shield to circuit ground connection, some may recommend using a resistor or capacitor (or both) but rarely is there a reasonable reason to do this. You want a low inductance connection between the two to provide a path for common mode noise. Why divert noise though parasitic capacitance (e.g. radiate it out into the environment)? The only reason usually given for such tactics is to prevent ground loops, but you're talking about USB, ground loops most likely won't be an issue for most USB applications. Granted, such tactics will prevent ground loops, but they will also rend your shielding all but ineffective.

Yes, it sounds like (a little confusing) you have a ground loop problem, and yes they can matter, especially when trying to measure small analog signals. If all grounds tie back to the same outlet strip via relatively short line cords, then it would probably be OK. However, you say that this cryostat thing (whatever that is) is connected separately to building ground, so that is obviously not the case and it's confusing therefore why you brought it up.

In general, it's good to convert analog signals to digital as close as possible to the source, then ship around digital signals. Those are much easier to isolate, like via opto-couplers, pulse transformers, radio, etc. In other words, a old fashioned A/D card in the computer is not the best overall architecture from a system level point of view.

However, look at the A/D card carefully. Most likely it can be configured for single ended and differential operation. This is a case where you want differential inputs. The cryostat thingy may produce a ground referenced signal, but take its ground and output signal as being differential. This will essentially subtract the ground offset from the signal before converting it.

This trick will only work up to some frequency, probably a few kHz or low 10s of kHz. It should work pretty well in subtracting off any ground signal due to 60 Hz or 50 Hz power line return currents accross ground paths in the loop. Sharp common mode spikes can still confuse the diff amp in the A/D and show up as noise in the final output. It's worth a try though. If it's not good enough, go back and convert to digital at the sensor, then opto-isolate the digital telemetry signal.