Netelligent modification

Well I received a 233MMX Compaq Armada with some PCMCIA lan cards from a friend. Since finding a dongle seemed to be near impossible and probably would've been too expensive to be worth it I ended up taking one apart. I guessed the pinout, it worked on the first try. Basically just followed the traces to the LAN magnetics chips and hooked up the two pairs of the CAT5 to those.

The cards are both labeled Compaq NETELLIGENT 10/100 PC CARD (they are actually Xircoms based on the Xircom Dingo chip). One had two dongle connectors while the other had only 1.. that's the one I opened up. Wired it up like so:

from left to right, TX+(RJ45 pin 1) TX-(RJ45 pin 2) RX+(RJ45 pin 3) RX- (RJ45 pin 6)

If you ended up here while looking for info on this praticular lan card and you either have a suitable connector or want to solder into the connector without opening up the card or something then you would want to know that those points I soldered to should correpsond to pin 1,2,14,15 on the (now removed) 15pin dongle connector probably in that order. I just didn't want to solder onto the pads because they were too close together and I had no connector.

Testing:

got IP from my DHCP, success!

Apply epoxy, and even more epoxy

Apply shrink tubing and a desoldered RJ45 connector from broken pci lan card (and some more epoxy for good measure), Enter the Ghetto Dongle.

Clean, Simple, Cheap Toner Transfer

Made this movie about toner transfer using photo paper. It was demonstrated as messy and inconvenient before using high-gloss paper, Check out satin-matte.. There's no soap-water scrubbing action, and it gives an accurate transfer.

Toner Transfer Made Easy: Professional Circuit Boards At Home - Watch the top videos of the week here

As you can see the outcome is perfect. The quality approaches that of commercial transfer films.

I've made two JDM programmer pcbs with the method and they turned out perfect, here's one:

A 2051 thermometer experiment

Well this was mostly a "notice some unused components lying around and build something on impulse kind of thing"
Still have some 2051s left over from a previous order of around 5. Had a green, 4digit, 7segment led display which was of the dumb variety with each segment having separate pins in all the digits, no easy solution with 1 set of segment pins and a latch selector like here Also had two 8bit serial-in paralell-out shift registers so I used those to drive the last two of the four digits and wired up the middle segment of the second digit to a separate IO pin to use as a negative sign when it's freezing For the temperature reading I use a DS1621 which I freesampled from Dallas/Maxim The thing top left is a 7805 and under the micro is a reset switch.


It looks really ghetto indeed but It works, and something like getting the more accurate value from the 1621 and sending it out on the serial port for temperature monitoring on a PC or controlling a fan with it wouldn't take long and would only be about 5 extra lines in BASCOM.

The code was based on the project linked above. It's here in case you're interested.

Oct-Nov-Dec Hardware projects summary

It's been an interesting two months in regards of hardware projects. I familiarised myself with the antique AT89C2051 and BASCOM, I really like the simplicity. While this micro may be old, I find it fun to work with. This was the one microcontroller that I built 5 programmers for, none of which worked. My latest try, an old version of Peter Averill's TAFE programmer did the trick however so now I am fully capable of programming them. Good thing too because I have about 5 lying around doing nothing. After finishing a 4 year old project I never managed to finish because of the lack of a programmer I built a POV device with ported and improved code from a POV example.

I later found out that that particular type of SMD led had an integrated resistor so adding the resistors was really pointless. (Not sure now..)

The code in BASCOM-8051, It's currently displaying my name, alter as needed.

The project I finished was actually linked to the previous article. It's the PS/2->Newton Serial Keyboard converter from here.

Works as expected with the improved version of the code. The Linux driver also works after significant modifications

(I haven't updated the link in the previous post yet but I doubt anyone wants it and i'm lazy so leave a comment if you want the working version)

Onward, I've just finished duplicating a significant project that can be found here. It's the AVR Signal Generator, mostly because I had a 2x16character LCD lying around doing absolutely nothing. I haven't finished it yet but. I can now verify that it's working properly.

I've also revamped the MIDI keyboard driver I've built quite some time ago. The project is from this site. The PCB was badly damaged due to overheating, bad PCB quality and a use of a chemical soldering liquid which made additional soldering to the board borderline impossible(thus the overheating) However now it is completely functional again.