2/2/01
Recently i acquired an Hp Jornada 548. Having owned PalmOS organizers for many years my accesories are all PalmOS/Palm hardware compatible. Not wanting to drop $99 on a device I already essentially owned, I decided to make a PPK>SERIAL>HP548 conversion cable. The Palm communicates over rs232, as does the hp548 and Stowaway/PPK. I concluded that if i made the wire, it would automagically work. It did.
I used a 9pin Serial cable from a spare mobo and just cut the internal mobo header off of it for bare wire to play with.
The next step was getting my pinouts and wire mappings all straightened out. The Hardware/Dev from Thinkoutside was used. As well as HP548 pinouts from Beverly Howard's informative site. This is what it boils down to:
Stowaway/PPK Serial Port Pin 7 Pin 4 Pin 3 Pin 3 Pin 2 Pin 1 Pin 4 Pin 8 Pin 10 Pin 5
After the Serial port was jerry-rigged to the Stowaway/PPK, i simply plugged the included HP54X series Serial cable into the serial port. Once the driver from Thinkoutside was installed it was simply a matter of propping up the HP in a manner that it could be viewed while typing.
I have been very happy with the keyboard so far, using it to take all my class or meeting notes. Now i will be able to enjoy it twice as much with no extra cost. I will be getting a palm3>pro bridge in the future, so that i may solder these wires on and make it more streamlined and less hokey.
I have confidence that this could be arranged in the opposite manner, HP548Stowaway>Serial>PalmOS as it would basically be an inversion using the male HP connector on the Keyboard. The voltage/draw of both devices is similar in load on the keyboard. If anyone tried this please email me if you need me to reverse the schematic so that you have the pinouts from an hp548 stowaway to a serial cable that a palm hotsync cradle could be plugged into let me know and ill put that up here too.
Hopefully i will be getting a Dev unit from Agenda so that i may begin making a PPK>Serial>VR3 conversion. This will require writing a driver, but no matter it's the lunix!
