Quote:
Originally Posted by Shikhin
Oh, and um, what is the Kindle 3's serial connector pinout order, when you hold it in your hands, as you read it.
EDIT: Suppose I do get a copper clad board, as well as an etching solution, but don't have access to a laser printer, can I somehow do it in a easier + secure way?
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Pinout:
I am doing this from memory, so it might not be correct. It is probably documented in mobileread along with the connector layout for a circuit board.
On the kindle models that I have examined, the serial port layouts were designed so that it is okay to short together any adjacent pair of pins. They are in the order (starting at the top on kindle 3) TxD, RxD, GND. The kindle 3 also has a 4th pin at the bottom, which when connected to the GND pin above it, enables +3.7v DC power to the top connector (in the top slot). You should verify the information above before using it.
Connector:
You can draw it by hand directly on the copper with a Sharpie or other permanent marker. Instead of ferric chloride etching solution, you can use a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric (muriatic) acid. You can google that... Or you can remove copper strips with a knife, or a small drill bit in a drill press (by milling the voids out), or use a dremel tool (or other rotary tool).
You could probably even do it without metal foil. You could take some copper wire used for house electrical wiring, strip it and pound the wires down flat and thin to make copper strips, and glue those to a piece of stiff paper, or thin plastic, or other nonconductive base material (preferably something you can cut to shape with a pair of scissors).
Or... use your imagination!
The point is that there are more ways to do this than I can imagine, so you can do it. It just requires a little ingenuity. I could keep this up all day, and some people would probably respond with even more ideas.
As I mentioned before, you could cut a small piece of copper clad circuit board from a piece of junk electronics. Just route around any existing holes in it. And sand the paint off the copper where you need to etch it. Because it is so small and simple, I would skip the etching and just slice and peel thin strips of copper from between the traces.
You still need to convert the 1.8v TTL serial to something you can use with a computer (RS-232 or USB) even after you bring it out on a cable.