Dennis Lou describes the cable he made:
I happened to notice that a 24 pin male Centronics connector was a
pretty close fit for the Dakota Digital and Palm III connectors.
All that's needed is to trim a little bit off of one side.
The Centronics connector is a 0.100 inch pitch while the Dakota
Digital and Palm III fingers are a 2mm pitch but we only need 4 out of
a set of 5 contacts and those still line up reasonably well.
I bought this particular connector from Halted
Electronics for $1.95 but you can get
it from several other places as well. (click on images for larger
view)
The 24 pin Centronics connector has 12 pins on either side, so the 2
extra pins overhang the 10 PCB fingers by 1 pin on either side.
Keep this in mind when soldering the wires (USB cable is from a free
after rebate USB hub).
At first, I noticed that sometimes I have to wiggle it in order to get
good communications. Later, I noticed that cocking the connector
towards the rear of the camera seems to reliably make it work. It
might be that the spring contacts on the Centronics connector don't
reach as far as the Palm III connector. I suppose I could shim
the front side or trim some plastic or bend out the contacts on the
Centronics a bit. Perhaps some other day...
Above content courtesy of Dennis Lou. Return
to John Maushammer's Dakota Digital Page
