Dennis Lou describes the cable he made:

Dakota Digital Camera USB Download Cable

First we start with a Palm III cradle.




And we'll use the cable from a free after rebate USB mouse which has a button that died..


Here is the Palm III connector liberated of its excess bulk.


At this point, you'll want to remove all the wires soldered to the board. Removing the blue capacitor is theoretically optional, but you may want to clip one of its legs just to be sure.

If you look at the camera interface, you can see the pins are numbered 1 through 10. However,
the Palm III connector is reversed. Hence, 1 is 10, 2 is 9, 3 is 8, etc. On camera side, you want the following connections:

Pin 10: Ground (Black)
Pin 9: Data - (White)
Pin 8: Data + (Green)
Pin 6: +5V (Red)

Therefore on the Palm III connector, you want to solder the wires as follows:

Hole E1: Ground (Black)
Hole E2: Data - (White)
Hole E3: Data + (Green)
Hole E5: +5V (Red)

In case you forget, the original Palm III connections are as follows:

Hole E1: Yellow
Hole E2 (same as hole E12): Hotsync switch
Hole E3: Red
Hole E4: Blue
Hole E5: Brown
Hole E6: Green
Hole E7 (same as hole E13): Hotsync switch
Hole E10: Orange

Here is the USB cable soldered to the Palm III connector.


And here is the camera after the connector has been inserted and the other end connected to the PC. I did this with the camera off and inserted the Palm III connector into the camera before plugging it into the PC's USB port. As a matter of fact, you probably want to observe this connection order just to be safe (Palm III connector into camera first, USB port second). Notice that the green LED is on and the LCD picture counter says "PC".


And here is my first picture downloaded from the camera (click on it for original size). My best estimation is that this one picture took about a second to download, so it should take less than half a minute to download a completely full camera.



Above content courtesy of Dennis Lou. Return to John Maushammer's Dakota Digital Page