Help With Rino Cable

[jaspel]

Hi,

I spent some time tonight puting together a cable for my rino 110. I dont have the pacience or the cash to buy a plug, so its soddered right onto the pins. Unfornutaly I cant get the computer to detect it. I put a potietiometer to the pins and the upper left and lower left are coming back as a strong connection. Could someone please check the back of their rino 110/120 to confirm that these two pins should be connected. If not I will need to take it off, check that i didnt fry the gps, then take apart the cable and redo it. Thanks..

 

Jaspel

 

PS: I still have the origianl firmware on it, should i update to the newest, keep it where i'm at or somewhere in between? I know Fcc has enabled and disabled some things throughout the last 4 years.

Edited May 10, 2006 by jaspel

[+The Jester]

Check the Garmin site, on the Rino pages you can download the manual, which does have a pin map and other details. Rino linky

[jaspel]

Thanks,

Perhaps I should be more specific. I have already made a cable. I need someone to check on the back of theirs to see if pin 2(data in) and pin 4(ground) are connected naturally. You can check this using a multi meter. thankx

[jaspel]

well, im not an electronics major, just an electrical engineer.

here is a 4.5 battery. chip wise, check somthing like this out(first one). I'm pretty sure a ground connection is necessary, but i could be wrong. (transmit proticall)

 

Thanks for the pdf, i couldnt find anything that nice. The one i found conflicts, so I will try this one out tomorow. Let me know if you need any help with that.

[peter]

I was looking to make a direct USB connection cable instead of making the silly crap that converts the serial cable to USB but it seems that USB is 5.0 volts and I need 4.5 volts (1.5*3 batteries). Anyone know of an effective way to drop the voltages just a tad? Transformer seems fun and circuits for a DC-DC Converter don't make very much sense to me (I am not an electronics major, only a math major )

Dropping voltage a little is easily done by inserting a diode in series. Typical forward voltage drop is 0.3 volts for a germanium diode and 0.7 volts for a silicon one.

But it's not clear to me what you have in mind. USB and RS-232 are both forms of serial interface, but they are very different protocols. Conversion between the two therefore requires some active electronics to process the signals from one format and convert them to the other. The Rino 110 only understands RS-232 type signals so having the "silly crap" that converts those signals to/from USB is essential if you want to connect to a USB port on a PC.

 

And jaspel does need to have three wires to connect his Rino to a serial port on his PC: DATA IN, DATA OUT, and Signal Ground. Hopefully the diagram will be sufficient for him to connect it correctly.

[jaspel]

Thanks again,

I still havent had time to redo the wiring, but I just wanted to contribute. More than likely you have a ps2 port. Newer laptops combine this with an s-video out. This would bealot easyer to port than a usb...

[+CheshireFrog]

Yes looking back at the PDF it seems he does need a ground... but I did at least know it is not necessary to to power it from the computer.

 

Thing is I do not have a serial port on my laptop.. I do not know why... it's a 2000$ system and has every port you can need except serial. I do not want to have to spend too much money just to get it to link up to my laptop... So basically I want a USB cable... perhaps no need to power it as I can always buy more batteries. hehe. I take it I cannot simply match wires from USB cable to the unit, but I need to convert the signals somehow? Maybe google will aid me.

 

You can't simply rig up a USB cable to replace an RS-232 connection - the handshaking and data rate are completely different. I had the same problem with my new laptop and had to use the desktop system to load waypoints. What Garmin and Magellan want for USP to RS-232 converters is ridiculous. You can get converters on ebay for around $12 shipped, or if you don't want to wait you can get a Belkin converter at Circuit City for around $20.