Sunday, January 4, 2015

Nokia USB Serial Cable hack for my Arduino Mini Pro

I happen to have a Nokia USB Serial Cable lying around. I used it to program my Openwrt router.
It was perfectly fine. I had cut of the Nokia connector and I used the 3 wires:

WireSignal
Black + ShieldGND
WhiteRX
GreenTX

This worked perfectly fine for all 3.3v gear connected to the serial lines.
Until the day I wanted to connect my Arduino Mini Pro (3V/8Mhz).

It worked ok, but there were 2 drawbacks :
- I needed to provide separate power to the Arduino ;
- Programming from the Arduino IDE, requires a manual RESET of the Arduino to start the download ;

After some research, I found out the Cable uses a PL-2303HX chip. On PIN 2, there's the DTR-signal  but it isn't connected. The Arduino IDE using this signal to issue a reset to the processor in order to put the chip in download mode.

So, I performed following changes :
- Cut trace leading to Black lead between the 2 solder pads ;
- Solder Red wire from Capacitor to Red wire ;

- Solder Blue wire from PIN 2 to Black wire ;




This effectively puts 3.3v on the RED wire, DTR on the black and leaves RX/TX/GND as before.

Works as a charm. I soldered some Dupont-lines to the end of the Nokia Cable, heatshrinked the connections and finally inserted the PL-2303 board back into the moulded housing and glued everything nice and thightly. In order to avoid confusion, I used BLACK for GND and GRAY for DTR.




WireSignalMini Pro
BlackGNDGND
WhiteRXRX
GreenTXTX
Red3.3VVCC
GrayDTRGRN

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