Connectors

The Connectors on the Wallaby and Himalaya

Wallaby and Himalaya come with two connectors on the bottom. The large connector has pins for the USB port, serial port com1, power and audio (in and out). The connector is the same as on the 3800 or newer series iPaq, but the pinout is different. This means none of the iPaq peripherals will work.

Here's a picture of the connector, showing which of the 22 pins we call pin 1.

Or in words: If you hold the device with the screen towards you and the antenna upwards, pin 1 is the leftmost pin. We haven't seen any documents from HTC that acknowledge that this is really pin 1, but we'll use it for now.

(Orientation on the Himalaya is the same as on the Wallaby.)

NOTE -

The Himalay only needs 5 Volts-supply, it's unconfirmed if the Wallaby indeed has 6 Volts-supply, but users report having problems putting 6 Volts in their Himalaya !

Notes:

• CAR_ON# is connected to +6V/+5V on the car charger, it's not connected in the cradle. +6V/+5V makes the phone go to speaker mode immediately when picked up or dialing. Himalaya only: When this pin is connected to ground via 10K resistor, the internal mike and speaker are turned off, and all audio input and output are redirected to CAR_MIC_IN, CAR_AUDIO_R, and CAR_AUDIO_L respectively. When CAR_ON# is connected to ground directly, the audio input and output are only redirected to the connector pins while a telephone call is in progress. Wallaby only: When CAR_ON# is grounded, the internal mike and speaker are turned off, and all audio input and output are redirected to CAR_MIC_IN, CAR_AUDIO_R, and CAR_AUDIO_L respectively.
• Pin 2 GND / SENSE is not necessary. it seems that if it's grounded, the phone hangs up when placed in a DIY Car-holder for example. - leave it unconnected.
• Pin 5 ANALOG GND - connect this to your sound Input/output-GND (Speaker/Microphone) - do not connect this with the other GND's - it makes a lot of noise on the analog input/outputs.
• Audio needs to be capacitively coupled in, any DC bias seems to inhibit audio.
• Pin 12 IN_CALL - (maybe Blue Angel only!!) This pin's voltage builds up to about 5v when making a call and does drop off to 0 when you end the call. Handy for making your DIY carkit (trigger car audio mute?).

If RS232_DCD is pulled to +6V/+5V, the device turns on and ActiveSync is started. The serial port powers down and needs to be reopened after the device goes in power-save mode.

• USB power also wakes up the device and starts ActiveSync. UDC+ and UDC- are the USB data connections. One person reported measuring them the other way around.

We bought our connectors at Gomadic for US$2.95, and were happy: http://www.gomadic.com/ipconplug38s.html

Power hookup

The schematic below shows the car charger schematic. Not shown in the schematic is that +6V is also connected to the CAR_ON# pin on the Wallaby side.

DIY Car-handsfree:

This is the way to make a Car-handsfree. the audio-transformer is a 1:1 type, used in audio-applications. Connection of a microphone depends on which type you have, some requires a preamplifier, some don't - experiment ! It's very important that the ANALOG-GND (Pin5) is not connected to any other GND's !!!

The Wallaby headphone connector

Then there's also the headphone connector. It looks a little bit like a standard headphone jack at first, but contains an extra ring.

In the sales package for the Wallaby, there's a headset (of which the earpieces do not stay in your ears). It connects to this connector, and has a tiny circuitboard inside. It looks like this:

Notes:

• As you can see, grounding the microphone wire will pick up the phone. This only works on this connector: grounding the audio input on the large connector does nothing.
• The silkscreen says D2, but there's two capacitors soldered there. Probably a last-minute modification to keep more RF away from the microphone.

Conversion from a Nokia Headset

Since the Nokia 8210 GSM has the same 4-connector jack, here the pin layout of a regular Nokia 8210 PHF Jack and the responding Wallaby/Himalaya connection.

Wallaby headphone jack

I number the terminals counterclockwise starting from where the plug fits (like a DIP IC). One side has pins 1 and 2, the back has pin 3, and the other side has pins 4 through 6. To disable the headphone jack, short 2 to 3 and 4 to 6. --yuubyou

Himalaya headphone connector

The Himalaya has a different headphone connector. Most obvious is that there's now two buttons on the remote: one for pickup and one for hangup. On touching the Sleeve with the Outer Sleeve it seems to have the same effect as pressing the End Call button.

Conversion of Plantronics MHS 123 Headset for Prophet

Prophet has the following headphone connector wiring:

Plantronics MHS 123 uses a different wiring, but after swapping the wires, it works perfectly with Prophet.

Plantronics wiring:

Serial cables

Here's a few cable diagrams for serial cables. The connector terminals are rather small and close together. Nothing unmanageable for an experienced enthousiast, but building these cables yourself probably is not the project you want to pick to teach yourself how to solder, unless you order 10 connectors.

Cable to plug into computer

This is the cable you need to talk to the Wallaby or Himalaya serially from a computer, such as is needed with our Manipulator program or for using ActiveSync through the serial port. Techies like us call it a "null-modem cable", O2 describes it as a "serial hotsync cable". Optionally, if you wish to be able to power/charge to XDA while using this cable, you could hook up a female connector that mates with the connector on your power adapter between Ground (pins 2,5,etc. on XDA) and pins 20,21 and 22 on the XDA. Make sure the center conductor on the power connector goes to pins 20,21 and 22.

• NB: don't ground pin 5 on phone (audio ground)*

Cable to plug into modem or GPS

This cable will connect to devices which come with a cable to plug into a PC serial port, such as a modem. If you are connecting to a device that only uses RX, TX and GND (such as many GPS receivers), you may only need the wires which connect to pins 2, 3 and 5 on the 9-pin serial connector. And you can, optionally, hook up a charging interface in the same way as described above.

• NB: don't ground pin 5 on phone (audio ground)*

Modifying iPaq accessories

Using the pinout of the XDA connector, you can now modify iPaq accessories to fit the Wallaby or Himalaya.

• NB: don't ground pin 5 on phone (audio ground)*
• Note: The Wallaby/Himalaya and the older iPaqs have DSR and DCD combined in one pin. Depending on what output signal the device sends to indicate the port is opened, you may want to hook up either hook up iPaq pin 6 or 11 (but never both).

Keep in mind that on some accessories, such as the keyboard below, you need to make the connector face the other way, as well as make the necessary electrical changes.

Charge circuit for the Universal

The Universal has a standard mini-usb connector so that any matching usb-cable can be used for synchronization.

However, the pinout of the connector is extended to signal the connection of the external DC battery charger. THe Universal recognizes the charge power supply because pin 4 the mini-usb connector is pulled to ground (pin 5). The fast charge mode is apperntly switched directly from pin 4.

Many 3rd party chargers are lacking this connection of pin 4 to ground, which is why they often do not work reliably.

Something additional for the BLUEANGEL !!!

To built a USB-Cable to sync and charge the BA via USB form the PC, you have to connect following Pins:

PC <=> BA Pin: (see "Connector-Pinout")

PC-GND <=> (2-Analog-GND, 16-GND, 17-GND, 18-GND)

PC-Signal (+) <=> (14-UDC+)

PC-Signal (-) <=> (15-UDC-)

PC-VDD <=> (13-USB_VDD)

(This pinning is the same as in the cradle)

You MUST NOT connect PC-VDD to BA-Pin 20, 21 or 22 or PC-GND to BA-Pin 2 (GND-Sense) cause then, the cable would allow syncing, but won't charge the BA form PC-USB!

(...although a cable like this would charge the BA with an ?ACtoUSB-Adaptor. The reason seems to be the higher voltage (PC-USB: 5V <=> Adaptor: 5,5V or above)