Serial Port for Athena t-mobile ameo

[JChristensen]

I cant find a pinout for the 16pin plug and was wondering where I can find it, but I dont think that would help me anyway.

I have a requirement for a Standard Serial port (RS232 type not USB).

Does anyone have any experience/advice on how to do this?

Do USB to serial adapters work?

Is there a mini SD to Serial port that anyone makes?

Any other ideas?

Thanks in advance

Jon

[mikealder]

Have a look at something like this http://www.roalan.com/Bluetooth%20Wireless%20Serial%20RS232%20Converter. htm you will have to code your own application for the phone to make use of it, I have used a similar device with my Athena - Mike

[JChristensen]

Thanks,

I am trying to avoid a wireless conection. What I am trying to do is use the Athena as a moving map for a glider. To do this I need to make use of an external GPS NMEA source. The software I am using works fine on a pda that has a std com port, I am hoping for a 'quick fix' to try it on the athena.

will this work, I havent looked for drivers yet tho!

http://www.roalan.com/USB%20to%20Serial%20RS232%20RS422%20RS485%20Conver ter.htm

Cheers

Jon

[mikealder]

I have to ask the obvious question though, why not use the internal GPS receiver in the phone? - if the application software you have isn't capable of switching the internal GPS on (some struggle with this) use Fransons GPS Gate to activate the inbuilt receiver and configure the ports, I would expect the inbuilt GPS to work quite well in a glider to be honest, and it does output NMEA data - what mapping application are you trying to use?

USB / RS232 converters are not the way forwards though, the mini USB port on the device is not a true USB port, it will not work with this sort of hardware, even if it did the converters generally don't work well as they don't use standard RS232 voltage levels - Mike

[JChristensen]

A good question. The external NMEA source contains additional sentances for things like accurate air speed and vertical speed that comes from a flight computer making measurements of the air. This is used for some of the calculations on the PDA. The software I will probably use is called SeeYou http://www.naviter.si/products/seeyou-mobile.php. There are several others, but this seems to work best in Landscape which is how I want it.

The internal GPS works fine with the software just to give map position.

I have managed to get it working by emulating a NMEA output over Bluetooth from a PC. I will try something like the Bluetooth to serial adapter and see what happens!

Cheers

Jon