Well, this whole thing started around November of 2002. I was toying with the idea of getting a Pocket PC for reading eBooks, games, calendar... the normal things one would do with a PDA. Around that time I started seeing information on the Dell Axim. Hmm... price $350. iPaq... price $500+. Made for quite an easy process of elimination.

Now, I've been looking for an alternative to my PJRC display for some time now. I'm not saying it's a bad display, it just doesn't work well in a car. Or at least, it doesn't for me. So, I got this idea in my head. I started thinking "Self. You know I bet that hand held has a serial port". To which I replied "Maybe. It's not confirmed ya know. You're not thinking of doing something stupid are you?". The rebuttal "Me? Never. Well, I mean except for that one time... but I swear that goat was... uhhh, never mind". And it just went downhill from there.

Never the less, I got an Axim. And it was good. And then a serial cable came out for it in the last week of January 2003, and life was very good. So. My serial cable in hand, I try connecting to the PJRC board. Uh oh. Doesn't work. One trip to the local electronics shop later, and I now have a male-male gender changer. Ummm. Still no good. Time to start reading up more information.

So, here's the conclusion I've come to. The Axim is an end connection type of device. It's really only meant to be connected to a PC. The PJRC player is also an end connection type device. The serial port on that is also meant to connect to a PC. In theory though, you should the Axim should be able to "see" the PJRC player if a null modem cable is used between them. Well... in theory anyway. Something I did NOT try is a straight through cable. Maybe that would work.

The Axim also has a very odd way of implementing a serial connection. There is no onboard serial chip on the hand held. Instead, the Dell serial cable has a chip that converts the serial signal to something the Axim can understand. The gotcha here is that for this to fully work, DTR(pin 4) must be asserted by the device in order for the serial port on the Axim to realize that a connection is present. Well, for whatever reason Pin 4 on the PJRC board is actually being used as a ground. At this point I thought I was in for a long tedious amount of soldering. But ho, I found a picture on the PJRC site showing the button board.

And then I got an idea. "Hey, we send transmit, receive, +5V and ground to the display adapter. Wonder what happens if I wire +5V to Pin 4?". Trip number two to the electronics shop commenced. And then we have what's displayed below. I picked up a wire-it-yourself serial connector, and connected it to these pins. You may not have to wire anything to the +5V! I just had to for the Dell.