Thank you Barry and Lyndel for your efforts in making public the test port pinout on the TSU9600 docking base.
I’ve done the mod myself and it is a great, time saving feature specially with Barry’s debugging tool.

Kind regards,
Sorin

How difficult was the soldering? I bought an extra base and power supply (wanted one for the HT room anyway) and plan to make the modification, but I suck at soldering.

Mark

It's not hard at all. The traces are rather large.

The traces are specifically fitted such that if you get a Molex 3-pin connector (pins + jack - same used for PC Fan to motherboard connections and some fan-speed limiters), you can make it so that you can wire up the jack in the top-half of the base and then simply plug it into the board for final assembly.

Lyndel is correct. I am not very experienced with the soldering but this is very easy. Open the base and judge it yourself. Molex connectors are what I used myself.
I also hated the bright light in the base but I didn’t want to alter the docking base too much so, there’s a simple solution:


Get a black permanent marker and darken the white LED.

Great. Thanks.

One more question - the special cable - the FTDIchip store seemed to point me to a UK based supplier. Was there a better option? It seems like it could take some time to get stateside.

What you need is an TTL 3.3v to USB converter.
Lyndel or Barry will correct me if I am wrong.
You should be able to find one in US. Worst case scenario you will have to connect an 3.5 stereo jack on RX/TX/Gnd.
An example:

[Link: ecrater.com]

[Link: mouser.com]

That www.mouser.com link appears to be the same cable.

Thanks,
Mark

The mouser cable appears to be the same item and refrences the FTDI description. Sgtoma is correct in that what you need is an RS232 level converter at which time you can use an RS232 input to the PC. The cable is nice because many PC's no longer have RS232 inputs just USB and it provides a degree of isolation.

Although the cable mfg is UK based, it actually ships or at least mine did from Oregon. Whole thing took about a week using cheapest transit possible