Posted on Sunday, September 09, 2007 9:07 PM
Well, I started to feel better in the past two days, so I decided to finish a little project I've been working on for some time now; putting the DDR-pc in my living room in a slightly smaller desktop case instead of a tower, and in order to show various things on the projector, adding an internal card reader to the mix.
However, the reader I bought a while ago only has a connection for a motherboard header.
Since the motherboard I used in that machine doesn't have USB 2.0, and I like to have the full bandwidth on the devices I connect, I had to go and get a separate interface card for that.
I figured the card would just provide me with 4 or 5 regular USB-connections, so I broke out my trusty soldering iron, a pin header, some wire and two USB connectors to connect the reader the oldfashioned way.
But wait, aren't that... yes, they are!
The person designing the card was kind enough to include some contacts for a 10-pin header (right beneath UJ5), to connect internally connected stuff to the card.
After checking whether the header would be pin-compatible or not (it is), I put the wire and the connectors away again, made a header to fit and soldered it into place:
Yes, this voids my warranty severely, but I don't really care as I tested this card beforehand, and it's not very expensive to begin with. ;)
The card obviously still works, and the only thing that's left for me to do is to cover up two of the five UJ-sockets, as the header shares the lines used with UJ3 and UJ5.
Cheers, K.