Bacteria - Ipaq 3600 PDA resurrected, improved! *DONE*

[bacteria]

vskid - Great work, I am enjoying the fact we are both working on this mod at the same time and can share information.

You have proven with the battery connection yours works with three AA's, I can't use this as I destroyed mine, so need 4 AA's at the mains connection (no real odds).

Please post comprehensive pics of modding the LED's to replace the PDA's screen light, might be worth doing.

Found this link which might be useful vskid - http://www.handhelds.org/Compaq/iPAQH36 ... H3600.html

Are we able to extract the pin data we need from this for the CF card?? This appears to the the official developers datasheet.

Lots of stuff, http://forum.brighthand.com/archive/ind ... -1130.html

Looking on e-bay, rather than "Compaq Ipaq 3660" search and getting nothing, I did "Compaq Ipaq" and found for about £12 + £8 Customs Tax you can get a battery from China (not a good deal), the battery is 1600mAh, which explains the bad battery life in the PDA.

There are some Expansion packs n e-bay, looking to see if I can get one at a cheap price; then rip it apart.

[vskid]

The AAs successfully discharged and charged. Even better, the ipaq doesn't drain the batteries all the way, which kinda sucks for battery life, but it also means that the batteries can be "dead" in the sight of the ipaq, but they'll still give it juice to keep the RAM going. I think I can get about 4 to 6 hours of battery life without any sort of screen light, I wasn't paying much attention to the time, so I'm not sure yet.

[bacteria]

vskid - this sounds similar to my findings and postings - with the batteries on the external power in plug, when the voltage gets to (in my case) just under 4.5v the screen goes onto standby, but keeps everything else ok. I can still turn the system on from standby but it goes again after a few seconds. This seems to be what you are saying too (all be it at a lower voltage). With one set of batteries I got 3.5 hours with the light on Super Bright, you could probably get over 4 hours on High Light.

With the external mains power in, it would recharge the batteries, although I probably won't get a completely maximum recharge as the batteries have a possible recharge voltage of 5.5v and the mains adaptor is 5.1v, but that should be ok. This is I presume the other thing you were mentioning about "the AA's successfully discharged and charged"?

I figured in my project, that rather than making the system wider by putting the batteries on the sides of the screen (which might make it look too wide and harder to hold to use nicely), the batteries would be mounted under the mobo - there is plenty of space for 8 x AA's - using four only would leave a space, eight would fill it nicely, and gives lots of usable life.

Were the links I gave you useful?

[illustriouschin]

wait i thought AA's were really huge and inefficient. wouldnt it be a lot more convenient to use a Li-ion battery pack?

[Skyone]

wait i thought AA's were really huge and inefficient. wouldnt it be a lot more convenient to use a Li-ion battery pack?

Li-Ions have their fails, too. AAs are fairly efficient and generally safe if they're NiMH.

[bacteria]

illustriouschin - AA's are hot huge, about 14mm high, they are fine - heck, two sets of four of these in series powers the PDA for 10.5 hours - that ain't bad!!

Skyone - (or anyone else who would know the answer to this) - would there be any long term effect on keeping AA rechargeables on permanent recharge, out of interest?? I wasn't thinking of doing this in the scenario I mentioned, but if there is no longterm damage at all, it might be worth doing. Any comments??

[illustriouschin]

wait i thought AA's were really huge and inefficient. wouldnt it be a lot more convenient to use a Li-ion battery pack?

Li-Ions have their fails, too. AAs are fairly efficient and generally safe if they're NiMH.

oh i thought from experience that they were going to be crap but if you guys say they are cool then how can i argue with that!

[bacteria]

illustriouschin - of course AA's are not "crap", look how many devices around the home use them, and also higher drain applications like some digital cameras, GP2x, etc. One of my digital cameras uses 2 x AAA's and my other one uses 2 x AA's.

The time AA's are no use is when the appliance is very high drain, then AA's can't cope, even photo grade ones (as I use). This PDA however was designed to work with a Li-ion battery of only 1600mAh; therefore, if you have a set of AA's which (as I used) are 2700mAh, your batteries last and don't even get mildly warm. It wouldn't be any use using AAA's (they are only 1300mAh at maximum) but quality AA's are fine.

[Skyone]

Skyone - (or anyone else who would know the answer to this) - would there be any long term effect on keeping AA rechargeables on permanent recharge, out of interest?? I wasn't thinking of doing this in the scenario I mentioned, but if there is no longterm damage at all, it might be worth doing. Any comments??

Same effect as having any other rechargeable battery. I'd just shove them in a battery pack (holder) as you're doing so that if they do crap out, you can easily swap them out. If you charge them correctly, then there should be no long-term effect per se.

If you're using NiMH (or even possibly NiCD): Here or here.

[vskid]

Were the links I gave you useful?

Yep, that one with all the pinouts will be really useful.
The expansion port on bottom (thanks to your link) seems to be directly compatible with CF/PCMCIA/IDE. The only problem is soldering to the board, its half through-hole, half surface mount, both of which are pretty small. It would be a lot easier if I could find something that would plug into the port, so I can solder to that instead.

When you take apart the screen assembly, the diffuser for the frontlight is on the touchscreen's part of the assembly. LED modding it is gonna be great fun because of that.

I might work on LED modding it on Monday (tomorrow), I have school off then. The only problem is that I don't have much use for the ipaq, so I'm not too ambitious about it, its just to have something to do.

[bacteria]

I note the CF card is a 50 pin memory card. That is likely to be a soldering issue and there is likely to be a reasonable chance of something going wrong. Thinking about it, the USB connection to the PC enables you to copy programs and games across and install them, and to back up the Ipaq to your computer, so I can't see a real reason to use a CF card to back up data - is there one? I never used to use one.

The Expansion packs for the Ipaq go quite expensively on e-bay, about £14, which is a lot for potentially little reward - the battery in it is redundant with our mod anyway.

Thinking about it also, why do an LED mod, with the sort of battery life you can get with AA's, getting another hour or so from them isn't really necessary when you can get 10.5 hours use in any case - that is more than plenty battery life for a working day, in any case, the PDA is bright enough and works well as it is. If you do an LED mod, please post lots of how-to pics as I could change my mind if it is fairly easy and worthwhile.

Thanks Skyone for the links, interesting reading. Rather looks like it is better to leave the batteries off unless needing recharge, in which case they can be on whilst the external mains power is on (to recharge the batteries and keep the PDA on).

[bacteria]

I am not sure if I will stay with this design, it looks bland, however of course this is only on paper so looks entirely wrong anyway.

The inside rectangle is the INSIDE area of the screen, not the outer bit. I have made the drawing to only have about 3mm clearance on all sides, so this is as small as it gets. The system is longer to accommodate the external power and USB port. There looks to be just enough space to put in a D-pad and the buttons, the speaker is from an old GBA as the PSone speaker is too big. The GBA speaker is bigger than the PDA's and I would expect it a better one anyway.



151 x 82mm, although I need to add a couple of millimeters on each side for the edge strips, so will end up 155 x 88mm. Original PDA was 129 x 84mm (I had to allow for the extra 21mm for the USB and power mobo), so this isn't that much different, which is ideal. The PDA will be thicker than the original PDA of course, the original one is around 27mm thick, mine will be more like about 35mm or so (I need to work that out more precisely).

As you see in the pic, space is tight, as the buttons, speaker and D-pad I am using are all bigger than the original. I probably won't use buttons as such at all, but the thin raised area of the tact switch button itself.

Yup, I know, not a very good drawing, however this is the same principle as when I did the Nintendo 64 Advance, it is designed as a template rather than a design drawing. I will cut the centre out (touchscreen) and the outside will be out of perspex again. The tact switches will be fitted inside the perspex and the screen will too. I will put a layer of 6 thou PVC, reverse spray painted as before (probably in silver for a change, as the PDA was itself a silver colour), which will sit on top of the screen edge (just show the inner screen and the button switches).

[illustriouschin]

wouldnt it be more logical to put the Dpad on the left side like with game controllers since you are using game parts here and having the dpad in the center is not a convenient place to use it. having all the controls at the bottom are not all that great either that makes it top heavy when held. the input board is seperate, maybe cut it in half, put the dpad and speaker on the top, the buttons on the bottom and hold it horizontally.

or maybe do something like with the wonderswans then you can hold it both ways. well have the right side buttons closer to the top, having them at the bottom is dumb for reasons i mentioned already, pluse having them up there gives your fingers more to hang on to.

http://us.emulcenter.net/images/Consoles/wonderswan.gif

[bacteria]

wouldnt it be more logical to put the Dpad on the left side like with game controllers since you are using game parts here and having the dpad in the center is not a convenient place to use it. having all the controls at the bottom are not all that great either that makes it top heavy when held. the input board is seperate, maybe cut it in half, put the dpad and speaker on the top, the buttons on the bottom and hold it horizontally.

or maybe do something like with the wonderswans then you can hold it both ways. well have the right side buttons closer to the top, having them at the bottom is dumb for reasons i mentioned already, pluse having them up there gives your fingers more to hang on to.

http://us.emulcenter.net/images/Consoles/wonderswan.gif

Thanks for your input illustriouschin, however doing what you suggested would make the PDA rather big as moving the controls to the sides would mean the case would have to be bigger, which would make it harder to hold as a PDA and also it wouldn't fit in your jacket pocket.

Yes, having the D-pad and buttons on the bottom is slightly awkward, in comparison to the games system approach with D-pad on left and buttons on right; however the orientation of these are different on PDA's, as the idea is that the unit can be held entirely in one hand so the other hand can use the touchscreen pen and work the PDA. It also should be able to fit in your jacket pocket. PDA's, including the Ipaq 3600 series, look like this (I got the pic from the internet as mine is in bits):



The idea of this project is to keep the case to as near the size of the original as possible, give far greater battery life, better speaker, better D-pad (the one on the Ipaq sucked) and buttons to access the menus which are easy to press. These are all improvements over the original design.

What I might do is to swap the speaker with the D-pad so the D-pad is more on the left side. I am still making up my mind as to exact layout, I have various ideas in my head at the moment...

[tom61]

You might want to consider having a couple of buttons at the top, for those emulators that support full screen (and GFDoom). A couple squished up close to the screen vertically wouldn't add too much length.

I thought these models of iPaq had troubles with multiple button presses (i.e. pressing two directions[like up and left] would not yield a diagonal or you can't press more than one button), which make playing games on them harder, is that not the case? There are a couple of gamepads that work with iPaqs that you could hack up instead, if there are issues with multiple button presses.