Service Forum

[vbwizard]

Hello All, thought I would post here to find out if anyone had any ideas. I built the simple circuit for reading the Philips chip that stores the password on the x41. The chip itself is located on the bottom side of the motherboard opposite the PCMCIA slot. When I soldered the wires I used the orientation as provided in the simple-i2cprog.pdf file. This file shows the that the SDA and SLC wires are on the top of the chip (top being defined based in the orientation of the writing on the chip, which is the only way I know how to do this)... definitely a novice here. I then built the circuit as described (to the best of my knowledge). In the scenarios I attempted I received the error message Eeprom not available.... To describe my circuit I had the ground attached to both Zener Diodes (the end not marked with the black band). For ground I initially used pin 5 as marked on the Female RS232 port that I had kicking around. To one Zener Diode (the end not connected to ground) I connected two wires. One leading to a resister (2.2K) and one lead set to connect to SCL lead off the laptop. The resister was orientated so the the 3 red bands were on resister were closest to the wire running back to pin 7 on the RS232 port. This took care of one zener diode and one resister. On the other zener diode I had 3 wires attached. One was left blank and it was to attach to the SDA line on the Eeprom. The other two one headed directly to pin 8 on the RS232 port. The other headed to the final resister. The three bands again were closest to the wire that ran to the final rs232 connection on pin 4.
With this configuration I recieved Eeprom not available. So I read the forums a bit more and found that the diagram might be reversed to the way I had set it up. Meaning that the numbers on the diagram might NOT correspond to the numbers as labeled on my RS232 port. For the bottom wires on pins 7 & 8 this did not make any difference but for the pins 4 and 5 I reversed them so that it was using pins 1 for ground and pin 2 for resister return from SDA.
This configuration also netted me an Eeprom not found.

Anyone know what I am doing wrong

[bob]

Hi,

Interesting naration, but I think a picture (or maybe two) is worth a thousand words.

Many people have this :eprom not found: in the begining due to some simple mistakes like hookin up to the wrong eeprom pins or COM port, etc. but we need to see some images to help you better.

Cheers

[vbwizard]

I will take some pictures tomorrow and host them to my own website and link em through to here. I can keep the images up there for awhile and anyone can feel free to copy them for their own records. I will try for a couple of macro shots

[bob]

No problem, we will host them here if that's what you want.