Project: Whisper - build log

[JCLW]

[MrBurnsVoice]Excellent....[/MrBurnsVoice]

This page shows that the Type A ports have the same pinout order as a normal header: http://www.frontx.com/con_guide.html. Hopefully a normal strip of header pis will fit.

I'm going to try it with just the four pins at first (+5V, D-, D+, GND). If I have problems I'll add signal ground pins as well, but I don't think I'll need them.

[Archilochus]

Slick mod, JCLW

Kewl guide too!

[gvblake22]

Nice work! Hopefully it works! I'll keep my fingers crossed for ya

[JCLW]

Well I measured up the holes, and they turned out to be closer together then the normal header pins. :(

So I soldered some wires on:


That white wire on CN2 got a little melted, but I'm not going to bother redoing it.

I'll twist the pairs together (D+ & D-, and +5V & Gnd) and wrap the shield around them all before I solder on the pin headers.

I'm using:
Bare - Shield
Blck - Ground
Wht - +5V
Yel - Data+
Grn - Data-

I'll grab a little foil tape from work tomorrow to cover up the two open holes in the bracket.

[JCLW]

Well I picked up some header pins today but forgot the foil tape.

First off I twisted the data wires together and heat shrunk them:


Then I twisted the power and ground cables together, wrapped the sheild around everything, slipped some larger heatshrink around it all, and soldered on the pin headers:


Time to go test them on my workstation...

[Tyreal]

lookin good so far man.

[gvblake22]

Awesome work JCLW! Looks like it will work out great! Very good ideas here, I like it! :)

[simple_inhibition]

definitely gonna be a sweet mod! i can wait to see the finished product!

[JCLW]

Thanks guys!

Well, I threw it into my P5WD2 workstation to test and all five ports still work fine. I connected my front case ports up to my homemade headers, and everything seems to work fine. :)

I did a few benchmarks comparing my native intel ICH7R USB controller to the NEC D720101. These were done using a USB flash drive (as it is the fastest USB device I have around) connected via the front case ports.

Intel:


NEC:


As I anticipated, the NEC controller is not as fast as the native intel controller. This is probably mainly due to the fact that the NEC controller has to deal with PCI bandwidth and latency issues, while the intel controller is integrated into the southbridge. Plus intel makes one of the best (if not the best) USB controllers around.

The real reason for this test was to verify that despite my ugly wiring mess the NEC controller was still operating in USB 2.0 mode (@ 480mbit/s). Since USB 1.1 tops out at 12mbit/s (~ 1.2MB/s) and ATTO shows speeds of ~24MB/s it is definitely in USB 2.0 mode. That's a full 20x faster for my flash drive!.

Using the benchmarked speeds as a guide, my camera (Canon 10D) saves files that average over 6MB in size in RAW mode so this means it'll only take me 1/3rd of a sec to transfer each picture when I'm visiting my parents, as opposed to the 3 secs per picture it would take if I were to just use the onboard i440BX USB 1.1 ports. :)

If I were transfering 60 pictures the difference would be 20secs vs 3mins :shock:

Definitely worth the $15 bucks + 2 hours I put into it.

[gvblake22]

SWEET! It Works!!! Nice work man :)