Hello folks,
So I finally got the FTDI Basic part from Sparkfun, and had a good friend of mine, Jax, but together the DIY dongle. My hands sometimes are not good for fine work so sometimes I leave it up to him!
He used a hard drive IDE cable from a G3 Ibook, that he removed the ribbon cable from, a cut up piece of IDE cable from a desktop computer, and good old glue gun glue to do the job. I didn't need it to be super fancy.
He used the red wire of the IDE cable to signify Ground, so I knew which way to plug it into the console.
A first test via Mincom showed no results. I was a bit disappointed, after all it is a pretty simple set up. Jax tried it out on his nifty pocket PC with Hyperterm. He bent a wire and stuck it in the connecter to join RX and TX, and after turning off Hardware Flow Control, he had it echoing back what he typed. Sure enough after turning off Hardware Flow control on my Minicom, I was talking to the Davis Console instantly. What a great feeling to see random data spitting out at you!
I want to thank Dekay for the information you provided the world free of charge. A thanks to af4ex for the pictures to help us along. A thanks to everyone else for their stories of struggle and success. I would also like to thank Jax for his young hands - he is a great kid and has some neat projects at -
http://www.jax184.com (the least I can do for him).
My next post will outline my work with Free and Open Source software to do something with all this data. Hopefully I will have a link to share for my live web feed of my weather station data.