Well all PDA’s with the

Well all PDA’s with the exception of two Newton 2100’s are gone. Sold both the hp Jornada and Handspring Visor on eBay. It’s remarkable, that neither of these devices could compete with the capability of the Newton. Input using Palm graffiti was miserably slow. Success was only achieved through the use of a Stowaway keyboard. It was impossible to input text into the Jornada. Handwriting recognition was very poor at best. Had high hopes for the Jornada but ended up very disappointed. It has an impressive colorful screen, but no real functionality.
Still have the Handspring Visor version of the Targus stowaway keyboard. It’s a pretty slick device. Thought it would be nice to convert it to work with the Newton. Raised the question on newtontalk@newtontalk.net and received a wealth of information. Andy put me on to dev.newtontalk.net/~dpadilla/newtondose.htm. This is Daniel Padilla’s site. In it he provides a great wiring diagram an offers his “alfa” driver to anyone interested. He and I have passed several emails. Daniel provided key information, as follows:

“The Visor version uses TTL level signals, you cannot use it with the regular serial port of your Newton as found on the serial dongle, the SER-001 or the interconnect-DB9 cable.
The only way would be using the other serial port available at the interconnect. If you have a interconnect connector, I can send you some wiring diagram and a modified driver.”

“The palm portable keyboard needs a couple of actions to start working First, it needs to be powered. And then, the handshake pin needs to be raised, lowered and raised again. When extracting power from a serial port, you usually get it from the handshaking pins of the computer. But the regular newton serial port has both handshaking signals combined at the HSKo pin. And I had to use that pin for for handshaking. So I got the power from the TDX+ pin.”

“The connector of the MP2000, MP2100 and emate is called Newton Interconnect port. It has audio in-out, power in-out and two serial ports. The serial dongle, SER-001 and interconnect-DB9 cable provide access to the first serial port which has RS-232 levels. To use your Visor keyboard, you’ll need to access the second serial port, that uses TTL level signals, with a interconnect connector. The easier way to get an Interconnect connector is destroying a serial dongle. I think it would be easier to buy a Palm stowaway, that are going for 20 US$ these days at amazon.com.”

It does not seem practical to attempt to convert the Visor version on the stowaway. Will just sell it on eBay and maybe get a Newton keyboard. Not sure it is really needed since text entry is so easy.