MemeCode - Blog

USB/Firewire Header Adapter

Date: 29/6/2005

My new case has USB and Firewire ports built into the front and to connect them into the USB2 and Firewire PCI cards I need a little adapter like this. Male pins on one end and a normal USB or Firewire plug on the other. Both my cards have normal sockets on the internal side instead of header pins. The motherboard only has USB1.1 headers and no Firewire at all.

I can't find anyone in Australia that sells these sort of adapters so I'm probably going to have to construct them out of USB/Firewrire cables... which is more expensive and prone to malfunction than getting the right adapter.

Not to be outdone the sound ports on the front of the case have another incompatible connection point so I can't plug them into my SBLive.

Comments:

SnappyCrunch
30/06/2005 5:08pm

Shipping the required adapter from overseas is out of the question?

fret
01/07/2005 12:03am

So far no-one who has em will ship them overseas. They are quite rare. In any case I've ordered a usb2 and firewire cable and I'll wire it up myself. There are 2 types of people in the world... those who can solder and those that can't ;)

fret
08/07/2005 3:42pm

After working for the last 2 hours on an adapter cable I now have the front firewire port working.

I bought a firewire cable and cut it in the middle, had several attempts at soldering on rows of header pins, gave up and cut the header pins into single pins and that worked much better. Then I went through endless testing of the cable because it wouldn't work. So eventually I pulled the pci firewire card out, and tested the pins on one end of the cable to where the socket on the pci card joined the pcb... and lo... behold... one of the pins didn't connect. I'd in my attempts to put the multimeters testing needles in the cables plug pushed one of the contacts out. So I butchered the plug till it worked.

Now I have firewire on the front of the case.

Usb and sound to go *sigh*

I have the usb cable already, and I'm going to do the same sort of thing.

From:

Email (optional):

(Will be HTML encoded to evade harvesting)

Message:

Remember username and/or email in a cookie. Notify me of new posts in this thread via email.	BBcode: [q]text[/q] [url=link]description[/url] [img]url_to_image[/img] [pre]some_code[/pre] [b]bold_text[/b]

Sitemap