kotel wrote on 2024-12-09, 08:46:
Hi
While back I got this Xircom Creditcard Ethernet 10/100 with an old armanda t4131 (which has an dead keyboard now (these laptops suck)). Sadly it is missing it's dongle. I have tried searching online for the pinout but to no avail. All dead ends. There are 9 pins connected to the dongle connector. One seems to go to GND, second to an VIA on GND (maybe NC?). Three go to pins on HALO TG110-XIR13P2, which I have no idea of what it is is an LAN isolation transformer. One goes under that chip and the rest go under other IC's.
My question is, is there anybody who has this card with an dongle and can make an pinout of where the data pins from RJ45 connector go to the dongle connector? They even can be the ethernet+modem combo cards since they look to be using two seperate dongles.
It's odd isn't it, there seems to be little information online for this. With some PCMCIA network cards once they're opened up you can look up the part code for the ethernet magnetic and find the relevant info, but Xircom used their own custom parts so there's no datasheet to refer to. It seems like search engines don't bring up useful results looking for Xircom dongle pinout info lately, but this blog post from 2007 covers the topic very well: https://www.karosium.com/2007/07/netelligent- … cation.html?m=1
They used a few magnetics in the Xircom cards but the common part is that the dongle pinout on most of their cards follows this pattern, even if the transformer layout is different. Looking at the rear of the PCMCIA card, from left to right:
1 ----------- tg43-1406p - pin 14 (negative?) - transmit-
2 ----------- tg43-1406p - pin 16 - transmit+
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14 ---------- - tg43-1406p - pin 11 (+ - receive+
15 ---------- tg43-1406p - pin 9 (tx/rx minus?) - receive-
It says TG43-1406P because one of my cards had that and that does have a schematic to refer to which I was able to line up which ones were + and which side of the transformer's pins were -. It's not relevant to your case though because lan transformers are all different. See the xircom dongle below with two magnetics and one of them had the ethernet side of the transformer going to both sides of the magnetic. Usually all the ethernet side transformer pins are on one side and the chip side are on the other, with that side usually facing the chip.
Well, it should be correct since it worked with my test setup. I've found it's quite forgiving if you mix up + and - of the differential pairs or even transmit / receive.
Now, as long as you have a pair of wires connected for both the TX and RX signals you should have working connection - most modern devices like routers support auto MDI/MDI-X or crossover/patch cable selection which is all I'm testing with right now. So everything just works on my test setup generally, even if I connect one wire of the pair into the wrong side of the ethernet magnetic and probably if I mix up TX and RX pairs. Most cables you'll get now are using the T568B colour coding which means the Orange wires are the transmit pair and green are the receive pair:
The attachment wire pair colour designations for T568B.jpg is no longer available
This layout works with my test setup:
The attachment xircom-dingo-pcmcia-wiring.JPG is no longer available
I think this should work with your card, but if you want to be sure where pin1 on the dongle connector goes to on the magnetic, try to find the lowest resistance pin which should be where the orange wire is highlighted to go. The differences between the correct pin and one maybe on the wrong pin is maybe half an ohm or less.
The attachment 1000004454-possible-pinout.jpg is no longer available
