We know this about USB:

-the USB device has to be self-powered (e.g., battery- or AC-powered. Note: many USB hubs describe themselves as "self"-powered to mean "bus"-powered)

- the 770 has a type Mini B USB jack (eg, "female"); at least I think it's called a Mini B. You can see a converter at store.yahoo.com/abccables-store/ca-000306.html

Type A female to Mini B male gender converter


I guess you could use a converter to get into the Nokia 770.

Does anyone know any USB keyboards that work with the 770? Does anyone know of any battery-powered (or AC-powered) USB keyboards?

I've never seen a battery powered USB keyboard.

From my testing, it would appear that most devices that include their own power supplies still don't work without at least a little bit of power from the USB bus - I've tried a hub with an external power supply, a digital camera, and a wall powered USB CD burner. My 770 was in host mode, with a correct cable, but it failed to work with them.

My theory is that the bus interface circuitry is powered off the USB host no matter what. I'll be doing some more testing to see if that's the case - I haven't wired up an external 5v power supply to the USB bus yet.

I've got to say I'm surprised that those ac-powered USB devices didn't work. I was thinking a battery-powered USB hub would make for some neat capabilities. Counting my chickens before they were hatched, I guess.

http://www.darkain.com/nintendo_ds/usbcable.php Here is someone taking the plunge with there Nintendo DS cables. But after someone gets a powered USB hub connected and plugs in there 770 and keyboard. Will it need a driver? Someone who already has a 770 needs to do this test. i am still waiting for it to be finish being delivered into my sisters hands on the other side of the world, then be sent to me on this side.

I finally got it working after re-reading the posts here-- you must supply power to both the USB device (keyboard, flash drive, etc.) and the 770. If the 770 USB power lead isn't connected to 5V+ it doesn't know anything is plugged in. Once I did that it was all good. I have a mini 4-port USB 2.0 hub (not that the 770 is USB 2.0, but it was what Walmart had) and it works great. I have one port used up because I have a USB cable end plugged in to steal power from the hub for waking up the 770; the black and red wires are connected to the 770's. Using an older 48MB flash card it writes at about 300KB/sec ("time dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile_on_flash bs=1024k count=20" was what I tested with-- a 20MB file is created). Nothing amazing, but definitely usable.

That's cool that you got it working! Have you tried a keyboard yet? What devices have you tried other than the memory card?

This doesn't quite make sense to me -- are you saying that you don't have a plain cable from the hub to the 770? (Plain in the sense that it's like the one to the PC, or uses a gender bender if that's needed.)

If you're connecting wires directly, what the heck do you mean "the 770's [red and black wires]"?

Can you take a picture of this just so we can see?

And try out a USB keyboard, please!

I ran down to Fry's Electronics and picked up a BTC "ultra-slim" USB keyboard for $19.95. I plugged it in and it just works without any goofing around. What's even better is when you click on or select text input fields on web pages the onscreen keyboard doesn't pop up-- very nice.

Now for some issues.... Opera doesn't seem to understand pgup/pgdn; the arrow keys work the same as the 770's D-pad. When typing on the keyboard the power-saving functions that dim the screen/etc. don't recognize the keyboard input as activity, so it will turn itself off eventually whether you're typing or not. I expect a plugin of some sort could fix that.

Abiword works flawlessly! It understands all the normal keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl-S to save, pgup/down, ctrl+shift+arrow keys to highlight text, etc. Truly a pleasure to use. F4 brings up the normal pulldown menu for file/tools/etc. F5 will minimize and switch back to the "desktop" screen. Alt-tab switches back to fullscreen. Sweet!

As far as hooking up this beast... A USB cable has four colored wires and a braided shield (see http://pinouts.ru/data/USB_pinout.shtml at the bottom of the page). To get this to work I hacked off the male end of a USB extension cable. I then hacked off the male end of a male USB->mini USB cable like the one that ships with the 770 and connected each wire from the extension cable to the mini-USB cable (red->red, black->black, etc.). This does not work by itself, since the 770 and USB device require power. I re-hooked the red and black wires of male end of the USB->mini USB cable up to my existing red/black connections, leaving the white and green wires of the male connector unconnected. Plugging the male connector into a USB hub provides power for the 770 interface and keyboard. Confused yet? Here's some pictures. http://lbattraw.home.insightbb.com/770_wires.jpg and http://lbattraw.home.insightbb.com/770_full_setup.jpg
WARNING: very large pictures for detail, 2.5MB apiece

Larry

Great work, lbattraw! You could probably wire an even simpler supply off a battery pack instead of the usb-hub (assuming you get the voltage right), since all it appears to be doing is supplying power (right?). Just take the two male cable ends (1 mini and 1 normal), and splice the battery pack in the middle. A little solder & electrical tape to secure things, and you've got a portable powered USB keyboard!

Yep, already thought of that. My ideal would be to hack off the USB keyboard cable and put a mini-USB-ended cable on with the appropriate batteries connected at the keyboard. Probably need to add a switch for that matter to avoid draining the batteries the entire time. That way there would only be a single cable to plug directly into the 770. I was at Walmart today and they sell a "PSP USB" cable that is really just a mini-USB->USB male cable like the Nokia one. The cool thing it's only $5, so you can afford to hack away with having to buy expensive cables.

Incidentally I'm just finishing up the initial mke2fs of the 30G USB hard drive I have hooked up. I purchased a USB enclosure for a laptop drive at Fry's ($20) and thought it would really be cool to have a "man-sized" bit of storage for the 770 :-)