Lately there have been some questions about the interface and communications between the Shifter ZR-3 and the Escort/BEL detectors. Here's how it works.
Two of the pins on the jack (the pins at the far ends) are connected to the SCI TxD and Rxd lines to the micro (through some transistor buffers), so that the micro can send and receive serial data. I decided to try and interface with it via RS-232.
Since this signal is +5V level in the detector, I couldn't simply connect to the serial port directly, and I also needed to invert the signal. So I came up with a simple interface, here's the schematic of what I used:
Since right now we're only concerned with the micro receiving data sent to it, the interface schematic only includes connection to the RxD pin.
I also wrote a simple application to send byte data to the X50 over the interface.
The application I wrote is HERE, but you can get similar results with Hyperterminal etc...
The micro is capable of some different baud rates, and I wasn't sure which was being used. So I tried a few different baud rates, some gave sporadic results so I knew they weren't right. I found that 9600 baud gave me the same results every time, so I was pretty confident that was correct. The final settings i ended up using are 9600 baud, No Parity, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, which are hard-coded into the application.
Anyway, I started sending different bytes to the detector to see what would happen.
Here's a list of bytes that caused something to happen:
0x01 = Zr3 SHFT
0x02 = Zr3 SHFT
0x05 = F Laser
0x06 = R Laser
0x07 = Shft ON
0x08 = ShftOFF
0x10 = Zr3 SHFT
Between 0x40 and 0xBF, these bytes caused the detector to display the following:
0x40 - 0x7F = "REV I 0" thru "Rev I 63"
0x80 - 0xBF = "REV D 0" thru "Rev D 63"
I don't know what that is, perhaps it is for displaying the REV of a connected Zr-3.
(And before anyone asks, I tried 0x00-0xFF and some other stuff too, but nothing else did anything [obvious] :wink: )
I tried it and it works basically the same on the8500 X50, the 8500 non-X50, the RX-65, and the 9500i, except for the 01, 02, and 10 bytes for "Zr3 SHFT" and the REV stuff from 0x40 to 0xBF.
I made a demo video, which can be viewed [replacer_a].
Why would you want a PC interface to trigger laser alerts? You probably wouldn't. This is mainly for investigation purposes. One thing this information could be used for is triggering the laser alert on your detector from a jammer other than the Zr-3. It wouldn't be all that difficult, all you would need to do is use the information above to program a small & cheap micro that supports 9600 baud.
Anyway, there it is in a nutshell. USE ALL INFO AT YOUR OWN RISK.
-jimbonzzz
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