5G question

[icedman]

is the 5G clickwheel confirmed to work with the same protocol?

[Gigahawk]

As far as I know the protocol should be the same, however the connector is small enough that I was unable to actually assemble a breakout to test it.

The 5G connector has an extra 5 pins compared to the 4G, which makes sense since the 5 clickwheel buttons are external on the 5G.

I'll attach some pictures of the reverse engineering I did to design the breakout at https://github.com/Gigahawk/clickwheel_breakout_5th_gen

I never got far enough to figure out what pins are actually used for data, but I suspect it's the ISSP pins carrying the actual data, but if you have the skills or can pay for PCB assembly I would just make a breakout and probe the pins yourself.

[icedman]

Thank you for the info. 5G wheels are easy to purchase from aliexpress. I might try it out.

[felberj]

I built a breakout board and tested the pins with a multi-meter:

Cable Pin	(wrongly mapped) Chip Pin	Corrected Chip Pin	Note
1	9, 24, 29	12, 17, 32
2	7	2
3	6	3
4	5	4
5	4	5
6	3	6
7	2	7
8	1	8
9	32	9
10	31	10
11	30	11
12	28	13
13			Connects to some chip before the main chip

FWIW, I have no idea what I am doing :) I numbered the chip pins starting on the white dot clockwise. The cables pin numbers are from the numbers that the socked gave me from the pcb designing tool.

Update: I realized that my numbering was wrong. I used this function below to map it to starting from the "black" hole going anti clock wise.

conv = lambda x: range(32, 0, -1)[(x - 1 - 8) % 32]

[felberj]

Quick update:

I tried making it work with an arduino uno. For this I changed the variables in clickwheel.cpp like this:

• 20 -> SCL
• 19 -> SDA

Attempt 1

Arduino	Cable
SDA	12 (SDATA)
SCL	11 (SCLK)
GND	1
3.3V	13

Result when scrolling: Nothing besides the "Starting" message

Attempt 2

Arduino	Cable
SDA	9 (SDA)
SCL	8 (SCL)
GND	1
3.3V	13

Result when scrolling: Nothing besides the "Starting" message

[favict]

Hi! Thank you all for the sharing.

I'm currently working on building an MP3 player with Raspberry Pi Zero 2W inside a 5th gen case.

Has anyone been able to make the 5th gen clickwheel work with Arduino or Raspberry Pi already? I'm planning on modifying @Gigahawk's breakout board design, replacing the buttons with tactile metal dome switches under the wheel, allowing it to be fit inside the iPod's case.

Any further tips would be greatly appreciated.