Swapping out old USB to serial converters

[adampeterson@gmail.com]

Our stake center still has the old Sony EVI-D70 SD camera and interface that goes with that. We still use that for broadcasting, and just use OBS to cut off the bottom of the 4x3 video and broadcast 16x9 SD. The serial connection from the camera to the panel is done on a cat5e cable, with RJ45 connectors. Unfortunately, in this case the serial to USB converter is inside the AV panel, the cat5e cable plugs into the back of the panel, and the front side has the USB port. The adapter is one of the old keystone ones, and drivers are hard to come by, especially for iMac.

I spent some time tracking the wires within the cat5e cable, and was able to wire an RJ45 to DB9 modular connector correctly so that I could then plug in my own, newer, USB to serial. In the end, I only needed 3 pins in the DB9. Pin 2 was RX, pin 3 was TX, pin 5 was ground. Looking at a DB9 port from the front side, pins 1-5 are the top row, with 1 on the right, 3 in the center, and 5 on the left. I'm not sure how standard that is on church installs, but from what I can tell, it looks to be a fairly common standard.

As a bonus, some issues we had controlling the camera seem to have been fixed by changing this out.

From Amazon I used StarTech.com DB9 to RJ45 Modular Adapter - F/F - Serial adapter - DB-9 (F) to RJ-45 (F) - GC98FF, Black, $3.49, and USB to RS232, USB Serial Adapter with FTDI Chipset,USB 2.0 to Male DB9 Serial Cable for $12.99. On the DB9 adapter, the orange wire went to pin 2, black to pin 3, then brown or white to pin 5.

[fulcible]

this is super helpful! We’ve got a similar setup with legacy Sony cameras, and running into driver issues with those old USB-to-serial keystones on newer Macs has been a nightmare. I never thought about bypassing the keystone entirely with a custom DB9-to-RJ45 adapter. Definitely bookmarking this for our next upgrade session. Out of curiosity, have you noticed any latency improvements in camera control after the swap?