The world's shortest #505 cable?

I recently created what very well might be the world's shortest Meade #505 compatible cable. I built it to use with the Aircable bluetooth service module to wirelessly control my telescope with my Treo 650.

For those not familiar, Bluetooth is a technology developed to let small devices such as cell phones, notebook PCs and PDAs communicate with each other "over the air" using radio frequencies instead of wires. It uses very little power and has a maximum communication radius of 10 meters.

The Aircable bluetooth service module is a device which has a bluetooth adapter built into a DB9 serial port dongle. This allows you to communicate with any serial device using any bluetooth-enabled device, such as a notebook PC or PDA. It's powered by 5-15 volts that can be supplied via a plug on the side of the device, or through pins 5 and 9 on the DB9 serial connector. I opted to go the serial route, which is what the red and black wires coming out of the #505 are for.

I'll be using the Aircable in conjunction with Astromist, a full-featured planetarium program for the Palm operating system. I've been using an old 300MHz laptop running one of a number of PC applications to control the 'scope when I wanted to have more functionality than the Autostar supports by itself, but dragging a laptop to the observation sites and dealing with the power, the cables and the excess light from the LCD display made it more trouble than it was worth, most of the time. Getting all the same capabilities with a hand-held computer is like a dream come true.

I haven't received the Aircable yet, so I can't report on how well it all works, but I've read other accounts from people using the Aircable with Astromist and I doubt I'll be disappointed. Once I get the hardware and manage to get out and use it, I'll update this page.