Mainboard 16 pin VGA socket, has anyone seen this before?ble I

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The NAS was never sold or advertised has having a VGA port, the port on the main board was identified and my expectation was that a cable would be available to get VGA output from the NAS

I would like to get VGA output for the sole reason of getting access to the BIOS. I was almost certain this was the cable I needed

Iomega is defunked, it’s a dead-end

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Hi Den,

Getting a VGA display working on a NAS that was never designed to utilise that interface would be quite a DIY feat. I would imagine that it will involve more than simply plugging into an unutilised port on the main board, you may need to write custom firmware drivers to get that interface operational.
It is interesting that the physical hardware capability is supposedly there but the manufacturer opted not to implement it themselves.

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Hi Trent

The board has a Serial B interface that when used with a TTL to USB cable allows a serial connection which provides access to the BIOS.

It’s not elegant but it works

My quest for a cable was purely an exercise to simplify access, as it turns out finding/ making said cable seems like a dead end

If I need to use a serial connection, so be it

Cheers

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Hi Den,

Yes, I suspect using the serial interface is probably going to be the easiest way to access the BIOS in this case. Using VGA may be possible, although as Trent said, I’d expect that you’d need to write some custom drivers for it which would become quite tedious for in this case what I’d say is little benefit if you’re already able to interact with it via serial.

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Hi All
Sorry if I seem a bit confused here.
I thought VGA was a VIDEO format, like pictures one way to a monitor.
I would not have thought it would be any use with the BIOS except to display the video. You could not communicate the other way to make any changes or do anything at all.
Now the talk seems to be using serial communications to do what you want. You would have to do this anyway as I doubt VGA would be of any use.
Cheers Bob

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my TTL to USB cable arrived today and I was easily able to access the BIOS, made the necessary changes that I was after

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Hey Bob,

Spot on. It stands for Video Graphics Adapter, it’s one of the fairly old IBM standards, it’d be about 40 years old now.

The original specs for it were:

  • 640x480 resolution
  • 60 Hz refresh rate
  • 16 Colors at once

The issue with using it to display a video output to allow for easier interaction with the BIOS is that it’d need custom firmware drivers to output to that format (you’d still need a connected keyboard for input). In this case, sounds like just using a Serial interface was a lot easier :+1:

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Hi Bryce
Interestingly VGA might not be absolutely dead yet. I have a second monitor connected which is pretty old now. It is Samsung which has an unusual 16:10 aspect. This monitor has 2 inputs, 15 pin VGA and DVI. The monitor automatically selects the appropriate input. Still works well and currently the second monitor for my Mac Mini. Even though the 2 monitors are different (16:9 and 16:10) the both happily co-exist.
Cheers Bob

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