How to convert an old HP 2210 PDA into a uart terminal?

Question

Iron

Good afternoon. I have a little old PDA lying around for anything sane, it can no longer be used, but I can’t throw it away.
This model has a hardware rs232 on the connector, and sometimes I need a terminal to debug all sorts of crafts on the microcontroller, it’s not very convenient to connect the usb-uart adapter to the computer all the time (a bunch of wires, the port is busy, etc.), I want to try using a PDA as a terminal. To do this, you need to fence the level matching, this is a rather primitive scheme, but there is no place for it in the PDA itself, but I want to just bring rx / tx / gnd to the case. In theory, an initially clean uart comes out of the guts of the motherboard, and then it is already converted into a com port, is it possible to somehow find tracks with an uart rx / tx before the converter in order to solder to them?

Answer 1

Yes, there should be a max232 type IC inside that will match the levels to normal RS232. But I think that it is very small, or even can be integrated into some larger chip.
Even if you find and connect a terminal to it, you can easily burn it with static or connect it unsuccessfully, so it's better to do an external matching anyway.