Odd ideas that I've had lately...

From: Ethan Dicks <erd_6502_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Sat Feb 8 20:30:00 2003

--- John Boffemmyer IV <john_boffemmyer_iv_at_boff-net.dhs.org> wrote:
> Roger: first off: serial/usb isn't really built in. you have to plop it
> into a cradle to get the usb/serial connection or get a usb/serial
> adaptor to plug into the palm, it is NOT built in on most models that I
> know of.

Huh?

I have been playing with Palms since the 1MB-no-IR days... the connector
at the bottom that plugs into the cradle *is* a serial port. The
cradle is completely passive.

I used to use a Palm III with a "travel cable" (no cradle, just a wire
with a Palm connector on one end and a DE9 on the other) and one of
several VT100 emulator apps to reconfigure Cisco routers. Flipped out
the boss the first time I did it - he had only ever seen people use a
laptop (all of 28 years old... no Classic experience).

My only complaint with Palms are that most of them do not have
rechargable batteries in them. I bought an aftermarket one for
my III and have used it with the Rand McNalley GPS and "Fly!" software
for auxilliary navigation while flying single-engine planes, but it's
only good for a couple of power-on hours.

I have had *no* problem with the PalmPro, Palm III or Palm Vx
serial. Not sure why you've seen so many problems, but that's not
my experience or the experience of anyone I know.

OTOH, I agree that the Palm makes a nice hacking platform - 160x160
screen (nicer than most affordable external LCD displays, and I have
several!), built-in serial, 68K instruction set, megs of RAM... I
can write stuff at the app level for it, but I have no idea how you'd
go about writing stuff for it at the bare-metal level. I'd hate to
hose the PalmOS flash - dunno if there's a way to get it back without
building your own external re-Flasher (in the case of the IIIs and older
that *have* removable SIMMs).

I think most folks have resigned themselves to working with the OS
out of a) comfort, and b) fear of rendering the Palm inert. If there
were a way to put your own OS-level routines in there (and you'd have
to have a lot of them to make the platform usable) that was reversable,
then people might do some more deep-level hacking.

-ethan
Received on Sat Feb 08 2003 - 20:30:00 GMT