Palm OS Dashboard PRGM

[Alexander McGee]

Ok, let me begin by saying that i have searched for this, and found only discussion.

Is there anyone out there who has a working dashboard program for palm os?

Thanks

[Astronouth7303]

Great Idea. But unless you have a VB compiler for PalmOS, then your out of luck (Like anyone has the time anyway!)

[deltacoder1020]

not necessarily - a dashboard doesn't have to be written in vb, it just needs to be able to accept serial input, which is perfectly possible for the palm (its sync port is a serial port).

[Astronouth7303]

I ment that's all I do.

[emusteve]

Once we all get familiar with C, there's a neat (read "free") little compiler for the Palm OS called "Pocket C" that might be usefull for writing a dashboard utility.

[Jay Lundy]

I have a palm program written in C that gets data from the dashboard port then prints it to the screen. It will be a dashboard program eventually I just haven't finished it yet. I will probably finish it after the robot ships.

I'm also working on wiring an LCD to the dashboard port. Right now I have it working with the RC, but it will be more work to actually get it hooked up to the dashboard.

[Adam Shapiro]

I've done some Palm development before. The actual program coding isn't very hard as the API is pretty straight forward but I have no idea about the serial access. I imagine it would be much harder than coding for the GUI. You might want to search in the developers section of palm.com or on google (you need to sign up, I believe, for palm.com but it is free).

[rdsideresistanc]

do palms use windows CE? I have eMbedded Visual C++....which develops applications for windows CE...i could pretty easily port a dashboard program i would think, since all this stuff is .NET now....

[velocipenguin]

Originally Posted by rdsideresistanc

do palms use windows CE? I have eMbedded Visual C++....which develops applications for windows CE...i could pretty easily port a dashboard program i would think, since all this stuff is .NET now....

Palm-based devices use PalmOS. The OS architecture of PalmOS is very different from that of Windows, and a port would probably be more difficult than simply cross-compiling your WinCE code after modifying a few libraries. I have played with Pocket C in the past, and found it to be quite powerful; it might be wise to use the official Palm SDK for more complex operations like serial port I/O, although that necessitates finding a compiler to use with it.

[rdsideresistanc]

i was kind of thinking they were completely different...oh well.

[Jay Lundy]

By the way, serial access in Palm, like many other OSes, is actually quite simple. It's just like reading a file in windows. You just call a get function (can't remember the exact syntax right now) and tell it how many bytes you want to get. You can also check how many bytes are in the buffer and many other useful functions.

The hardest part about Palm programming is how anal it is about memory management. If you leak any memory or use a pointer where you should use a handle there is a good chance you will hit a fatal error.

[Ferazel2001]

Well, I am seriously the 83+SE nerd, so I will attempt to write a program using the get( function... is there any way to get the data from the 9pin to a TI cable? like can someone w/ more electrical knowlege make something that inputs from a 9pin, and then passes each line one by one through the cable? if you could post the schematics for that, it MAY be possible. MAY MAY MAY.

-Devon

[velocipenguin]

Originally Posted by Ferazel2001

is there any way to get the data from the 9pin to a TI cable? like can someone w/ more electrical knowlege make something that inputs from a 9pin, and then passes each line one by one through the cable? if you could post the schematics for that, it MAY be possible.

Use one of the older RS-232 TI GraphLink cables with a 9-pin null modem adapter. I don't know if TI still makes them, but if not, there's always eBay.

Being something of a TI fanatic myself, I have to say that your idea is absolutely brilliant. The TI-83's built-in facilities for graphing data would be absolutely superb for monitoring a robot's behavior, and the simple programming interface (in TI-BASIC, anyway) would be ideal for quickly creating a working dashboard program.

[rdsideresistanc]

I actually have one of those old serial port TI-Graphlink cables.....I might actually try this myself. Thanks for the idea!

[ahecht]

For those of you interested in programming for PalmOS, there is a free compiler called PRC-Tools (which is based on GCC) which can compile palm programs from C or C++ source. You can get it from http://www.palmos.com/dev/tools/gcc/.

There are IDEs available (such as CodeWarrior for Palm), but none for free yet. However, PalmSource (the makers of PalmOS) have announced that they will release a free IDE (based on Eclipse) for compiling Palm programs at the Developer Conference next week.