Palm M500 impulse buy

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

Techbargains turned me on to a $9.99 Palm M500 at Newegg.

(newbie, link not allowed)

So, I made the impulse buy. I'm only starting Arduino and haven't soldered up my Modern Device BBB/BUB kit yet, but I thought this was too good a deal to pass up. I'm guessing that the Palm could serve as attached-GUI ...

Any best references you can suggest? I did a few searches and things look possible, though some of the projects are of course dated. Thanks!

2

Well the M500 is dated. Palmgear.com may be a good starting point for finding an application that may be compatible with the Arduino or programming. but i doubt you'll find one. You'll just have to go with what you can find threw google.

3

Thanks. For what it's worth I found this on the M500 -> robot control:

http://www.acroname.com/robotics/info/ideas/palmhack/palmhack.html

and that was my starting point for a bunch of RS232 level stuff.

When looking for "Palm M500 datatlogger" I found this interesting automotive page

http://mmcdlogger.sourceforge.net/

I like the idea of a graphing data logger.

4

I'm guessing that the Palm could serve as attached-GUI

Good guess: another sourceforge project you may find useful for this purpose is PalmOrb.

I think I've seen a hack out there somewhere for turning the USB cradle into a serial connection. Ironically, it might be cheaper to buy a second Palm from newegg and hacks its cradle than to buy a serial cable.

5

Since RS232 is presented at the Palm's connector pins, I think the cheapest solution for a microcomputer-supervisor is to just glue a 90-degree DB9 on the back and wire it in parallel with the existing connector.

I'm not going to take a soldering iron to my iphone, but I'll do it to my $10 palm.

6

An update: I was never able to find a true Palm SDK, but I did take Waba for a spin. It's a java-ish environment. I was able to compile under Sun's JDK 1.6 and launch my HelloWorld on the Palm.

http://www.wabasoft.com/products.shtml

For $10 this represents a pretty cheap programmable touch-screen display for an Arduino project. As mentioned in previous messages, the M500 has RS232 (and IR). The Waba discussion forums talk about using both, though I haven't gotten that far yet.

I thought I'd drop a message about progress. Too bad newegg hasn't got any more at $10, or I might grab a second one (as suggested) for the cradle/connector.