Re: ATM control az and alt by palm pilotIII

[Bill Lee <wlee@ix.netcom.com>]

I've been investigating the hardware/software required to interface the Palm w/
encoders.

Jon Bertrand wrote:

> For software development check these sites, some of them have a free GCC base
> system complete with software emulator:
>
> http://www.hewgill.com/pilot/jump/index.html
> http://www.palmcentral.com/original/pilot_gcc_win32/
> http://www.wademan.com/Pilot/Program/FAQ.htm
> http://palm.3com.com/devzone/tools/sdk30.html
> http://www.palm.com/devzone/tools/sdks.html
> http://palm.3com.com/devzone/index.html
> http://www.hewgill.com/pilot/index.html
> http://www.massena.com/darrin/pilot/index.html
> http://www.roadcoders.com/
>
> I'm guessing the battery life of the Palm Pilot is dozens of times longer than
> your average junker lap-top.
>
> Long battery life is good.
>
> Jon Bertrand
> jonb@cirris.com

Umm. Yes and no.  I go for a couple of months on two AAA batteries if I don't use
my Palm too often (couple of times a day).  It can drop to a couple of weeks if I
take notes on it.  If I'm playing chess on the hour ride on the train home,
they'll only last a week or two.

The CPU of the Palm is the Motorola DragonBall processor, a Motorola 68000
compatible (the M68K was in the older, pre-PowerPC Macs, Amigas and 16-bit
Ataris[!]), with some power saving aspects and a lot of the auxillary logic
included on the chip.

The power savings come from the fact that you can completely power down the chip
(most of the system, the memory is static) on demand.  PalmOS powers down the chip
after a certain amount of activity (I don't remember how much off hand, but it's
less than 1, 2, or 3 minutes you specify to wait to turn off the whole Palm--it's
something like 10 seconds).  This results in considerable power savings.  The neat
thing is that the CPU can be powered up on an interrupt (can you say RS-232?) and
resume where it left off, with all the registers and whatnot intact.  It's a neat
thing.

This is light-years ahead of WinCE machines, which are basically small
pentium-class PCs.  Some manufacturers of WinCE actually tout that their machines
come with a recharger and the Palm doesn't!  (That's because their machines only
last a couple of hours on a charge.)  Marketing genius.  (BTW, what marketing
genius came up with an OS named wince?  Bill, maybe?)

To get to the point, every time you want to send or receive data from the serial
port on the Palm, the CPU has to be in the powered-up state.  Of course, it could
be sleeping while it's waiting for ticks from the encoder.

Those are my thoughts.  I'll keep everyone updated on how it goes.

(My wife is strongly discouraging anymore projects.  "We've gotten to the point in
our lives where it's easier to buy something than make it.  And we can afford it."
Sigh.)

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