Odd ideas that I've had lately...

--- John Boffemmyer IV <john_boffemmyer_iv(a)boff-net.dhs.org> wrote: 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