I just inherited a "dead" Palm 3x from my g/f and after "ressurecting" it (screen cable needed reseating), I got to wondering what I might be good for. Specifically, has anyone here ever heard of someone using an older Palm or other PDA as an embedded microcontroller? They're cheap, redially available, have a 16 MHz processor, a decent chunk of memoru (4Mb on mine) and a nice screen. What I would like to do, if I were smart enough to figure it out, is to use one to control the watercooling system for my next computer independently of the main PSU and Mobo. Ideally, the controller should recieve infromation from various system sensors such as thermocouples, flowmeters, fan RPM sensors and then adjust fan and pump speeds based on a programmed instruction set. Additionally, it would be interfaced with the SMB system and have the ability to shut down the computer in the event of a cooling system failure. Ideas? Comments? Flames?
At the moment you can only use a Palm as an LCD info display using PalmOrb. However in principle what you propose should be possible. Add to that its touch-screen interface and you have something very tasty indeed --if you can program it. And you need some electronics at the PC end to interface with --Palm hardware by itself cannot control fans and pumps. Seems complex to me...
I know that Palm pilots have been used in the past to control things like motors and such, connecting them to a serial controlled fan bus may well be possible. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pprk/ for ideas.
ive got a tungsten E thats screen got cracked, but it still works electronics wise, what could i do with that? 32mb memory, so lots of room for stuff.
I got thinking about this last night as I was lying in bed... Mine is so old that it hot-syncs (or doesn't yet anyway) over a serial connection. Somewhere in my boxes of, um, "stuff" I have a basic stamp microcontroller which has 8 i/o ports. it seems to me that I could use 7 ports on the BS to poll sensors and the eigth as a serial output to communicate with the palm. An alternative would be to use the BS by itself and use a serial out pin to run a 4x20 LCD display. Where I'm going with this is I would like somthing similiar to the display on Nexxo's Metaversa, but completly independent of the computer itself. At some point this will require a seperate processor to run on, and probably, unfortunatly, me learning at least a bit of programming. I agree the palm idea is probably too complcated to make work, but I think it's worthwhile as a theoretical exercise.
