Sir, Am Avinash.T.J doing my btech(ece) at AMRITA ENGINEERING COLLEGE (INDIA) ..Am interested in designing a pda .So i need to know which processor is used for this? i want to program it by my on.Is there any c compilers for it? In the first phase am not interested in building a real pda..only a small miniature one which can perform the functions like calculator,phonebook,calender.Also i wamt to know from where will i get the parts ?.Will i able to do with pic microcontrollres???...So pls suggest me the sites where i can get th informations about this stuffs.pls reply as early as possible.If possible reply to avinash snipped-for-privacy@students.amrita.ac.in
thanking you, Avinash.T.J Amrita School Of Engineering Amritapuri Kollam Kerala pin-690525
As far as I know, most PDAs use an ARM processor; you can expect that most these days will use a small 32-bit processor.
They also take many man-years to put together.
You could make a device with the functions that you want using a large PIC, assuming that you could find an LCD screen that you liked (finding a _touch_ screen is probably out of the question, though).
Getting an ARM processor on a board running Linux and talking to an LCD would be quite an achievement, and you'd be able to build on that.
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These days they're all 32 bits. Palm PDAs use Motorola Coldfire CPUs (68000 derivatives), Windows-based Smartphones/PDAs often use Intel xScale CPUs, and most other PDAs tend to use some flavor of ARM CPU.
Yes, always these days.
The way most people do it today is to get a development board from a CPU manufacturer. E.g., for an ARM-based design, Atmel will sell you this:
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- the other manufacturers have similar offerings.
No. At least not if you want to build something that most people would consider a "contemporary" PDA, with a large (e.g., 320x240) LCD, Internet connectivity, USB connectivity, full-featured e-mail/calendar/internet browsing features, etc.
One of the Big Choices PDA designers make it the operating system they're going to use. The major choices are stripped-down-Windows (once Windows CE, has some other name these days), Symbian (Nokia cell phones use this), the Palm OS (unfortunately dying -- Palm quit developing for it and is switching to a Linux-based OS), stripped-down Linux (the Nokia N800 is the most prominent device here, although there are others from, e.g., Sharp that also use it), or stripped-down Mac OS (iPhones! -- not available unless you get an internship from Apple, though). Contemporary PDAs all use "real operating systems" because it's just not realistic anymore to write *all* your software from scratch and still release a product in time to make any money -- probably at least 2/3rd of all the code running on a PDA is identical to what's running on a desktop PC somewhere.
What are you really interested in doing? If it's just getting experience with bringing up a PDA-type hardware platform, I'd definitely get one of those ARM development boards and get Linux running on it. If you're interested more in designing better user interfaces (a big deal on today's PDAs, with some new interest due to the iPhone) I'd get something like a Nokia N800 and start hacking... or just use a desktop PC running a PDA emulator.
Before building a PDA, I suggest you to start with something simpler. For example, you can build a Space Shuttle; it is not so constrained by size and cost.
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