I'm interested in thoughts about how best to interface with a PDA to use it as the CPU for an embedded product. It seems to me to be a natural way to assure net access, with all the CF and SDIO cards available. But what's the best way to interface to a PDA electronicly? The iPAQs previously had a nifty developers program for their older PDAS that showed how to build a "jacket", but they're obsoleting those models and are recommending developers interface via BlueTooth, CF or SDIO. I'm thinking this wouldn't be very elegant, as well as tying up ports that might be useful to my application. Has anyone else given this any thought?
Using PDA as brain for embedded product
Sep 20, 2004
18 Replies
Seems to me Bluetooth bould be the most elegant design of all. No wires!
However, since you gave so little information on what you are doing this is only a guess.
I suspect the best way is to stop trying ;-(
With the demise of both the Compaq jacket idea and Handspring's "Springboard" port, I suspect there's not much of a way left to integrate your own embedded electronics with any current model of PDA.
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
Where I used to work they use iPAQs as the interface for a thermal imager product. The actual embedded controller is an AVR, though.
Leon
Leon Heller, G1HSM
http://www.geocities.com/leon_heller
Labview (Signal aqusition and presentation package) runs on the Palm PDAs. See:
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Cheers
Klaus
*Beware* Labview for PDA's is a very immature product. We are using an IPAQ as the UI for an embedded project, and had Labview forced on us for historical reasons. Most of the useful features found in Labview for PC's aren't available or don't work on the PDA version. Makes for extremely painful code development and cumbersome workarounds.
Bob
Check out AppForge's Crossfire.
There's also
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USB implementation on PDAs is client (except for the Zaurus which has been killed in North America) and legacy ports like rs-232 are completely obsolete on newer PDAs.
The application I mentioned that used an iPAQ had the software written from scratch in C++.
Leon
A much better way to go IMHO. I was responding to the Labview recommendation.
Bob
Really? I just bought one (the Zaurus SL-6000L) through Amazon.com.
But it is true that they seem to go out of there way *not* to advertise it's availability.
-Zonn
Zonn Moore Remove the ".AOL" from the
Zektor, LLC email address to reply.
www.zektor.com
For PDA application development the best way to go is to use the Windows hosted MS tools. Recent versions are .NET based, however, native C/C++ tools are also available. They use an environment very similiar to the PC based tools (Visual Studio) and are free of charge. See
formatting link
I considered using a PDA for the brains of a portable data acquisition system.
- Expansion buses. iPAQ was best option however ties you to one vendor (HP) and is now been removed from newer models.
- Full-speed SDIO which supports a data transfer rate of 0-25MHz with a maximum of 4-bits giving a theoretical maximum of 100Mb/s or
- CF which is a subset of the existing PC PCMCIA standard (aka PC-CARD). CF supports up to a maximum data transfer rate of 16MB/s. Due to large form factor, more recent PDA models are dropping this interface. CF is memory mapped, hence, software interfacing is straight forward.
We didn't consider bluetooth.
HTH, HG
Actually, it doesn't. There's just too much stuff on it you're not really going to need in a truly embedded product, and it'll generally be a good deal more expensive than what you actually need. Just about the only true benefits of using a PDA would be that the hardware itself is well-tried and easily available.
But that does not do you any good at all if you can't actually connect anything to it without bending over backwards.
Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker@physik.rwth-aachen.de)
Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.
Why not irDA ?
"Tom H" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com...
Everyone has missed the most important point. For any real embedded prduct the product lifetime is going to be measured in years. The product lifetime of any specific PDA is measured in months if not minutes.
You will soon end up endlessly redesigning your system to keep up with the PDA. A nightmare to be avoided.
Paul
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