Palm OS + Bluetooth Keyboard
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I have the Aceeca PDA32 portable computer, you know. It has its
advantages. For example, it has Bluetooth, a miniUSB connector and it
has Palm OS 5.4.0.
But it has also some problems: it was built to order so many common
features may be unavailable. My particular device has no sound, no
infrared and no WiFi. It only has the Bluetooth chip.
The device has huge RAM (32MB) and fairly fast ARM CPU (much slower
that the CPU in T|X anyway - and it sometimes felt SLOWER than my T|W
with its m68k CPU!) so I decided to try to develop some stuff here. I
Have bought a PockeC license, also downloaded the OnBoardC, the
SmallBASIC and the Tcl interpreter.
But I hate the default input method: it uses the Graffiti2 and it has
thin, uncomfortable stylus on relatively small screen (the screen is
physically smaller that that of the T|X) and screen surface is also far
from ideal. So I do not want to write C codes with stylus.
But what to do? There is none of "standard" Palm connectors so I cannot
use keyboard designed for, say, Palm m50x/m70x. There is no infrared
sensor so I cannot use the Palm Univarsal Wireless Keyboard.
So the only way is to use Bluetooth. But the Palm OS have and no
build-in Bluetooth drivers. There was a Bluetooth keyboard driver (and
it WAS freely available at PALM.com) but it is gone and it is not
archived at Archive.org... I tried to find it elsewhere but failed.
So I asked on Mastodon: @jynx and @logout tried to find the driver but
also find nothing.
Fortunately I have remembered that at some point I have got a "brand
new" Stowaway ThinkOutside Sierra keyboard. As the company name suggest
it was probably designed for Palm. And it was. My keyboard came in an
original packaging, if I am not mistaken. So, I thought, there should
be a driver CD. SO I searched for it at home, at office, just
elsewhere... and I found nothing.
Today I needed to find some documents. I didn't found them (of course)
but I found the Stowaway CD instead!
And yes, the CD includes a *.prc file named Stwy40Plm.prc [1]. So I
connected my Aceeca, installed the file and tried to connect my Nokia
SU-4W Keyboard. I thought that there is zero chance to mke it work,
Well, ic connected and worked. Except the "Fn" key. If you know how the
SU-4W work then you know that the Fn is necessary to use numbers among
others..
So I have found my poor Stowaway Sierra keyboard. It is mechanically
damaged (didn't I told you that it was declared as "brand new" and
unused?). Except its issues it work as expected.
I wrote this text on this keyboard.
References:
[1] http://jirka.sdf.org/Stwy40Plm.prc
So I thing that it is a success, finally...