screen changes from joystick to PDA???

In the Condor flight sim program it's easy to configure joystick buttons
to change screens, zoom the PDA in/out, etc.

Anyone with more electrical engineering skills than me look at what it
would take to integrate similar capability into a ship? Putting buttons
on a stick is easy, it's getting the functionality into the PDA and
software that is going to be the trick I bet.

If you have a bluetooth / CF / integrated GPS feeding your PDA and a
free serial port then it would be pretty easy to send button-press
messages to the PDA over serial, though of course the software you're
running would need to know what to do with them. XCSoar is the obvious
candidate here, as you can modify it to your heart's content.

If your serial port is already being used by the GPS then I imagine you
could do it relatively inexpensively with a PIC circuit that can inject
extra sentences into the NMEA data. I was thinking of doing just this
to get vario data into XCSoar from my old Borgelt B20.

Alastair


Gary Emerson wrote:
In the Condor flight sim program it's easy to configure joystick buttons
to change screens, zoom the PDA in/out, etc.

Anyone with more electrical engineering skills than me look at what it
would take to integrate similar capability into a ship? Putting buttons
on a stick is easy, it's getting the functionality into the PDA and
software that is going to be the trick I bet.

If there is a standard IPAQ protocol to have a remote button act as
one of the physical buttons, then the software wouldn't have to do
anything.

Does anyone know the IPAQ connector really well ?

Todd

toad wrote:
If there is a standard IPAQ protocol to have a remote button act as
one of the physical buttons, then the software wouldn't have to do
anything.

These are not available through the connector on an IPAQ 36xx

Does anyone know the IPAQ connector really well ?

No, but the IPAQ 36xx connector pins are described here (scroll down to
"Cradle connector"):

http://www.handhelds.org/Compaq/iPAQ...PAQ_H3600.html

It looks as though the cradle connector is the same for many (all?) IPAQs.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

On Nov 10, 1:47 pm, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
toad wrote:
If there is a standard IPAQ protocol to have a remote button act as
one of the physical buttons, then the software wouldn't have to do
anything.

These are not available through the connector on an IPAQ 36xx

Does anyone know the IPAQ connector really well ?

No, but the IPAQ 36xx connector pins are described here (scroll down to
"Cradle connector"):

http://www.handhelds.org/Compaq/iPAQ...PAQ_H3600.html

It looks as though the cradle connector is the same for many (all?) IPAQs.

--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

Yes, I've seen that spec. Nothing really useful jumps out at me.
Without a simple "Pin 27 means button 1", I am done.

I think the 3600's are different from the 3800/3900/5400/5500's.
And the new ones are different again.


Todd

My 5915 is USB only. Anything after 5500 is goingto be that way I suspect.
Fortunately all it needs is power as the GPS is built in.

Bruce

toad wrote:
On Nov 10, 1:47 pm, Martin Gregorie
wrote:
toad wrote:
If there is a standard IPAQ protocol to have a remote button act as
one of the physical buttons, then the software wouldn't have to do
anything.
These are not available through the connector on an IPAQ 36xx

Does anyone know the IPAQ connector really well ?
No, but the IPAQ 36xx connector pins are described here (scroll down to
"Cradle connector"):

http://www.handhelds.org/Compaq/iPAQ...PAQ_H3600.html

It looks as though the cradle connector is the same for many (all?) IPAQs.

--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

Yes, I've seen that spec. Nothing really useful jumps out at me.
Without a simple "Pin 27 means button 1", I am done.

I think the 3600's are different from the 3800/3900/5400/5500's.
And the new ones are different again.


Todd