USB Palm OS Device as an LCD Display

 This article based on work done by Ramuk at Linkstationwiki.org 

Abstract
This article is for people that want to add an LCD display to their Linkstation but don't want to crack it open, and happen to have a USB cabled Palm OS device lying around. Using PalmOrb you can emulate an external (20x4),(40x4) or (26x16) character LCD display.

Prerequisites
This article assumes that you have installed FreeLink. A 2.6 Kernel Upgrade to the 2.6-kernel (ppc only) has better USB support, but a 2.4 Kernel would probably work as well. For these instructions you will need a USB cabled Palm-OS Device.

Method

 * Install PalmOrb on your USB cabled Palm-OS Device. The v1.1a4 version has the most font options for a (20x4) emulated LCD, there are several other versions available on Sourceforge .  It emulates a Matrix Orbital LK204-25 LCD.
 * Install and remove LCDproc using apt-get (this should take care of any dependencies) The Debian Stable Version only has the LCDd Daemon program but not the lcdproc client, so you'll have to install lcdproc from a tarball. Kind of an ugly solution to get the dependencies resolved, but it works:

apt-get install lcdproc apt-get remove lcdproc


 * Get the LCDProc tarball and compile/install it. Make sure you have installed the Precompiled C development environment, running on the LS first.

wget http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/download/lcdproc-0.4.5.tar.gz tar -xvzf lcdproc-0.4.5.tar.gz cd lcdproc-0.4.5 ./configure make make install


 * Use these instructions to configure LCDProc to run with PalmOrb properly make sure that the MtxOrb part of /etc/LCDd.conf looks at least a little something like this:

........ [MtxOrb] device=/dev/ttyUSB0 size=20x4 ........
 * 1) Matrix Orbital driver
 * 1) Select the output device to use [/dev/lcd]
 * 1) device=/dev/usb/tts/1
 * 2) device=/dev/ttyS1
 * 1) Set the display size [20x4]

modprobe visor usb 3-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB0 usb 3-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB1 LCDd & lcdproc C M X
 * You may have to initiate the appropriate module for the palm
 * Attach the USB enabled Palm-OS device and start the PalmOrb app. Do a dmesg of your linkstation; if things went well you should see lines like this at the end:
 * Run the LCDd (LCDproc Daemon) and LCDproc client with some options to see if it works.
 * Hopefully you got some output on the Palm-OS device as an LCD. For other clients Google:lcdproc to see what other LCDProc clients you can find. Or just go here

What's the point?
Well if you happen to have a USB enabled older Palm OS PDA lying around and want an external LCD display for the price of nothing, now you have it!

Shell Scripts
killall LCDd LCDd & lcdproc T & netlcdclient -i eth0 -a LinkSTN -d
 * 1) !/bin/sh
 * 2) lcdmon.sh
 * 3) Kill any LCDd that are running first,  Start the Daemon and
 * 4) fork it to the background.  Then run LCDProc with the Time option and
 * 5) fork it to the background.
 * 6) You can run lcdproc -? alone to see what options there are.
 * 7) Run another client: netlcdclient which gives U/Dl speed
 * 8) You could run this script at startup.

Alternatives
If you happen to own a dbox2, you can display a log file on the dbox's LCD -andre