USB Palm OS Device as an LCD Display

From NAS-Central Buffalo - The Linkstation Wiki

Revision as of 07:30, 30 September 2006

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

Abstract

USB LCD : These instructions are essentially for a USB LCD Display, a USB docking Palm-OS^[1] device can emulate a USB LCD interface so that no external adapter is needed. The same instructions could be used with some modification to add an LCD with: Add a Serial port to the PowerPC Linkstation as a matter of fact someone on the kurobox wiki has done just that^[2]

This article is for people that want to add an LCD display to their Linkstation but don't want to crack it open^[3], 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^[4] 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 the sourceforge site. 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^[5] 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: How do I configure LCDproc for PalmOrb? make sure that the MtxOrb part of /etc/LCDd.conf looks at least a little something like this:

........
[MtxOrb]
# Matrix Orbital driver

# Select the output device to use [/dev/lcd]
device=/dev/ttyUSB0
#device=/dev/usb/tts/1
#device=/dev/ttyS1

# Set the display size [20x4]
size=20x4 
........

• You may have to initiate the appropriate module for the palm: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/pdf/Handspring-Visor.pdf

modprobe visor

• 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:

usb 3-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB0
usb 3-1: Handspring Visor / Palm OS converter now attached to ttyUSB1 

• Run the LCDd (LCDproc Daemon) and LCDproc client with some options to see if it works.

LCDd &
lcdproc C M X

• 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: LCDProc Site:Clients

What's the point?

PALM AS A TERMINAL untested: Enable terminal access with this command: getty -h -L ttyUSB0 9600 vt100, and use a terminal program like ptelnet

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

#!/bin/sh
# lcdmon.sh
# Kill any LCDd that are running first,  Start the Daemon and 
# fork it to the background.  Then run LCDProc with the Time option and 
# fork it to the background.  
# You can run lcdproc -? alone to see what options there are.  
# Run another client: netlcdclient which gives U/Dl speed
# You could run this script at startup.

killall LCDd
LCDd &
lcdproc T &
netlcdclient -i eth0 -a LinkSTN -d

References

1. ↑ The Wikipedia: Palm_OS_devices
2. ↑ kuroboxwiki:LCDKuro
3. ↑ The NSLU2-Linux project where this idea was hijacked from: Palm as LCD-Display or terminal
4. ↑ The PalmOrb Page: SourceForge:PalmOrb
5. ↑ The LCDproc home: LCDproc