What I dearly wish would happen is that someone would rewrite the palm drivers for linux to allow for continuous connections and PPP over serial/USB. With those two things you could use the mature VNC clients for the palm OS’s (VNC was first ported over for the Palm Pilot!) to access a virtual frame buffer and do all sorts of things.

I once got a reasonable distance into converting one of those Fossil Wrist PDA’s into a wearable computing terminal before running into the driver stumbling block.

the cradle expects rs232 like signals by default, I am pretty sure the voltages dont matter much so maybe a simple adapter would work

I have 2 palm VII’s that I got from a place I worked at back in 1999, one is in great condition I have a cradle and keyboard for it (both use the serial port so it sucks, need an IR one I guess) the other I cobbled back together out of a box of parts and its modded like the one in this article for ttl level serial

I’ve thought often about how old Palms would be great displays to embed in another project. The problem I see with that, is that the old pre-USB models I am familiar with are just battery-backed RAM. If I lose power and the batteries run down, I’ll lose the Palm’s software. Then I will have to pull it out and reconnect to a PC to reload it. Not good for an embedded controller in something.

I have a spare Sony Clie SJ22 with memory stick slot. I think I can put Palm apps on the memory stick to solve the battery issue, but I haven’t tried it yet. Unfortunately the Clie only has USB and not serial, which is why I haven’t tried it yet.

> I must be missing something – why not just telnet into your router from your device? <

This would be for the situation where you are experimenting, bork your config, and can't telnet in.

@Alan:
Search Google for PDAParts. That firm does sell cables that match everyone’s PDA. I have here (someplace) a cable for one of those gadgets.

@uu:
The biggest problem with the NSLU2 is that the serial ports are deucedly hard to find inside it. And serial via the USB ports requires an adapter that will (definitely) work with the firmware that you chose.

@WestfW

I had a palm pilot, and yea there was a serial converter in the cradle, and the one for my VII has a larger knot in the cable

ps:LOL

I’d love to use my Palm m130 has an RS-232 terminal.

I have an old m505 laying around but I haven’t figured out anything worthwhile to do with it. This hack is cool, but I don’t change stuff on my router often enough to need a dedicated terminal like this.

I’d love to do something like this with my old Dell Axim X5. I haven’t done anything with it in years–do you have any ideas (i.e., does anyone know if it can be used like the palm)?

Yeah, this was part of my headless/shrunken head WRT Kismet box, a few years ago.

http://www.frontiernet.net/~beakmyn/OpenWRT%20Kimset%20Server.htm