Operating Cell-Phones from PocketC ?

[irmcd]

I plan to use PDAs (palm or CE) as remote data-loggers to
collect environmental information. Two or three times a
day, I want to phone the collected info back in to a base
computer. The options are using a PDA which already has
cell-phone capability or using the PDA to activate the
phone, dial and initiate data transfer ... using it as a
cellular modem.

For several reasons, I'd RATHER not use an integrated PDA/Phone.
They are expensive, if one part breaks then the whole thing is
useless, I'm not sure the range is as good as a 'real' cell
phone and we get a very good corporate price on our 'real'
phones which they might not give for a PDA/phone. The major
benifits of a PDA/phone are simplicity and the extremely low
power consumption of a PDA (these things will be run using
solar-charged batteries).

There were companies selling A/D converters which plugged-in
to the compact flash port on some older PDAs, but I see the
newer ones all seem to have gone to secure-digital slots and
I've seen no A/Ds for them yet. The other option is to use
the PDAs serial port and employ an external A/D which sends
a data string in that way. Of course, the phone would then
have to be addressable using IR or Bluetooth since the hardwire
serial port would be 'hogged' by the A/D device.

In any event, PDAs now seem to beat some of the lower-range
dedicated data-collection/transmission devices out there in
in terms of price, memory capacity and flexibility. If you
don't need a really high sample rate, they're the way to go.
Well ... I hope so .....

Has anyone had any experiences in commanding cell phones
from a PDA running PocketC or OrbForms ? I could maybe use
Procomm on the base PC to arrange an automatic data xfer, or
I could write my own software ... nothing needs to be very
sophisticated or even very fast since I'm not sending that
much data. Reply to group.

Thanks,
Jim

[jstadolnik]

The palm version of PocketC has no built-in support for accessing phone features. You'd have to write your own native library to provide this functionality for PocketC.

There might be libraries for the this for the WinCE/PocketPC platform but the version of PocketC for that platform is no longer supported. It's a dead horse, and I would recommend against using it.

Joe

The PToolboxLib guy.
http://www.geocities.com/retro_01775/PToolboxLib.htm

[otakribut1]

if you know java. get a phone with midp. program it on a pc. compile and download it to your phone. best choice would be--phone with usb connection. my suggestion=the old nokia ngage.(old model ...not the new QD)