Labview PDA Palm devices supported and I/O on those devices

[GHernandez]

I would try an SDIO bluetooth card and purchasing a bluetooth to serial.
http://www.provantage.com/socket-cs0400-479~7SOCK02U.htm
they are very expensive though and your battery life will suffer.

[ljenski]

GHernandez,

Thanks but the whole idea is to keep the total system cost low.

If we could spend that "bluetooth money", we would put IRDA in the end product, but that is the problem.

Rather than penalize each product, we want to put the cost in the test equipment used to service the end product and unfortunately that test equipment cannot be too expensive either. That is why using the PDA for a diagnostic tool looked so attractive, but it's not attractive if you have to spend a great deal on the interface.

What bothers me is that the "low cost", proven and reliable interfaces like RS232/RS485 have been abandoned completely in some of the PDAs?

It looks like using these PDAs for anything other than true personal assistants is not realistic depending on the application.

Anyone have opions on that?

Len Jenski

Invensys Controls

[GHernandez]

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@ljenski wrote:

GHernandez,

Thanks but the whole idea is to keep the total system cost low.

If we could spend that "bluetooth money", we would put IRDA in the end product, but that is the problem.

Rather than penalize each product, we want to put the cost in the test equipment used to service the end product and unfortunately that test equipment cannot be too expensive either. That is why using the PDA for a diagnostic tool looked so attractive, but it's not attractive if you have to spend a great deal on the interface.

What bothers me is that the "low cost", proven and reliable interfaces like RS232/RS485 have been abandoned completely in some of the PDAs?

It looks like using these PDAs for anything other than true personal assistants is not realistic depending on the application.

Anyone have opions on that?

Len Jenski

Invensys Controls

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I would have to disagree on that.  Before we embarked on doing rs232 communication with our device, we looked at our options and what we needed and that is how we decided on what PDA we needed.  There are reasonable PDA's that have a CF slot that allow you to do rs232, but it is impractical to expect an rs232 port on a PDA.