Using Palm as Display

**Tomek_G** · 03-24-2006, 09:17 PM

I have little space in my Audi A4 and I'm looking for cheap screen. While holding my T|X I noticed that would work great as a display for carputer. All I would really need is for it to act as secondary display and input device to a PC.
Sounds easy, but apparently I can't find anything about it.
So far, on this site I found exactly what I was looking for. http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive...ake_a_w_1.html
The only problem is that this setup is powered by Windows PDA, which I don't have and are expensive to obtain, plus they're much bigger.

**piabu** · 03-24-2006, 11:21 PM

Why not just run RealVNC on the computer and PalmVNC on the T|X?

**RawsonDR** · 03-25-2006, 03:54 AM

http://sourceforge.net/projects/palmdisplay

Don't know if you can get that working on Windows or not....

**sama** · 03-25-2006, 05:23 AM

PocketPC as a Touch Screen Replacement

**Tomek_G** · 03-25-2006, 12:41 PM

Sama, your setup utlizes PPC, I have PalmOS.

VNC is so far the only available option, I will read into that and see if it will meet my demand

I looked at PalmDisplay and it appears only to work with serial connection in text mode.

EDIT. I installed TightVNC and PalmVNC and it works OK, problem is that it scales the display so setting it to mach Palm Resolution will be tricky.
There is also performance loss and still unstable program.
Actually the only thing I need is to make Palm control few aspects of PC, like remote control of media player and maybe filesystem access.

**sama** · 03-25-2006, 04:23 PM

hey dude, I know it is. I intended to use a pocketpc as an interface, but decided against it. And the reason I decided against it is all in that thread. I just thought you may be interested in the discussions to see the limitations of what's possible etc.

hope that helps.

**Tomek_G** · 03-25-2006, 05:51 PM

The only reason why I'm looking at PDA solution, because of the screen size.
I'm actually looking at 7" screens but they're still too big and carry too many cables. True it would be MUCH easier.

I thought about PDA and PC connection and it is kind of simple, at least in theory, but I just assume it was never done.

**sama** · 03-25-2006, 07:17 PM

if ur more persitant than me and decide to do it, then good luck with it all. I would say try to make some fail safe solutions, for when it freezes up etc.

Perhaps you could do this:

have a script that constantly checks for the existance of the remote control process, and that it's state is in "awaiting connection" or "conntected", and somehow to see if it's responsive. if it isn't, then to shut down the process and restart it. robustness is key if you are to use a remote viewport. Of course, you would always have a fail safe solution that you could just restart the pc.

and since your operations will mostly be telling the pc to execute some predefined functions, I would say boot of a CF card and in read-only filesystem. that way, if you do need to restart just by flicking the switch, then you don't care about harming the OS's environment.

I'll be interested in your progress so keep us posted.

**Shines** · 03-25-2006, 08:54 PM

good luck... I hope you figure this out.

**Tomassi** · 03-31-2006, 07:22 PM

I recently put together a laptop with a Palm Vx as a display and I used this:
http://palmorb.sourceforge.net/
it works great with LCD smartie and with this other plug-in:
http://www.markuszehnder.ch/projects/lcdplugin/
I use an ATI remote to control WinAmp. For me it was cheaper to do it this way instead of buying an actual LCD module since I had the Palm just collecting dust.