Re: Zaurus wearable, ps/2 to bluetooth adatper,

From Wear-Hard Mailing list Archive (WH) Maintained by R. Paul McCarty

On 4/26/06, Craig M. Armstrong <> wrote:
> Which Zaurus? I am looking at the SL-C3200. I know it has USB host, but
> how did you manage the VGA out? What were the problems you encountered?

The SL-6000L. It had an adaptor that did VGA out. Problems included
the VGA out sucking, closed source for some of the product, really
buggy operation (like not being able to turn on if the battery was
uncharged). I don't remember all the other problems - it's been quite
a while.

> I have long wished to find an adaptor that will turn any PS/2 mouse or
> keyboard in to a wireless one. Now with Bluetooth, seems like it should
> be easy to design a bluetooth box you plug in a PS/2 mouse and keyboard
> and it whala you have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I have a fuzzy
> memory that a wireless USB standard was being developed.

One thing we are looking at for a "cheap" solution is to take apart a
bluetooth qwerty keyboard and route the lines correctly for the
Twiddler. You'd need a microcontroller to do it properly, but it
shouldn't be hard - I just don't know enough about electronics at the
moment...

> I definately agree. Should be able to plug in and it just works.
>
> Also, the hardware should take care of any mapping changing a user wants
> to make to the device, just like the Twiddler2 does. Installing drivers
> for devices has caused me a lot of headaches.

Though having the Twiddler forget is terribly irritating... and of
course there's no Linux-based software to re-upload keymaps.

> I thought my Kensington trackball was fine as long as I had it plugged
> in directly to the computer and had the right OS for the drivers. But
> then I plugged it in to a KVM, and the drivers couldn't see the
> trackball behind it. Now all of a sudden several of the buttons are
> completely useless. Also, they redesigned their drivers somewhere along
> the way and introduced some new 'features' that went against that way I
> used the trackball. Attempts to get around this limitation ended up in
> blue screens of death and tech support being quite un-supportive. Also,
> they may stop writing drivers for new OS's, like my old ALPS glidepoint
> adaptor, only drivers for it are for Windows 3.1!

That's pretty exciting. KVMs are known to cause weird problems like
that. I keep praying that one day we'll have stuff that works. =3D)

dan

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