Palm OS + Bluetooth Keyboard
============================

I  have the  Aceeca  PDA32  portable computer,  you  know.  It has  its
advantages. For example,  it has Bluetooth, a miniUSB  connector and it
has Palm OS 5.4.0.

But it  has also some  problems: it was built  to order so  many common
features  may be  unavailable. My  particular device  has no  sound, no
infrared and no WiFi. It only has the Bluetooth chip.

The device  has huge RAM  (32MB) and fairly  fast ARM CPU  (much slower
that the CPU in  T|X anyway - and it sometimes felt  SLOWER than my T|W
with its m68k CPU!)  so I decided to try to develop  some stuff here. I
Have  bought  a  PockeC  license, also  downloaded  the  OnBoardC,  the
SmallBASIC and the Tcl interpreter.

But I hate the  default input method: it uses the  Graffiti2 and it has
thin, uncomfortable  stylus on relatively  small screen (the  screen is
physically smaller that that of the T|X) and screen surface is also far
from ideal. So I do not want to write C codes with stylus.

But what to do? There is none of "standard" Palm connectors so I cannot
use keyboard  designed for, say,  Palm m50x/m70x. There is  no infrared
sensor so I cannot use the Palm Univarsal Wireless Keyboard.

So  the only  way is  to use  Bluetooth. But  the Palm  OS have  and no
build-in Bluetooth drivers. There was  a Bluetooth keyboard driver (and
it WAS  freely available  at PALM.com)  but it  is gone  and it  is not
archived at Archive.org... I tried to find it elsewhere but failed.

So I asked on Mastodon: @jynx and  @logout tried to find the driver but
also find nothing.

Fortunately I  have remembered that at  some point I have  got a "brand
new" Stowaway ThinkOutside Sierra keyboard. As the company name suggest
it was probably designed  for Palm. And it was. My  keyboard came in an
original packaging, if  I am not mistaken. So, I  thought, there should
be  a  driver CD.  SO  I  searched for  it  at  home, at  office,  just
elsewhere... and I found nothing.

Today I needed to find some  documents. I didn't found them (of course)
but I found the Stowaway CD instead!

And  yes,  the  CD  includes  a *.prc  file named  Stwy40Plm.prc [1].  So  I
connected my Aceeca,  installed the file and tried to  connect my Nokia
SU-4W Keyboard.  I thought that  there is zero  chance to mke  it work,
Well, ic connected and worked. Except the "Fn" key. If you know how the
SU-4W work then you know that the  Fn is necessary to use numbers among
others..

So I  have found my poor  Stowaway Sierra keyboard. It  is mechanically
damaged (didn't  I told  you that  it was declared  as "brand  new" and
unused?). Except its issues it work as expected.

I wrote this text on this keyboard.


References:

[1] http://jirka.sdf.org/Stwy40Plm.prc
So I thing that it is a success, finally...