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Treo Bluetooth Bounty Efforts Unsuccessful

Posted by timothy on from the born-to-lose dept.

UberGeek28 writes "The development effort pushed by TreoCentral (previously discussed on /. here) seems to have failed. After raising a bounty of $5,812 for the first developer to meet the requirements of a working Bluetooth driver for PalmOS 5.0 with the Treo 600 in mind, no developer has come forward to claim it. The official word has come here. Maybe another effort with wider impact could succeed where this one failed?"

5 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Only 1135 signed up so far by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.savebetamax.org/ Let's Slashdot the Senators. Please sign-up and follow through. If the INDUCE act passes, we all lose.

  2. Re:Palm should support their products better. by iCEBaLM · · Score: 2, Informative

    "psyched"

  3. Why there was a time limit. by miradu2000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    As Senior Editor of TreoCentral.com, the author of the linked article, and overall the man in charge of the bounty, I think it is fair for me to answer the question of why we had a time limit. I do not believe that I addressed this well in the article, so I'll do it here.

    First and foremost, I have other responsibilities come September, and I would have been unable to dedicate the time needed keep this bounty running, answer questions, test possible results, etc. The bounty had an end time because it needed closure at some point - we chose to do a post-collection method, and as each month went by more of the credit cards used for the pledges expired.

    Secondly, when I started the bounty I had full knowledge of the next generation Treo, currently rumored to be released at the end of October/early November. At the time, specific accurate info on the next generation Treo was publicly unknown, so "want" for bluetooth on the current Treo was high. However, I was aware that this info would leak sometime over the summer, and it did - through an article I wrote a few weeks later. Subsequently, after photos were leaked in August, support from users who may have wanted this solution waned. I'm not saying that all support disappeared - we have many users who really want bluetooth on their current Treo, but many others are now resolved to simply upgrade to the next generation device. At the time, I thought the next gen Treo was going to be released early september, so the goal was to have the end of the bluetooth bounty somewhat neatly coincide with the introduction of the bluetooth compatible Treo.

    It's debatable whether 3 months would have been enough time to complete a driver. I have seen some very complex Palm OS applications developed in a much shorter time period. Even so, if in the last weeks of the bounty a developer said "I'm making progress", I would have asked our users to let us extend it. But no developer did, and as explained in the article, the prospects of having a working driver to our specifications were grim.

    -Michael Ducker

  4. Re:Wow, they gave it an entire 3 months! by DrEldarion · · Score: 3, Informative

    "As we got more publicity, more people who knew Bluetooth started to get involved in the discussion. Sadly, these people only had bad news to share. Developers started to tell us that what we were asking was impossible, because it was physically impossible for the Treo to access the voice stream from the radio. This meant that at best, a driver would only be capable of doing data over Bluetooth. But, as our conditions stated that it must support the headset profile, a driver that only did data would not have won the bounty."

    Sure sounds like patience is what they needed, hm?

  5. Re:Complicated Treo? by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Informative
    See my post here. In short, it's not just talking to an arbitrary external device. There is no documentation for any of the several layers of driver components here, at least not without NDAs with PalmOne and others. So the best guide you can find is the Palm OS 4 drivers (at least one PRC file for BT, BT serial, BT/SD), which weren't written for ARM hardware. So take those drivers, disassemble them (like I said, at least 3 PRC files), now go through opcode-by-opcode and figure out what each of the undocumented API calls are doing, so you can write something that's compatible with the built-in Bluetooth API.


    Oh yeah, and there's really no public documentation for writing drivers of any sort for OS 5/ARM - you're talking about stuff operating below the level of the public PalmOS API. So it's not a matter of bloating here, just lack of information because the whole system is relatively closed and undocumented.


    I'm not an expert by any means, just a guy with a modest amount of Palm application development experience who took a crack at this problem only to throw up my hands in frustration after a day or so, realizing it was much harder than it looked at first glance without the proper documentation for anything.