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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. Complicated Treo? by aklix · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since when did an external device become too complicated to program a driver for? Have devices really become that bloated?

  2. Impossible by comwiz56 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article:
    "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." ... and they're suprised nobody could do something impossible?

    1. Re:Impossible by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I can also assure you even writing a driver for the data capabilities of the BT card was nearly impossible without extensive reverse engineering of the existing drivers - there are several layers of drivers, all of which are undocumented in the public PalmOne hardware/Palm OS API documentation. The SD card has no documentation to speak of. There were, IIRC, three different driver files you would have to rewrite and get compiling and working under OS 5/ARM. Oh, and did I mention, you can't use any of the usual Palm development tools since they don't generate ARM native code, you need to use a totally different toolchain (GNU with ARM target, I guess).


      There was an easier way to get BT working, which is to build an add-on device that connected to the external serial line and ran the signal through a UART to one of the many complete BT chip systems out there. I made some progress toward doing this, but I lost my motivation when they announced the Treo Ace (and I got busy with other stuff). My takeaway from this experiment was that the internals of Palm OS software and hardware are sadly extremely closed these days, and even figuring out the general things (like how to write drivers for OS 5) is nearly impossible. Things didn't used to suck so much in Palm land (before the PalmOne/PalmSource split I guess?).


      And a hardware add-on solution would have made voice possible too (by plugging into the headset connector) - as this article said, there was no way to access the voice audio stream from software to redirect it to the BT card, even if it had the capability to do so (which is also doubtful - apparently the relevant voice pins on the BT chip in these cards may not have even been connected).


      So no, nobody in their right mind would have done THAT much work for 5 grand. I've done plenty of Palm programming in the past, and had this been a simple Palm app, I would've whipped something up in a minute.

  3. Re:bluetooth is dead! by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think the "XYZ is dead" proclaimations are getting lamer. It is not you, but gee, nothing really dies until everyone, not just the technical elite quits using it. For example, VHS and floppy are slowly going away but is hardly dead.

    There appear to be hundreds of Bluetooth products: Bluetooth SIG site product listing

    Several PDAs have bluetooth built in. Mobile phones seem to be the #1 device with a bluetooth transciever. I've seen printers in stores that have built-in bluetooth capabilities. With a lot of new computers, notibly laptops, a Bluetooth reciever is often a $50 add-on. I've seen bluetooth cellphone headsets, so there is no cord between the phone and the earpiece/mic unit.

    I think for syching, portable music won't work well given the 2.1 Mbps limit of the latest version of the standard, you would be better off with USB 2.0 or Firewire. I really don't think any currently available wireless standard (a, b, g, etc.) is acceptable for transferring large amounts of files anyway.

    I do have bluetooth, but currently only the reciever for my laptop, a Logitech mouse and a Logitech keyboard. It does what I need, and a standardized module in my laptop + a third party cordless mouse is far better than any cordless mouse with an easy-to-break USB dongle. I could make it easy with a corded mouse but I think that's messy.

    Supposedly there is a wireless USB coming out, but it still doesn't exist yet and will take a while to be integrated into computers. There are no real wireless human interface standards other than what is in Bluetooth where you can mix and match receivers of any brand with peripherals of any brand.

  4. No it's not! by Macka · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Apple have a Bluetooth keyboard, and mouse. And I use Bluetooth all the time to sync up the address book, calendar and todo items on my SE K700i with my PowerBook.

    In fact probably the most use I have for Bluetooth is when I'm away on business, like this:

    PowerBook Phone Internet

    Just last week I was in a hotel room with dodgy mobile reception. The only way I could get a good signal was to place the phone on the window ledge in the bathroom. Thanks to Bluetooth I could still sit at the room desk and connect from about 15m away.