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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?"

17 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Wow, they gave it an entire 3 months! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Learn to have some patience before throwing in the towel.

    1. Re:Wow, they gave it an entire 3 months! by pyrrhonist · · Score: 5, Funny
      Learn to have some patience before throwing in the towel.

      How long is it going to take to learn that?

      --
      Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
    2. 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?

  2. 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?

    1. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Unrealistic Expectations by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I know they announced the dealine in advance, but their 3 month project was horribly unrealistic for such a small bounty. The initial slashdot article had comments to this effect (out of the relatively few comments it had--this is a BAD sign: no one really cares). I can see MAYBE an undergrad who didn't have a summer job working on it, but no one else would put everything else on hold for a pathetic bounty for an already ambitious timeline.

  5. 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.

  6. No wonder by janoc · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Three month of development for OS 5.x, which is a messy hybrid of old Dragonball code and new ARM stuff with mediocre development tools (e.g. POSE does not emulate OS 5.x machines, AFAIK) ? Are they nuts ? Or did they really think, that somebody is going to plop down money for the dev. kit, sign few NDAs to get the docs and implement it for $5k which probably does not even cover the price of the dev. kit.

    Not to mention which Bluetooth card did they have in mind ? The ultra-proprietary Palm one ? As if there was anything else.

    Unrealistic expectations doomed this project from the start, IMHO.

  7. Re:Bluetooth sux! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think you mean "Bluetooth on Windows sucks". I have Bluetooth on my Mac, with a 3rd party PC Card mind you, powered by an open source driver none the less, and never had any problem with it!

  8. Give me a break by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why not just hire someone as a real employee to do this. I'm sure there are plenty of qualified people who can do this, but they want to be cheap and make it into a contest.

    Nobody is going to get started on a project like this when they don't know how many other people are working on it and how far they have gotten. Why waste a lot of time working on this when at any moment someone else can come out of nowhere and make all your work for nothing.

    Reality check. The types of people who can write a bluetooth driver are not slave labor who will grovel around in the mud for your amusement.

  9. Re:People too picky on jobs these days? by dioscaido · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > That is some good pay man, and in view of all that whinging on /. sometimes I really wonder why no one took up that offer.

    heh... probably because 95% of the slashdotters that trash Windows on a daily basis couldn't write an OS module if their life depended on it.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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

  13. Rather odd sum .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny
    After raising a bounty of $5,812 ...

    Well .. for $5,813 I would have done it .. but as it stands ..