Recently, Motorola had a massive layoff and I was affected. This isn’t really a source of great worry for me and Amy, and we’re relocating to the West Coast. If you happen to need a computer science and digital design dilettante and you’re living in the Bay Area, Portland, or Seattle, please give me a ping!
Anyway, part of moving is going through your old things and figuring out what to throw out. I recently rummaged through a storage box and found a bunch of very interesting things…an old bike light I wasn’t using (which contains, among other things, some useful ICs)…a digital camera (ripe for hacking or scavenging)…an old Nintendo Pikachu digital pet (looks easy to disassemble)…and, the real gem and the reason that I’m making this post…
At the bottom of the box, sitting there and looking back at me, almost as if to ask me where I’d been for nearly 10 years, was my old Palm iii. I bought one back in the late 90s as a way to get into apps development for handheld devices. It’s a fairly sad sight by modern standards, with a monochrome screen and text input through an inscruitable writing system, but it’s also a complete platform ready for hacks. I recall that, back in the day, someone designed a tilt sensor for it and made a game similar to Labyrinth for it. For a maker who’s living on severance money, this is a real, real find.
The first order of business, of course, is to create a flashing process. I already found the flashing utility, so next will be either finding or, more likely, building a sync cable. After that, I need to locate some documentation on its memory architecture and any firmware routines, because what I really want to do is write a new OS for it. The limited space will likely make it a challenge, but something I’ve often found to be true is that writing an OS for a mobile device, even one with not many resources, is still more pleasant than working on the x86 architecture.
