Avalon Engineering can provide PDA based user interfaces for embedded systems.

Avalon Engineering has the expertise to create state of the art graphical user interfaces and embedded applications using Palm OS. Use Blue Tooth, IrDA, or IEEE 802.11b wireless interfaces to connect to your embedded product. If you have a serial port on an existing product, we can easily upgrade your product to wireless. Use your PalmOne to...

• Configure the embedded device
• Operate and monitor the embedded device
• Collect data logs
• Automate online help
• Perform diagnostics

Why Palm OS? What is it?

What is Palm OS? The simplest way to explain what Palm OS is would be this: If you consider WinCE to be the PDA version of Windows, then Palm OS is the PDA version of Unix. The same GCC compiler used on virtually every Unix machine is used to create Palm OS applications. Most newer Palm products are ARM based.

Why Palm OS? If you're not a fan of Unix, you won't be a fan of Palm OS either. If you are a fan of Unix, welcome to the PDA version of Unix. There really isn't much more than that to the technical part of the "why" answer. The business part of "why" is simply faster development.

What does it take to develop a Palm OS application?

Most Palm OS applications are written in C or C++. Most of the system calls will be familiar to a Unix programmer. The graphical interface is unique to Palm, but the development tools make screens easy to build. Application development for Palm OS is substantially easier than for Windows. That means being better able to keep aggressive schedules, and keep costs down.

We had a little fun with Zap one evening. In less than an hour, we turned Zap into a program icon on the Palm application screen, and put a skeleton program in place complete with menus, popup dialogs, and graphical controls.