SDK Demo Programs

The Scanning Devices iButton Software Development Kit for Palm OS contains libraries, demonstration programs and documentation which should help you to build Palm OS applications which read and write iButtons.

The demonstration programs have been chosen for simplicity and for specific purposes. They may not be examples of great coding style, but they do show "how to" in straightforward, often repetitive code. There are five Code Warrior Demo projects:

• Jim's App - Our good friend Jim wrote a program to read an iButton ID, grab the Palm Date and Time, and put them in fields on a single form. It uses the ICN Manager (ICN library) to allocate memory, control the Palm serial port, read an iButton ID with a single command and draw fields.
• Onshore - A variation on Jim's App which polls the iButton. At one second intervals, it opens the Palm Serial Port, Reads the iButton ID and Closes the serial port. It displays the ID, date and time in a field on the Palm Screen. If no iButton is in the probe, it puts up a "No Button" Message. Be careful with this application, it eats batteries alive!
• Button - The next level of complexity shows how to read and write data in iButton pages without the library's help, allocating memory, issuing commands directly to iConnection and responding to iConnection data. One look at this should cure your desire to do it without the library, so take heed! But it does demonstrate that it can be done.
• tcButton - the Palm OS component of the Scanning Device tcButton application system. This uses the icn and tchron managers (libraries) to setup thermochron iButtons, extract temperature data and graph it. It demonstrates the techniques used to construct, store and retrieve records in the Palm Database. It also implements many Palm OS functions: beaming, searching, scrolling, table processing, windowing. There is a lot to tcButton; we invite you to draw on it to build your own application.
• SD1994 - A general purpose utility to read and write Dallas Semiconductor DS1994 iButtons. This Palm Application allows the user to read, display, edit, write and store and retrieve DS1994 data in a Palm database. The application uses the icn manager for the 16 general purpose iButton pages and additional functions to read and write the iButton Timekeeping Registers. It demonstrates the conversion of date and time data between Palm and iButton (PC) formats. Note: this projected is distributed as a Code Warrior Release 5 project.

Four of these are distributed as Code Warrior Release 6 projects (as noted, SD1994 is a Release 5 project). They include all executables, sources and headers. If you are using Code Warrior Release 7 or Release 8, you may need to reset the directories and paths to the proper System Header Files. For example, #include Pilot.h changes to #include PalmOS.h and a different directory path in the project settings. Code Warrior documentation should help you with the specifics.

Contact Scanning Devices with questions or comments

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