Hi all,

I am currently working on another hair brained scheme, and I need some advise from palm users.

A while ago I managed to strip an old computer down to its bear minimum, and stuffed it all into a plastic cereal box. Now I know this sounds a little strange, but it does have a point.

You see, the cereal box will fit perfectly in the corner of my boot, next to an inverter. Plug it all in, turn it all on, attach it to the RCA input I managed to hack into my headunit, and I have a carputer ready to play MP3's.

I have managed to everything perfect except one thing. Its only a small thing, but its been stopping me put it in my car.

You see, I can't find a satisfactory way to control it. The ideal would be a touch screen monitor, but at the start I set myself a budget of $100 to complete the whole thing (after all, otherwise I might as well by a solid state mp3 player). So far I've spent $13 on an inverter, so the touch screen is out of the question :-)

And that's when it struck me. I can just buy an old monochrome palm from trade me for well less than my budget, connect it to the serial port and use it to control winamp.

I have found a suitable plug in for winamp that lets me control it via a html page (http://www.browseamp.com/).


Now, it has been a long time since I last played with a palm, so I have a couple of questions...

Can the older (read ancient/cheap) palms actually browse html pages? Can they do this via the hot sync cable?

Can anyone think of a way for me to make the palm automatically turn on with the car? I.e. do they automatically turn on when given power?

How about starting the browser automatically when they turn on?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!


As an aside does anyone have an old palm they are looking to sell? Most of the trademe ones appear to be a little classy for what I'm planning to do with it. After all it doesn't need a battery that holds charge, or a stylus etc, or a cover, etc.

On a different tangent (off topic). Has anyone else built a cap pc? If so, how do you control it?