I’m soon starting a new little project for my own amusement. I have my wife’s old PC lying around, and it’s old enough that, when we offered it on Freecycle, nobody wanted it. Well, that means it’s mine to tinker with!
I’m going to make it into a simple multimedia station; it will play MP3 files from its hard drive. To control it, I have thought of this: connect it to an old PDA of some kind using its serial port, and use a command line program by means of a terminal emulation. I might even write something using the Ncurses library to have a minimal character based GUI.
Now the next step is to get some very cheap PDA (because I’m a penny pincher in this) and experiment with it. I’m not an expert on these, though, as there have been so many brands and models. What is your advice about this? I will need:
[ul]
[li]As low a price as possible[/li][li]Serial connection[/li][li]Terminal emulation (either in ROM or with some external program)[/li][li]Capacity to be programmed would also be nice if I decide not to go the term emulator route, or if it is not available.[/li][/ul]
The presence of a keyboard might not be a stringent requirement if I can knock together some program for it to communicate with the PC. That’s it; I’m open to your suggestions!