Hello all

[jbuc]

New here, although not terribly new to Psion organisers - IIRC I got the Organiser II by way of:
Series 5 - which very annoyingly was broken (the screen at least) by a badly designed case before I'd used it much
Series 3 - fun for games, screen a bit small
Series 3a - nicer screen...better games
Series 7 - screen cable eventually failed, leading to
Netbook - still struggling on, although I'm very aware that every open/close brings it a little closer to death!
Siena - numeric keypad seemed like it would be useful. Hinge broke so in the end it wasn't!
Workabout - numeric keypad again, but never really found a use
5mx - still lurking "safely" (as in, I don't know where any more) somewhere running Linux off a CF card
Organiser IIs - I may have got "a bit carried away" with the Organiser II....at one point I realised it was cheaper and easier for any small microcontroller projects requiring a keyboard & screen that an Organiser II was cheaper (back in the days of sub-£5 organisers flooding ebay) than an equivalent screen and keypad, with the added bonus of time-keeping, datapak storage etc.

Thus I ended up with far too many Organiser II's, and every few years (such as now) I come across some and remember they exist again. With the current advances in cheap PCB production and assembly I'm tempted again to try and actually finish some projects (they work, but mostly resemble a Psion with a ton of wires coming out of the topslot to a breadboard and various circuits and/or microcontrollers). If you ignore the irony that the Psion is mostly controlling a far, far more powerful PIC/Atmel MCU then it works quite well. Whether I'm going to be able to figure out what is wired where and why, or decypher the Psion machine code I'd previously written is another matter, but time will tell!

[Daren]

Hello! Interested to hear about those projects, I have just started experimenting with some (very) rudimentary projects with microcontrollers, just using the comms link turning LEDs on/off and reading sensors with the microcontroller and sending the value to the Psion terminal.

[jbuc]

Not a problem (although I don't have vast amounts of free time currently to experiment, so don't expect anything very soon).

I quickly moved on from "a Psion would make a cheap keyboard/LCD" to aiming for a topslot addon that allowed the Psion itself to do various things using a combination of digital and analogue I/O via the adapter. I could therefore easily use datapaks (or RAMPak) to store results and tweak the program easily in OPL as needed if I found an unexpected issue or just wanted to do things a little differently. It also worked out easier due to now only needing 2 small machine code routines for the Psion to write commands / read data from the topslot device.

The latest iteration (see photo below) was for an 18650 Li-Ion battery profiler/tester that could plot the charge/discharge graph and test capacity of cells. Unfortunately (and as with most projects it seems!) once it was sufficiently working I tested everything I needed to test, and then stuck it in a drawer and never finished it off.

PsionProj1.jpg

As an added bonus some of the wires have come out of the topslot so I need to figure out where they were connected before I can even test any more cells with it

Once I get it figured out I plan to replace the Arduino with something a bit more modest (PIC perhaps) and make either a PCB that will fit in a Psion topslot housing (as for the charger or comms link), or if I'm feeling brave, exploring 3d printing and trying to make something a bit more custom to house it. Currently I'm still trying to figure out where I saved either the Psion side or the Arduino side of the programming, both having been done on a PC that has been replaced several times over since, but whose files should be saved somewhere.