How do you use yours?
Posted: Fri Mar 15, 2024 3:59 pm
On the last iteration of the forum we had this topic, and as I remember there were some interesting uses being employed by users from Ham radio (Martin, others) , Land surveying (Nick), and others which escape me now.
So how about we tell how we use our Psions again?
I’ll get the ball rolling, and very interested to hear how others use theirs too of course.
Currently I am working on writing some OPL programs to use for various function related to electronic music, nothing too fancy, mostly just calculations of things like how many ms for an echo to be in time with a given tempo, or how many samples in x number of bars at a given sample rate and tempo, that kind of thing but also some more specialised bespoke stuff too. I also have a few more ideas and half done programs which relate to the beep command and using it for simple music applications. Some other things that I intend to do are various timers, loggers, inventory dbs, and eventually also some comms control stuff, like scheduled turning things on/off, reading sensors and whatnot. I have made a little progress here, but nothing worth taking about yet.
I also enjoy using the notepad for reference stuff, a lot of the equipment I use has various (sometimes cryptic and not easily remembered) button combinations for functions, so the notepad is ideal for quickly finding this info. I did originally intend to use the xfiles but due to some limitations I think notepad works better for this, most of the time.
Why the Psion? Well for me the fact that even a non programmer like me can cobble together a bespoke OPL program that does exactly what I need, whilst being very portable and with as near as damn it instant access, and most importantly does not get in the way or depend on internet access.
I originally used a CM in the 80’s when my Dad gave me his which my Mum had bought him for Christmas one year, I wrote a few simple OPL programs and used it as a contacts database mainly, I can’t remember what happened to it, probably ended up on a boot sale.
Then about 10-15 years later I ended up working at Maplin Electronics for a few years, I was quite surprised to see that they still used Psions for inventory management and stock control duties, by this time (late 90’s) they were considered obsolete to most. Those poor old things were regularly dropped and chucked around, yet never stopped working.
In the years between my first Psion and those following I had a few different devices, first S3, Sienna, Revo, S5 and also a few Palm OS devices. Then with the advent of the smartphone I inevitably moved on to those.
But I could not help to notice that as each device became more sophisticated, they also seemed to become less interesting and less accessible from a tinkering perspective, eventually around 2015 I started googling about the old Psion2 and stumbled upon the forum, and my Psion journey resumed and continues…..
So how about we tell how we use our Psions again?
I’ll get the ball rolling, and very interested to hear how others use theirs too of course.
Currently I am working on writing some OPL programs to use for various function related to electronic music, nothing too fancy, mostly just calculations of things like how many ms for an echo to be in time with a given tempo, or how many samples in x number of bars at a given sample rate and tempo, that kind of thing but also some more specialised bespoke stuff too. I also have a few more ideas and half done programs which relate to the beep command and using it for simple music applications. Some other things that I intend to do are various timers, loggers, inventory dbs, and eventually also some comms control stuff, like scheduled turning things on/off, reading sensors and whatnot. I have made a little progress here, but nothing worth taking about yet.
I also enjoy using the notepad for reference stuff, a lot of the equipment I use has various (sometimes cryptic and not easily remembered) button combinations for functions, so the notepad is ideal for quickly finding this info. I did originally intend to use the xfiles but due to some limitations I think notepad works better for this, most of the time.
Why the Psion? Well for me the fact that even a non programmer like me can cobble together a bespoke OPL program that does exactly what I need, whilst being very portable and with as near as damn it instant access, and most importantly does not get in the way or depend on internet access.
I originally used a CM in the 80’s when my Dad gave me his which my Mum had bought him for Christmas one year, I wrote a few simple OPL programs and used it as a contacts database mainly, I can’t remember what happened to it, probably ended up on a boot sale.
Then about 10-15 years later I ended up working at Maplin Electronics for a few years, I was quite surprised to see that they still used Psions for inventory management and stock control duties, by this time (late 90’s) they were considered obsolete to most. Those poor old things were regularly dropped and chucked around, yet never stopped working.
In the years between my first Psion and those following I had a few different devices, first S3, Sienna, Revo, S5 and also a few Palm OS devices. Then with the advent of the smartphone I inevitably moved on to those.
But I could not help to notice that as each device became more sophisticated, they also seemed to become less interesting and less accessible from a tinkering perspective, eventually around 2015 I started googling about the old Psion2 and stumbled upon the forum, and my Psion journey resumed and continues…..