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Friday 28 March 2003

FMA - simple T68/T610 software [beej]

Lurks has blogged before on mobile phone software. Well, it's my turn now, having discovered FMA which I'm using with my T610.
It's not amazing. It's absolutely nowhere near the best. But fuck me if it doesn't actually do what I need for once. Everything else I tried just nagged, or bombed out, or timed out, or requires Outlook 2000, or needs a cable, or flat refused to work with an active Bluetooth connection. FMA connects through XTND Connect, which pairs silently with my handset.
The software is clearly a bit of a hack job - a stand-alone exe - but you get your crazy handset info, the phone book stuff, and then all your messages. It's fundamentally lacking in any other features, but it's quick, it's dirty, and it works with the cheap USB BT dongles from Scam/Dabs!

18 comments:

  1. Slimbo, what USB doofah did you get?
    There seems to be a huge range of prices on Dabs for essentially the same thing.
    The cheapest were a Dabs value class 2 one for £20 and class 1 for £24. What's the difference? Should I care?

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  2. Beej is using the dabs value one since I swapped it with him for a fucked battery. Class 1 has a longer range. Class 2 will do you fine.

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  3. Cheers, can't believe I confused Beejs' rantings with your... rantings. :)
    I'm a bit worried about getting the class 1 dabs value, ain't there a load of low-powered illegally branded bluetooth kit on the market.
    I want something with a good range y'see. It's for controlling winamp from the deck of my mate's garden. He's got some pig-in-a-poke fm transmitter hooked up to his PC, and he wants to change tracks/pick albums from the garden.
    Was thinking of using this PC Control softwarewww.christersson.org which is for Sony Ericsson phones, hopefully via Bluetooth, and you can control allsorts of cack, including Winamp. You can use it as a 'clicker' app for doing your powerpoint demonstrations slim :)

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  4. Hmm, for that use you're transmitting from your phone, not the computer. So having a class 1 device isn't going to help you a good deal there. I like the application though. There's a couple of RF modules at Maplin - might not be too hard to wire them up on a bit of vero-board but the PC interface would be rather harder. If I was going to do that, I suspect I'd buy an RF gamepad and then remove all the guts, add an antenna on the receiver and a nice buffer transister and a bit of wire on the transmitter from the gamepad. That'd be good for some distance and of course button presses come through as direct input states, which you can hotkey with a few different winamp plugins.

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  5. Am I being unrealistic then? I might have given you the wrong impression. The setup would be...
    T68/T610 bluetooth phone to Dabs USB/BT dongle on PC. Winamp and PC Control (for phone) running on PC, control software configured for controlling Winamp. PC soundcard connected to the FM transmitter.
    I don't know how you use the phone to control to the PC Control software though.
    Going down the IR route, was considered, the well-established Girder software www.girder.nl seems dead powerful but complicated. :(

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  6. I tried the Christersson IR control software, and I couldn't get it to work with any combination of Bluetooth-enabling software. It might work with the XP sp1 internal support though.

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  7. No, I understand what you're doing. It's just that you seem to imply a good deal of range being expected from a phone to the PC. I don't think you'll get it.

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  8. Bah. I see. So the phone will be a real low range device to prevent the need to recharge it every hour, regardless of the power of the PC dongle. BAH.
    So it's back to IR land then. Without going your Professor Pat Pending modified gamepad route, you reckon that a wired IR solution would work? The PC IR thing wired underground/overground/wombling free so the deck, and just something to send IR to the receiver on the deck, like an old palm or a cheap universal remote. I suppose the same would be true of RF but that's voodoo.

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  9. I don't really understand what you're suggesting.

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  10. Winamp over wap was how the whole idea of controlling the PC 'from space' started, but we couldn't find any software :(
    Now, we've become tighter and loath to pay for mobby wap usuage... we want something that is free like Bluetooth, IR or RF. Sigh... macs can do it ;)

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  11. There's a hundred ways of doing it but you think a Mac can do it then use a Mac to do it.

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  12. Hi kids, back again for more digging up dead thread fun.
    Right, who's got a Symbian or UIQ phone, Nokia 7650/3650 or a Sony Ericsson P800/P900?
    Has anyone tried controlling Winamp on your lounge server with it?
    This Ashley geezer is a senior softie at Symbian and has jigged up some nice software to do it, via BT. www.compsoc.man.ac.ukmore about porting it www.symbian.com
    I've not got one of these fancy dan phones, but I've managed to control my PC Winamp via a Palm m500 using GPRS on my Orange payg SE T68, using this priv.astronet.pl it's so pointless, it's great!Oh yeah, I see that FMA software now supports scripts that can be triggered from t68/t610 and the new t630. I can't for the life of me see what's different about the T630 other than slightly moddified keypad.

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  13. It has a TFT screen and will now be visible in bright sunlight, which was a big problem with the T610.
    Not that you UK peeps ever get any sunlight....

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  14. Beej,
    Have you been keeping up with the progress of FMA recently? fma.xinium.com
    There's lots of loveliness including proximity detection (the pc 'locks' when you leave range of the usb dongle), using your phone as a BT webcam, controlling winamp, windvd, bsplayer etc. via custom menus on your phone. All lovely, lovely stuff.
    Speaking of T610, reading the other phone/gadget blogs it seems somewhat of a disappointment. What's wrong with it?

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  15. Yep, I've been following FMA, and its got a bit l33t tbh. I love the 'walk out of Bluetooth range and it screenlocks and quietens Winamp' thing, that's just a bit cool!
    I've upgraded the firmware in my T610, no major gripes except that its a shame the camera isn't 'VGA'.

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  16. Beej, ahve you managed to get the mouse control stuff with FMA working? Whenever I try and use it, phone hangs on the 'Mouse control' message. :/

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  17. I've managed to get it working. although FMA does seem to hang for no particular reason sometimes. Make sure you're totally up to date with the versions. keep hittng update till it asks you to load a previous version.

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  18. FMA 2.1 beta is pretty awesome... now works with my 6230, so not just SE handsets.
    I uninstalled Nokia PC Suite, which at its last update decided that one systray icon wasn't enough, and added a second - neither of which had an option to quit on the right mouse button menu, sigh.

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