SQL to cell (Re: USB-Serial adapter success stories? )

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Sat, 6 Mar 2004, Rich Braun wrote:

> Would love a solution that allows one to sync a MySQL list into my
> [Nokia 6340i] cell phone via a Linux IrDA adapter.

I've got exactly the same phone, and I bought it wanting exactly the same
thing you're asking for. So far (I've had it since last summer) no luck.

My first phone was a Nokia 6210i, and I bought it specifically for the IR
port it had. Or seemed to have. I figured "cool, I can sync the phone with
my Palm Pilot or a iMac's IR port." Unfortunately, the the phone's
documentation drew no attention at all to the obvious dark plastic panel
on top of the phone, and I found out later from a cousin who worked for
Nokia that the American version of that phone had the same case as a
similar European model, but the electronics for the IR port weren't hooked
up on the version over here. Bummer. (Also, the IR port on iMacs doesn't
seem to work in OSX, which would have been another obstacle...)

I upgraded to the 6340i when I found out that the IR port isn't decorative
on this version of the phone, and yes I am able to actually sync numbers
to my Palm Pilot, and when I had a Dell laptop with built in IR at my last
job, I was able to use Nokia's PC Sync software to transfer data that way
as well. [Fun thing I didn't plan for: they have a free MIDI composer
program as part of their PC Sync suite, so you can write music on your
computer and sync it to the phone for use as a free ring tone.]

If you have a IR capable PDA -- all PalmOS devices, no idea what they put
in those weird Microsoft things -- then data transfer between the phone
and the PDA is easy, and this is the hack I've been using. 

As near as I can tell, both the phone and the PDA transfer address book
data as standard vCard files, which may actually be better than a specific
MySQL connector, because lots of programs already speak vCard: Outlook,
Palm Desktop, Mozilla Mail, Eudora, OSX's Address Book, etc etc. vCard is
a simple text format, so if you want to put vCard data into MySQL (or
LDAP) and there isn't already a shim to do this (it would surprise me if
there wasn't anything suitable for this on Sourceforge), all you'd need
is some kind of wrapper script. You could probably do this in a page or so
of Perl, and less if you grab a vCard library from CPAN. 

The phone's calendar probably uses standard vCal files, so again the same
benefits would apply. vCal is the format used by Outlook, Palm Desktop,
iCal, etc, and it's also a text format that should be easy to handle. 


Getting the phone to talk to Linux then is probably more a matter of
getting the IRdA port to work well under Linux. If you have a PDA, can you
get it to sync? Getting that to work would probably mean solving the same
problems that would allow the phone to work. 

Once you get that working reliably, getting the data into MySQL should be
easy. If you need help with that, let me know and I'll take a crack at it. 



-- 
Chris Devers