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About Paladin -- Aladin to Palm data transfer tool

Note: Current version is paladin-4.15

CHANGES (edition history) file is here.
If you want to receive every update information of Paladin, please mail to an automatic subscription site paladin-ctl@neko.ac (possibly without subject and body), and join the paladin ML. Note: Please don't send questions or comments to the address, since it is an automatic-response address and rarely watched by a human. If you are already a member of the ML and want to unsubscribe it, please send a mail to the same automatic address with message body 

     unsubscribe
(not in message subject) or, if you are in trouble, write to kuro at neko.ac (please convert at to @; this is for spamproof). And you can send any questions or comments to the address, too, since it is regularly watched by a real person (me).

What can this software do?

This software CAN:

Click here to see some screen shots and a brief operating guide of the software.

This software CANNOT:

In short, this software is not a real electrical substitute for paper logbooks but a software that can receive/store data from Aladin, display data on LCD (and attach a short note to each data for future reference), and transfer data to your PC at home.

I've tried the software to be as simple as possible. Because Palm's policy is, if I didn't misunderstand, "simple is best". Every Palm user doesn't want huge, all-in-one, Excel-or-Word-like softwares for PDA. Thus, I didn't design this software as a real paper logbook. I rather designed Paladin as a usable simple data transfer/store tool.

Operating environment

This software requires
1. Any Aladin dive computer made by Uwatec or their clone.
All types of Aladins that have data download facility should work with this software, namely: Note: Smart COM/Pro divecomputers made by Uwatec are not supported by Paladin, since they are completely different divecomputers. And The Digital divecomputer made by Uwatec doesn't have a PC-communication function.
2. Any Palm organizer device.
All Palms (including ancient Palm Pilot 1000, old Palm III, newer Palm Vx, Visor, bland-new m515, m130, i705, Sony CLIE PEG-S or PEG-N series, Handera 330 etc.) should work with this software.
  • Note: Sony changed the serial interface design for CLIE PEG-T and PEG-NR series. So T and NR series are currently not supported, yet.)
3. Interface cable between Aladin and Palm.
One-way version (or if you already have a two-way version for PC): Making two-way version from scratch:
4. PC side software in case you like to send received data to PC.
The following is a list of PC softwares reported to work with Paladin: Note: To use one of these softwares requires a certain kind of connection between your Palm and PC. Possibilities are: Newer Palms tend not to support serial connection as default but they all support USB. So if your bland-new Palm comes with a USB cradle, please try to consider using the software "pdb2log" for PC connection since any PC softwares for Aladin don't support USB directly (yet).
5. If you wish to view DataTrak's logfiles by using your Palm, please also install the software "log2pdb" that is downloadable from this page below.
6. If you are lefty, in order to get lefty oriented GUI please download "Lefty":
http://www.strout.net/info/pilot/leftypilot/intro.html.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers are here.

Disclaimer

This software is distributed as is in a hope that it will be useful for many people. The author of the software is not responsible for any damage or loss caused by using the software or information on the related web pages. This web page or this document tries to provide information in all possible accuracy, but may contain many errors. The author is not responsible for these errors, either.

This software is an open software with the source code. Duplication, redistribution etc. are subject to GNU GPL (GNU General Public License). For more detail please refer the comment in the head of main.c or the file COPYING included in the source package.

Download

[Upgrading from Paladin-1.7 or earlier]

Since the internal database structure has been completely changed at Paladin-1.8, updating from an earlier version than Paladin-1.8 to the newest Paladin-4.15 requires to do the following steps:
  1. Delete previous version of Paladin application (with all the related pdb files: *-Kuro.pdb) from your Palm device as well as your backup directory on PC.
  2. Install the prc file of new Paladin-4.15 (without any pdb files).

[Upgrading from Paladin-1.8 or later]

The database structures of Paladin-1.8 or later are all lower compatible. Thus you can safely update from an older version of Paladin (later than or equal to version 1.8) to the newest 4.15 without deleting the databases on your Palm; just install the prc file below.
Note: "Lower compatibility" does not mean upper compatibility. If you've once upgraded Paladin to newer one, then PLEASE DO NOT DOWNGRADE AGAIN. Since in order to support new features Paladin automatically rewrite databases when a new version is launched at the first time (and rewriting works may sometimes take 10 seconds or so). And thus rewritten databases cannot be read (and may cause a fatal crash) by older versions of Paladin.

Information for Add-in Developers

Paladin has excellent abilities to transfer/store Aladin's data and display dive profile graphs. Also, Paladin is designed as simple as possible and not intended to be an electric replacement of real paper logbooks. This policy is because to be simple is proved to be the best way for a PDA, which does not have fast CPU nor huge memory space, and, moreover, such functions already implemented to Paladin are rather independent to users' tastes; I expect Paladin is welcome by almost all Aladin users, but if I implement some real paper logbook functions like editing buddy name, tank size and so on, religious wars like "I need this new xxx", "This yyy is unusable" etc. may occur. In the real world, however, there are already many kinds of paper logbooks, and I believe in the Palm world there should be, too!

In order to help developers who are going to make a logbook application that will (or, I'm afraid, will not) fit for everyone's tastes, I decided to add functions to support them.

Now Paladin has abilities to do:

These two functions enable you to use Paladin as an add-in software for your logbook software. Paladin will take on "dirty" parts of your software: Communicating with Aladin and displaying profile graph. These dirty parts are low level things and they strongly depend on hardwares of Aladin divecomputers and Palm. Thus, if you leave these jobs to Paladin, you can pay more attention to higher level things and, further, your application will be portable and independent from Aladin divecomputer itself.

For more detail in developing Add-In Software for Paladin, please download the source package above (contains all source code, samples and binaries) and/or read the document in it.

List of Add-in Softwares for Paladin

Note

Back to the top page of Aladin data transfer tools.

Any questions or comments or bug reports should be made to

ITO N. Hisashi <kuro at neko.ac>
(Please convert the above 'at' to @ sign, this is for spamproof.)