Batboard

Ever been to a hamfest, picked up an ASTRO radio, looked at the flashcode, and said "awww, crap, where's a computer with Internet access, so I can check this flashcode on Radio Reference to see if it's any good?"

A flashcode decoder for Windows Mobile PDAs.



This version is a quicky prototype written in eMbedded Visual Basic 3.0. eVB apps don't run very well on modern Windows PDAs.

When my copy of Visual Studio .NET shows up next week, I'll rewrite it, and make it available for download.

Otherwise, if someone knows of a free J2ME VM for Windows Mobile that isn't crap, let me know, and I'll (maybe) write the flashcode decoder in Java, so y'all can run it on your cellphones too.


(EDIT: inserted 'maybe' above. I'd have to learn Java first.)

Wow, nice! Almost makes me want to upgrade my Treo to a Windows-based one.

That said, a J2ME-based version would be awesome.

I'll test it on WM5 on my treo... just make sure it's written for it's crappy 240x240 screen?

-Alex

J2ME would be perfect, I have a Motorola i605. I also have a Dell Axim x50v running WM2003 (downgraded from WM5 because it sucks and it's slow) ...

Have you tried the IBM VM? http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/w ... times.html

I've got an iPaq hx4700, and WM5 is as buggy as hell. It'll be downgraded shortly, too.

I'll give the IBM JVM a go later on.

This should cope well with the 240x240 screen. The bottom 80 pixels of a pocket PC screen are usually taken by the input panel (on screen keyboard, handwriting recognition etc), and I'll leave that part of the screen empty.

It's hard to tell from the screenshot, but could I add a nitpicky feature request (that you might already have)? Can you write the small amount of code that it would take to automatically insert hyphens when I'm typing it in? (Or just not require them at all?) It's always been a big pet peeve of mine that the RadioReference flashcode decoder insists that I add them in manually: it's exactly the type of thing a computer's cut out for. (And it'll be a big pain to add dashes if this code ever ends up on 'normal' cell phones... But then again, so won't 4F1E flashcodes... )

At the moment, it looks for and remove hyphens before processing the input, so it'll work either way.

Heh, you could add a drop down for quick flashcode checks for the "commonly seen codes"

Wait. We hopefully will get something for free? out of this, lets stop making the guy work and wait for at least one version to come out

Maybe a message box that says "Don't buy it!" for a radio that lists "ASTRO Ready"

where i can i get it? that would be PERECT for my i930!

Here - when I write it!

In any case, I will not charge anything for this when I release it (though I'll happily accept donations towards a new XTS3000!)

I have an Axim X51V... so I would be interested in it as well... As long as it plays nice with WM5 it's all good.

See how all you Windows guys out there are... What about us Blackberry guys?

Bonus uber-geek points if you can get it to run on the Java based Moto phones, like my i730 :P

The Java idea is getting more appealing, because it'll keep the Blackberry, Palm, Symbian and cellphone crowds happy too.

jayres wrote:See how all you Windows guys out there are... What about us Blackberry guys?

Web interface...

-Alex

alex wrote:

jayres wrote:See how all you Windows guys out there are... What about us Blackberry guys?

Web interface...

-Alex

I was about to say... us Blackberry guys just pull up RadioReference.

It would be nice if it could be made local, however. And, have you thought about trying to support the different models? XTS3000 flashcodes are significantly different from XTS5000...

That will be easy to implement.

I'm currently planning to use the data found in the Radio Reference PHP script. How accurate is this for the XTS5000?

If I could get some authoritative data straight from /\/\, I'd use that, but I don't know if they publish anything like that.

I'm sure there's published stuff on the codes, but the question is if they'll give it to ya.

Yeah, but internal docs don't count as being published.

mr.syntrx wrote:That will be easy to implement.

I'm currently planning to use the data found in the Radio Reference PHP script. How accurate is this for the XTS5000?

If I could get some authoritative data straight from /\/\, I'd use that, but I don't know if they publish anything like that.

They're significantly different... last I checked, it doesn't decode things like Q52/Q53, etc.

I believe Lindsey fixed that. If you run the usuall fffff some of the known new options are in there.

Pj wrote:I believe Lindsey fixed that. If you run the usuall fffff some of the known new options are in there.

Nope... 1Axxxx doesn't decode.

The flashcode decoder I was working on incorporated all the Astro 25 flashcode options I could find. In addition you can select the type of flashcode you want to decode (MTS, MCS, Astro, Astro25, etc). It was pretty simple, programmatically. Just have to have a multidimensional array.

Hows your Java learning coming mr.syntrx?

Of cause Motorola should just bundle a flashcode decoder with all their phones! Who cares if 97% of the people buying RAZR's wouldn't use it.

Not very far - I've hardly had time to fart over the last few months