Treo 680 project is started and some success with the GSM module

If you'd been watching the H&D SVN repository you might have noticed several commits mentioning 'palmt680', and indeed we have a new project. I'd like to welcome our newest developer, Satadru who has started working on the port.

On a related note I've discovered how to talk to the GSM phone module (it will probably also work with the CDMA one) on the 650. After a little poking around, I discovered my initial assumptions about the BP (baseband processor - the 'smart' part of the phone module) being hooked to the ASIC UART were wrong. The BP is actually on the FFUART, so to talk to it all you need to do is open /dev/ttyS0 at 460800 8N1 with RTS/CTS flow control. It seems that Palm OS puts it into a binary protocol mode, so it'll just spit gibberish at you. After a bit of tinkering around with ASIC though, I noticed one of registers changing if the phone was on or off. Toggling this register appears to reset the module and you can speak to it in plain ASCII again.

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I was able to take it out of low power mode (AT+CFUN=1) and query some basic information like the IMEI, however I'm not sure how to get it to connect to the network or read the SIM - most commands just error saying "network personalization password required". Also, after about a minute of having it powered up, the AT command terminal starts behaving very oddly and drops about one in six characters. I've got absolutely no idea what causes this, but the same thing happens when accessing it via the Treo's HTC bootloader GSM 460kbps router mode.