Development of Mobile Platforms Using PDA

this paper describes a prototype that uses Per- sonal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Bluetooth communica- tion in an information system designed to supervise Auto- mated Robotic Maintenance systems. This work is a col- laboration between different University departments with different specialties. The work focuses on the programming of PDA devices and its usage in monitoring systems with domotic applicability. One of the desired goals is to apply new technologies for deploying an information system on mobile and wireless devices. The system's architecture and results are presented in this paper. During the 90's the use of Personal Computers (PCs), became common in several different application areas due to the falling prices. It turned out to be an object not only used by big companies or enterprises but also by the common citizen. The spread of PC's all over the world and its connection through networks, Intranets or LANs, made this equipment a means of communication between people from different parts of the world. This achieve- ment enabled a faster and even more effective communi- cation (e.g. chat, e-mail, net-meetings, etc) between peo- ple. This interconnection stimulated the mobility and data exchange between people of remote locations. The neces- sity of mobility implicates a new kind of thought. So, devices that, like the PC, allow the development of automation tasks but require no static power source, i.e. devices with less capability than a PC but with the onus on mobility, started to emerge, fig. 1. First we had the Laptop then we had the ever more powerful Pocket PCs or Palm OS devices (1) (2) (3). These PDA devices are more and more sophisticated in memory, I/O capability, wireless connectivity, Internet accessibility, etc. This was possible due to the advances in new embedded architec- tures (4).