James FosseyAs you can probably tell - if you're still interested, that is - not much has happened here recently. Rest assured, I still have my Organiser II (plus my Acorn Pocket Book, which I use almost daily as a budgeting tool) but this project is now very unlikely to see any more updates. There may be another project on the way, in a similar vein though - but with less soldering and more Python. Oh, and possibly a spring-loaded slider (clue...)
Bluetooth on the Organiser II isn't dead though - quite the opposite! In recent months, the experts have moved in to make a proper device to bridge the 1980s Organiser with the 2020s wireless whizzbang world. Over at the Organiser2 forums, some Psion enthusiasts (with real electronics skills - as opposed to my amateurish antics) are in the process of designing a proper Bluetooth adapter for Organiser IIs. I strongly suggest you have a look at the pictures here (http://organiser2.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=15&start=10) as it looks absolutely brilliant!
Anyway, two years after I started this Hackaday project (I think I ordered my OrgII off eBay two years ago today) I think it's now time to mark it as complete and closed - though, of course, I'll continue to follow Organiser developments closely. Thanks for reading and following.
Sent from my Organiser II XP (well, no - that would be pushing it...)
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Yes, that's it. The old forum went offline in late 2019/early 2020 so I suppose the new forum is its replacement.
Open-sourcing sounds interesting - though technically well beyond me! I have wondered if a modern Organiser II would be of any interest to anyone, though probably more as a BBC microbit/RPi style toy (or 'digital detox' device) rather than a serious PDA! I'm not sure what (if anything) is left of Psion now - as I understand it, Psion ceased to make consumer handhelds in the very early 2000s (2002?) but they carried on making machines for business/industrial use for years longer - under the name Psion Teklogix, which is now owned by 'Zebra' I think. I'm pretty sure Zebra handheld barcode scanners are still made & used by delivery drivers etc - the ultimate descendant of the original Organiser II!
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Is that a continuation of the old Org2 Forums that were built on some weird Perl software that eventually broke and died?
Also: I'd love it if someone had an otherwise-destroyed PSION OrgII with working ROMs and PAL inside. While there is an apparent readout of the existing one, the way it was done was... to put it politely, essentially useless. MiniPro programmers -- TL866A/CS and such -- *can* program PAL/GAL chips from what I understand, and if I could get the ROMs read and a PAL worked out -- since the rest is fairly standard fare -- there's really not much to prevent the design from being open-sourced at that point beyond writing PSION themselves (whatever is left) and asking for formal permission, which likely would be more a formality than anything else at this point, considering it's literally older than me, as a design, and I'm about to turn 35.
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