[NTLK] Error message on MessagePad 2100 and thoughts about an eMate accessory

[Brian Bijeau]

Hi everyone,

I decided to play with my MessagePad 2100 and eMate recently, and when I booted up my 2100 it gave me the following error:
“This unit requires immediate repair. Factory calibration has been lost. It will not charge batteries until this problem is corrected.” This comes up every time the Newton boots or is woken up from sleep.
Has anyone seen this before? My Google searches haven’t turned anything up. And interestingly, it’s lying about charging batteries - my rechargeable battery pack still charges, though it’s not good for much. 

I also wanted to reach out to you guys about an idea I had - making a C.H.I.P. PC accessory for the Newton. My first thought was that it would be cool to be able to SSH from my eMate, but I figure telnet over serial into the C.H.I.P. would be a lot easier than trying to make an SSH client, and trying to connect 802.11b to my school’s wifi network. 

I also realized that there’s already a bunch of code for making a Newton talk to *NIX devices, so it should be relatively simple to modify those packages, whose source code seems to be available on UNNA, to be interacted with over the serial terminal so you can wget packages on the C.H.I.P., queue them for install, and then open the Dock on the Newton. We could also use the data export programs on there to have the Linux box sync calendars and such to the Newt, and to get documents from NewtWorks or the notepad onto, say, DropBox for editing on a full-size machine.

If anyone else is interested in this stuff, let me know and I’ll record my progress. The current limiting factor will be that the C.H.I.P. is on backorder until sometime maybe as far out as March, but I might experiment with my Raspberry Pi in the meantime.

Thanks,
Brian Bijeau