Index
Supported phones
What are the supported phones ?
Supported phone list
Unsupported phone list
BT control
How do I insert special keys as F1,Cntrl etc ?
Do you run special software on the phone to show the menu's ?
When I try to unzip the downloaded file I get a password request ?
Can the tool work on non-Ericsson/SonyEricsson phones?
I have a P800, do you plan to support that ?
What do you to to my phone when the connection between btcontrol is setup ?
Control Stuff
Can I control my Media Center PC (TM:Microsoft) ?
Can I use the InfraRed capability of my phone to control [my stereo, my cd-player, my car, my frontdoor, etc] ?
How do I control [my stereo, my cd-player, my car, my frontdoor, etc] ?
Operation System
Which version of Windows are supported ?
How about WindowsXP?
Which versions of Linux are supported ?
Supported Phones
What are the supported phones ?
The phone capabilities (interface) that is needed on the phone by BTcontrol, is available on many (Sony)Ericsson mobiles.
If you want to run wireless the phone must support Bluetooth or Infrared, the last one requires the phone to be quite near your computer..
It is also possible to use BTcontrol with a serial cable between phone and PC.
Supported phones list:
T39, R520, T68, T610, T630, Z600, K700
I will update the list as information reaches me. In general if the phone is (Sony)Ericsson and NOT in the 'unsupported' list below, AND you can communicate with it from the PC (serial cable, Bluetooth or Infrared) THEN it is supported.
Not supported:
Z200 (no communication possible with PC supported by the phone)
P800, P900 and P910 (the Symbian phones do not support the functionality BTcontrol needs) try http://bemused.sourceforge.net/
BT control
How do I insert special keys as F1, Cntrl etc ?
Right click in the 'Key String' field, of the 'Keys' action. A popup manu appears
where you can select special keys.
Do you run special software on the phone to show the menu's ?
No. The Ericsson and SonyEricsson phones are provided with the possibility to control
plug-in accessories from the menu system. BT control uses the same capability, through the connection to the PC.
When I try to unzip the downloaded file I get a password request ?
I have experienced firewalls that remove .exe files from a zip-file. If they do you
cannot setup BT control. The double-zip-packing prevents the removal of .exe files.
The password is 'test' (without ').
Can the tool work on non-Ericsson/SonyEricsson phones?
No. See this answer, unless somebody provides me with the appropriate info.
I have a P800, do you plan to support that ?
I am looking into it. I will need access to a P800 first, I recently aquired a
Palm Tungsten T likely that will be supported first ;-)
What do you to to my phone when the connection between btcontrol is setup/disconnected ?
Glad you asked.. actually quite an amount of information is exchanged when BTcontrol and the phone get connected.
- First the data echo on the serial link is switched off, in the course of communicating with the phone it is very annoying to see everything you send also returned.
- Then I check if it is a SonyEricsson phone, unless you deactivate this test (menu Edit->Special Settings), the main reason for this is twofold. One BTcontrol cannot work with other brand phones as they do not support the menu-controlling facility, second I once by accident had the COM-port wrong and did not understand why it did not work (I was communicating with a build-in modem of the laptop).
- Next I check the actual CharacterSet of the phone, in the case of activating 'mouse-control' I must change this so I save it in case it must be changed back.
- I collect the serial number of the phone, this to make sure I reset parameters on the correct phone in case of interruption of the Bluetooth connection and the reappearing of the phone.
- The current silentmode of the phone is saved, again to be able to restore it.
At 'controlled' disconnection when you stop/close the communication or exit BTcontrol, all parameters that could have been changed are reset to the value at initial connection. These are: the echo mode, character set, the silent mode and additionally one command to reset the event handling of keys to the default value. This last one just to make sure the button/key handling of the phone is 'default'.
Control Stuff
Can I control my Media Center PC (TM:Microsoft) ?
Assuming that this is Windows based, and that the applications are acting upon keyboard/mouse events, yes. I have no such machine myself, nor do I know anyone that has, so I cannot check. If you have access and can try, let me know the results.
Can I use the InfraRed capability of my phone to control [my stereo, my cd-player, my car, my frontdoor, etc] ?
The IR of the phones only understands, and is capable, of handling a special protocol to exchange information between devices.
Things like files, business cards etc. This is called the OBEX protocol and is supported by many PDAs, Windows, Linux and other phones.
For remote controls there is not much (not any) standardisation. Every vendor uses its own or depends on available chipsets.
The only way 'other', then the provided remote controls, can work is by imitating the original vendor specific one.
So either one has to open the remote and the controlled to analyse the chips, or 'record' the information by reading what
is communicated. And then replay. Only a few devices, I think some PDA's have been 'hacked' to be able to do this.
A quite low level interface to the IR device on the phone is required, this is not available on the phones.
This all comes down to NO. Unless SonyEricsson thinks that this is a business case, and then some other person that understands, has access to, the phone insides must develop this.
How do I control [my stereo, my cd-player, my car, my frontdoor, etc] ?
BTcontrol executes on your PC on Windows. Any application that also can execute at the same time on that PC can be controlled. Assuming that most application accept keyboard or mouse events as these can be generated by BTcontrol. If you have, or can build, a windows application that in its turn controls your stereo (cd-player, car...) then you can control it through BTcontrol. I did something like this in my Lego(TM) example, see my website. BTcontrol simulates keyboard keypresses towards an application that talks to the Lego Mindstorms (TM) set.
Operation System
Which version of Windows are supported ?
From the point of view of BTcontrol, it runs on all Window versions from 9x and NT4. The important issue is the ability of your Bluetooth software that must be able to provice a 'ComPort' connection to the serial Bluetooth port of the phone. All software around, that I know of, can do this. Some have the possibility to 'learn' a phone-comport relation, so that the opening of eg. COM4 will automatically start an attempt to setup a Bluetooth connection to the phone that 'belongs' to COM4. The Bluetooth mode on the phone must be 'ON' to allow this (and paired of course).
How about WindowsXP?
There is much to explain on XP, gave it its own page here.
Which versions of Linux are supported ?
I am a Linux user since version 0.12, I do not use it much for power-point presentations though ;-| so BTcontrol does not run on Linux. There are several projects ongoing, instead of attempting to list them here... you'll easily located them when searching the web on: bluetooth control daemon.
