startalk(1)

NAME

startalk - read/write phonebook from/to Motorola StarTAC

phone

SYNOPSIS

startalk   [-c]   [-r|-w|-t]  [-n  entrynum(s)]  [-v]  [-d
debuglevel] [-p phonetty]

DESCRIPTION

startalk is a tool for letting your Linux machine talk to

a Motorola StarTac PCS phone. It currently lets you dump your

addressbook and write a new addressbook to your phone. It as

pires to let you read and set all options in your phone, and to

be easily integrated into a package designed to synchronize

phonebooks.

***** WARNING *****

StarTalk is beta software, and is not covered by anything

resembling a warranty. It has only been tested on my phone, and

attempts to implement an undocumented protocol for talking to

your phone. There is every possibility that StarTalk will com

pletely blow away the settings and phonebook in your phone, al

though as far as I know it does not do that. If you have data

stored in your phone that you don't have elsewhere, or that you

would be unhappy if it were destroyed, I would not even think of

using StarTalk without backing up your phone first.

This release of StarTalk is more written as a demo program

than anything else. It will write your phonebook to a text file

and read specially formatted text files in to write them to the

phone. It also has a simplistic test mode, which will send a

couple packets that I haven't had time to analyze, and print the

results, for future figuring out. When run in debug level 3 or

higher, it will include full packet dumps to and from the phone,

which have proven useful in figuring out how the protocol works,

and in decoding the information in the packets.

You can combine the reading and writing phonebook text

files with some straightforward Perl scripting to synchronize

your phone addressbook with another addressbook -- just read in

both books, decide what needs to be changed to make them synchro

nized, and write out a text file which will cause StarTalk to

make the changes. Then run st to write this text file to your

phone.

OPTIONS

A summary of options understood by startalk

-c clear out phonebook entries. USE WITH CARE!!

When used with the -w option, will clear out all

entries which are not in the file read in.

When used with the -n option, will clear out the

entries in the specified range.

-r Read entire phonebook from phone and dump to stdout

-w Read phonebook from stdin and write to phone

-t Write some test packets to phone, and read the re

sults

-T Set the default timeout (in seconds) for communica

tion with the phone.

NOTE: Default is 10; use -1 for no timeout.

-n {entrynum(s)}

Specify to perform the read, write, or clear on en

tries specified by n.

You can use commas to specify multiple entry num

bers, and can use the dash character to specify a range of num

bers.

For example, '-n 1-9,25-30,99'

-e Display empty phonebook entries

-p {phonetty}

Specify the tty/device to be used to talk to the

phone (default is /dev/pcsphone)

-i Specify init string sent to phone

NOTE: Default is 'AT S7=45 S0=0 L1 V1 X4 &c1 E1

Q0'.

-v Verbose mode (same as -d 1)

-d {debuglevel}

Set amount debug output:
1: Verbose
2: Downright noisey
3: Full packet dumps
4: Tediously report on the inner workings of

StarTalk.

-h Help (display this message)

FILE FORMAT

The files that StarTalk reads and writes are (loosely)

based on the LDIF files used by LDAP servers. They are basically

individual records seperated by blank lines. Each record con

tains name/value pairs seperated by a colon. For example:

position: 1
name: Emergency!
company: Police
phone-office: 911

represents an addressbook entry in position 1 (the first

speeddial entry), with a name of "Emergency!", a company of "Po

lice", and an office telephone number of 911. The values should

be exactly what should go to the phone -- both name and company

should be 12 characters or less, and the phone number shouldn't

contain any non-numeric characters. StarTalk tries to just ig

nore data that it thinks is invalid, printing a warning message

if it can.

Here's a description of all of the fields that StarTalk

recognizes in these files:

position

The position of this entry in the StarTac phone

book.

name The first line of a description of an item in the

phonebook. This is what is displayed while you are flipping

through your phonebook on your phone.

company

The second line of a description of an item in the

phonebook. Once you have selected an item on the phone, the dis

play flashes back and forth between name and company. Some peo

ple use the 'name' field for the last name, and this field for

the first name.

phone-*

phone number entries. These appear in the order

they are in your phonebook, and will be written in the order they

appear in the file. The word after the dash indicates which type

of phone number it is, and will affect the icon displayed for

that phone number. Valid words are 'office', 'home', 'pager',

and 'mobile'. There are two other types for fax machines and

other, but they are not supported right now becuase I don't use

them for anything.

Comment lines start with a '#'. The # character can *ON

LY* appear at the beginning of a line, or else it will not be

treated as a comment character.

If the only attribute for a phonebook entry is the posi

tion number, that is assumed to be a blank phonebook entry.

These entries will not be generated when reading the phonebook

unless specially requested, and when writing the phonebook, they

will remove the entry in the given position.

FILES

/dev/pcsphone

The default device for StarTalk. (Also See -p: in

OPTIONS, above). This is generally a symlink to the /dev/ttyS?

to which the StarTAC phone is connected.

SEE ALSO

You'll find additional documentation in

/usr/share/doc/startalk (on Debian GNU/Linux systems) Some in

teresting text files found there are:

PROTOCOL

a brief summary of the parts of the protocol that

have been figured out.

INTERCEPTTY

describes how the packets travelling to and from

the computer and a StarTac phone were observed.

AUTHOR

This manual page was written by Stephen M Moraco

<stephen@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be

used by others). It was crafted from original material written

by the startalk author Scott W Gifford <sgifford@tir.com>

Version 0.4 - 25 July 2002

STARTALK(1)