startalk - read/write phonebook from/to Motorola StarTAC phone

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

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 aspires 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 completely blow away the settings and phonebook in your phone, although 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 synchronized, 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.

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 results

-T

Set the default timeout (in seconds) for communication with the phone.

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

-n {entrynum(s)}

Specify to perform the read, write, or clear on entries specified by n.

You can use commas to specify multiple entry numbers, and can use the dash character to specify a range of numbers.

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)

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 contains 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 "Police", 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 ignore 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 phonebook.

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 display flashes back and forth between name and company. Some people 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 *ONLY* 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 position 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.

/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.

You'll find additional documentation in /usr/share/doc/startalk (on Debian GNU/Linux systems) Some interesting 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.

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>