So I recently bought myself one of A. R. Taylor's USB cables and a silicone USB keyboard. I fire up sterm and it works a treat (so far as the weird keyboard allows, anyway), but there's a serious problem - the only characters shift works for plain letters. While sterm indicates my shift key is depressed, pushing semicolon (US English keyboard here) produces a semicolon, not a colon; pushing the single quote key produces a single quote. I haven't figured out a way to get a colon, double quote, question or exclamation mark or any of the other bits of punctuation you get from shift using my keyboard in sterm.

Has anyone else run into this or do you have any ideas? Lack of a colon is a pretty serious problem in vi.

Nope, and forget trying to run anything much on the command line either, some of the characters needed to properly pass a variable are missing.

It is in reality GPH's fault, they stifled USB until they could rip off people for a Bob, and this resulted in the developers not having hardware to dev on for more than a year.

(Basically USB can be added for under $2 to the EXT, and so selling "Devboards" for $50 + the power supply is just unconscionable.)

You do know the board has more than just USB sockets?

Someone from the Dutch GP2x forums has managed to fix this, and I think he has been trying to contact the author to see if he could get his patch in the next official build..

http://www.gpark.nl/forum/index.php/topic,921.0.html\
Get the .gz in the second post, and ungzip that over the original 0.6.0 build of STerm.

Hope that works.

That archive appears to be broken (gives me a "not in gzip format"), but I'll use the diffs and see what happens. Thanks for the tip.

Yes, (Does my sig no longer have my $5 Serial cable DIY from the wiki?!?! I did it nearly 2 years ago, long before a BoB was even heard of) but since Bricking and Jtag have become more rare, and anyone programming/debugging through the interface is likely to either have or build a Macriagor wiggler or a real Jtag cable, it is immaterial.

What you were paying for was a powered Jtag (Instead of the standard 20-pin header), a built-in USB hub (Smaller, AND cheaper WITH PSU at any local store, usually $10), and a fair joke of a connection that added another EXT port to the already flimsy EXT design.

While I am not arguing that the Dev BoB has its place (Maybe you need Serial and Jtag), it came too late and at too great a price, those willing or able to code did so without the knowledge of or access to a USB port.

USB support is/was spotty to nil. Only the superb Mouse support of X is/was available, Qtopia keyboard support is hideous, strings of garbage characters accompany every keystroke.

I was seriously looking forward to a portable Computer with a real shell, sterm is not yet at that point.