Sunday, July 22, 2007

AT&T wireless Motorola RAZR V3xx import contact list

Of the several million people who have purchased this phone, I may have been one of the few that wanted to import a Comma Separated Value (CSV) contact list into my Motorola RAZR V3xx cellular phone? Before handing over my Blackberry Pearl to my former company I had exported my contacts for importing once I got another mobile phone. A practical solution, right? After all who wants to re-enter 75 contacts through a mobile phone's interface?

This address book import turned out to be a little more challenging than it should have been. First off, Motorola provides an application to do all variety of communication to ones phone, for a price ($40). I've already paid for the phone and this didn't seem practical/economical for a single use.

Not my solutions
Hence I wandered the internet in search of an open-source solution. After stumbling across KMobilePhoneTools (linux), P2KTools (Windows), and P2K Commander (Windows). I found that I had spent a number of hours discovering the following tidbits:

  • Put your Motorola RAZR V3XX Phone into DATA Mode while talking over USB for KMobilePhoneTools. Main Menu - > Settings -> Connection -> USB settings -> Default connection
  • Get the driver download (single install) from developer.motorola.com (you'll need to register) rather than attempt all the varieties of drivers provided on the Motorola Modding sites. They worked immediately rather than sitting around and tweaking like I ended up with the other way. This is for P2KTools and P2K Commander (Windows).
  • Neither of these three tools provided an easy way to upload my contacts. Maybe it is there and I missed it, but I looked around and these tools were developed for a different purposes.
The solution? Use the Mac and the built in OS X Tiger's iSync.

Sadly I didn't try this right away with my Mac book Pro (OS X): use iSync. Unfortunately the connection to the Motorola RAZR V3xx phone isn't built in yet, but there is a forum that appears to develop the plugins for the phones rather rapidly. www.clockskew.com the link to the RAZR V3xx plugin: http://www.clockskew.com/blog/2006/12/18/isync-and-a-motorola-razr-v3xx/

Once I installed this plugin for iSync, I could sync the phone's contact list with the built in address book for the MAC. This address book of course has an import functionality. I imported my CSV and hit sync and within 20 minutes from start to finish I had my old contacts imported. However, I will not get back the minutes I spent trying to attempt this on Linux/Windows :(.

Just hoping to save you time...

Happy iSyncing.

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wx200d Text File Headers - Tab separated value (TSV)

To re-iterate some other posts, I use the Oregon Scientific WMR-968 weather station with the wx200d version 1.3 ( Sourceforge link ). One of the nice side-effects of the wx200d daemon is that it collects and stores the data in a text format at /usr/local/share/wx200d/. This is TAB separated format (TSV).

I didn't find a succinct definition of this TAB separated format file when searching for it, so here is with one line of data for context my extrapolation of it from the source file tab.c:

Time--TAB--Indoor Temperature--TAB--Outdoor Temperature--TAB--Indoor Humidity--TAB--Outdoor Humidity--TAB--Dew Point Indoor--TAB--Dew Point Outdoor--TAB--Barametric Pressure Indoor--TAB--Barametric Pressure Outdoor--TAB--Wind Gust Direction--TAB--Wind Gust Speed--TAB--Wind Direction--TAB--Wind Speed--TAB--Wind Chill--TAB--Rain Rate--TAB--Rain Total
0.6564--TAB--24.5--TAB--18.6--TAB--63--TAB--98--TAB--18--TAB--19--TAB--1011--TAB--1011--TAB--0--TAB--2.4--TAB--0--TAB--1.2--TAB--18--TAB--0--TAB--991

Our if you prefer to read this in comma separated format:
Time,Indoor Temperature,Outdoor Temperature,Indoor Humidity,Outdoor Humidity,Dew Point Indoor,Dew Point Outdoor,Barometric Pressure Indoor,Barometric Pressure Outdoor,Wind Gust Direction,Wind Gust Speed,Wind Direction,Wind Speed,Wind Chill,Rain Rate,Rain Total

Happy parsing.

Note:The units are in this file are metric.

Keywords: wx200d text file headers, wx200d log file headers, wx200d tab separated value file, wx200d comma separated value file, wx200d TSV, wx200d CSV.