as this is asked from time to tim, here is a sample and a class in C# (VS2005) that enables you to switch the green and orange keyboard shift plane of the keyboards on ITC CN3, CN3e and possibly other ruggedized ITC handheld devices.

You can control the keyboard shift state and you can subscribe to an event to get information about changes in the keyboard shift panel state. With the latter, you can create an application that is always aware of the active keyboard shift plane.

On the left image you see, that no shift plane is active. In the mid image, the Orange button was pressed. If you had pressed the orange key on the keypad, the Lock mode would be Locked. On the right image the green button was pressed.

As soon as a state change is detected (polling frequency is 200ms), the focus is moved to the right TextBox and the background color of the upper TextBox changes.

The code is written in C# and uses the native WIn32 APIs KernelIOControl, DeviceIOControl and CreateFile. You can either ask the current state of the shift plane and set it directly using the provided static class, or you can use the dynamic class object. The dynamic class fires an event, if the keypad shift panle status changes.

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ITC’s new device CN50 supports a G sensor by hardware. It delivers rotation, position, acceleration and magnetic data. But how can this help in commercial applications except for automated screen rotation? I dont know. The most G sensor enabled apps actually developed against HTC sensor are games. A bubble level application will not be that accurate with the form of the housing of the device. See a list of applications (mostly games) here.

I adopted the “sample Teeter-esque type application“  to the CN50 and the actual ITCsensor API I got. Did it to just play around with the API. I added a bearing line inside the moving ‘ball’ that always should point to magnetic north pole.

Let me know, if you are interested in my source code and I will post this useless app here.

Added source code to download. Please be aware of the code is written for ITC CN50.

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