Hello all,

When my n810 tab is out of range of any of the wireless networks it knows, I would like it to periodically dial up via my bluetooth phone connection for a few minutes, then disconnect.

I don't think this can be achieved with the settings available in the connect manager. I mean, what does Packet Data Idle mean to a device that periodically polls email and rss feeds? Could it mean idle as in not in use?

In any case, I want these to be different - I want it to scan and connect to wireless networks every 5 minutes, and connect to packet data every 30 perhaps.

So I am thinking that it may be possible to script this, with the help of cron. There is a cron.daily folder in /etc/ but doesn't appear to be actioned.

But cron aside - there are a number of ways to do something periodically. The real question is whether connectivity can be scripted - has anyone played with this?

I'll finally soon be getting a bluetooth cel phone & remembering this thread I was curious about the same functionality. Seeing that there were no replies yet, maybe a slight 'bump' will spure some ideas. Whattaya all say?

Yes, you could do this. One option would be with dbus-scripts; set the tablet to autoconnect every hour, and have a script disconnect 2 minutes after a connection, unless some criteria (indicating "real" use) was met. Alternatively, you could install cron, and set it up to log connection state, and then connect, on the hour, and then read the log and disconnect (if appropriate) 2 minutes past the hour.

I'm not sure why you'd want to, though; I just got a phone with data, so we'll see how it goes, but I expect leaving it connected will be fine. If not, I suspect connecting once an hour won't save enough...

It depends a bit on the phone I think. With my old phone I couldn't stay connected more than an hour or two before the phone's battery was down just because of the bluetooth connection, even with minimal data traffic.

With the one I have now (which is just a newer model) it doesn't affect its battery much if I leave it on for hours and hours. And as it's charged per megabyte I can leave it connected, if I just avoid applications that abuses the connection too much.

Well I don't know about the original poster, but for myself my provider's data plans suck ($20 for 2mb, yes that's mb NOT gb), so I want to minimize usage as much as possible. I'm planning on just using it for agps (I'm getting an N810), routing & occasionally checking my email via imap.

I've seen dbus being thrown around here on the forum but know little about it. I do know a fair bit of shell scripting though (it's part of my job), so I should be able to manage it. This explains the lower level stuff & I managed to find source intro to dbus on Freedesktop.org. But that still doesn't talk about scripting.

I see there are several posts that I could glean a few snippets from (for example here & here), but is there a central howto or listing of the dbus controls & their parameters? It looks like there's a lot that can done with dbus, I'd like to explore.

TX