Posts tagged ‘mobile’

Arduino ambient dashboard

Yesterday I finally got the Arduino, I ordered from Segor Electronics. Which by the way had a good service and packed it securely.

I had a plan to create a Ambient dashboard, that is to have some analog meters that would convey some digital information. In an non obtrusive way, i think it has a very fine name, peripheral awareness.

I found it easy to code the arduino and to work with, so far that is. Using ubuntu I for some peculiar reason had to uninstall braille support, as it automatically recognizes it a braille device.

In order to communicate with the arduino it uses a usb serial connection, that is its connected to the usb port, but it behaves like a serialport. The simple way to send data to the arduino is setting up stty and then you can do stuff from bash like echo “data” >/dev/ttyUSB0 and voila it receives the data.

dashboard1 dashboard2

Here is the prototype setup in all is lousy light condition for mobile cam glory.

There are 5 different meters and they all use PWM, without any capicitors or filters, and it just works, most of the time. Its coded so that when its send a string like 23#34#23#34#34 terminated by a newline, it adjust the displays to the values.(0-254).

Now the next part is to make some kind of script to read relevant information and pass it along to the dashboard, since i use linux some information is available trough acpi as virtual files. But the hunt for easy accessible and relevant data has started, i would really like to display bandwidth usage but so far i haven’t had any luck figuring out where it resides.

xonix mobile edition

Having toyed around with J2ME for the freeVibes, I got a bit hooked on coding for the mobile phone.

So I started to recreate the classic oldskool game Xonix, it’s a game I really like. So simple and addictive. It’s not the first time I’m coding it, I have made it as an applet about a year ago (Xonix applet). As well as being a fun game to play I find it a fun game to code too. Though I have had my share of frustrations. The basic functionality is a fillalgorithm, that has to fill an area on both sides of the line / trail you make with the ‘pilot’. This has to be fast and efficient – nobody likes a game where you have to wait for updates.

xonix screenshot

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FreeVibes

Finally the summer-holiday arrived, now its time to do some fun coding.

I bought myself a new mobile, a Nokia 6300, it’s got all the bells and whistles. Hmm well at least those I could afford. I choose this mobile because it has : Java, mp3 -player, bluetooth and memorycard.

I must admit that i might be a bit of a nerd, so I just had to code something for it. And after “hello world” I found a small and some would say useless application to code.

FreeVibes

I must say I got inspired by vibelet and the article in wired ( Hold the Phone, It’s a Sex Toy ). As the title suggest, its well vibrating. I think that vibelet – though i haven’t seen their program, must be making quite an profit. Because getting a java-enabled phone to vibrate constantly, is quite easy.

So now its Time for FreeVibes, a free software version.

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