Will O’Brien at Biobug.org has been doing some cellphone integration work. He recently picked up some Motorola c168i cellphones from eBay. It turns out there is a serial port that uses TTL communication with a standard head-phone jack as an interface. [Will] soldered up a connector and used a USB to FTDI cable to interface with the phone. To his surprise he was able to read off the stored text messages even though they were PIN protected in the phone’s operating system. The messages on these units were trivial but this is another example of the importance of clearing your data before discarding your devices.
What if you could point your cellphone’s camera at someone’s face, and then know that person’s name, schedule, profile, and latest tweets? That’s the promise of Recognizr, an Android app prototype using a 3D model to recognize facial features, find a match on its server, and then superimpose that person’s social networking preferences around his or her face.
Created by Swedish mobile software designers The Astonishing Tribe, it’s astonishing indeed. Problem is, unless everyone opts into this service, it won’t be particularly useful. However, if it were ubiquitous, imagine how easy it would be to act like you’re using your cellphone, but actually be finding out that person’s name standing in front of you — while you snoop around her Facebook profile.
Finally, Facebook stalking finds its way to meatspace! On a smaller scale, this could be useful at, say, a trade show or a party. Electronic nametags would be lots of fun, if everyone would submit to them.
Apple has not made it easy to let the iphone communicate with external devices. Basically, you need a jailbroken phone to do anything. This post covers the current state of serial communication on the iphone.
A succesful example of making an application that uses the serialport on the iphone is xGPS, which let you connect to an external GPS.
Now that the protocol for basic communication with the TI chronos ez430 has been worked out (see previous posts) I needed to work on something useful. So I set out to try and control my wireless light switch with the watch. Sadly the RF receiver supplied with the chronos does not use a protocol which is likely to ever be compatible with the arduino so this example requires a computer.
Data Logger for iPhone enables you to store and graph any data of your choosing along with a timestamp and geolocation. You might use Data Logger to store electricity meter readings, to create maps of pollution or temperature sensor readings around your neighbourhood, or animal sightings around the city. You can also set up custom data feeds, with user-defined min and max values, tags, description and units.
Viper Guard has called for urgent Government action to control rising oil prices and is warning of a new wave of fuel theft. The warning follows predictions that speculation in the oil market will soon see diesel prices back at last summer’s high of £1.25-£1.30 litre, when both trucks and fuel storage tanks in depots became high-value targets for organised crime.
But Viper Guard General Manager Debbie Jones said things could be worse this time round thanks to the recession.
“Hard times not only tempt people into crime but also put pressure on potential purchasers not too ask too many questions,” she said. “Obviously we would urge all operators to make sure they have adequate security measures in place this summer, but we want to see Government action too.
“The Government sowed the seeds of the problem itself when the Chancellor first put 2p on a litre to offset his 2.5% VAT cut last November and then went ahead with the further 2p increase in April. These increases need to be reversed urgently both to help hauliers through the recession and to head off the expected increase in fuel theft.”
She also urged the Government to control the activities of speculators in the City. “These gamblers are threatening the health of the entire road transport sector, with inevitable knock-on effects across the economy,” she said. “But after the Government bail-outs in the banking industry last year, many of the speculators are effectively state employees.
“The lesson of the credit crunch, surely, is that it’s enormously harmful to allow bankers to pursue their own narrow agenda at the expense of the wider public interest. Yet it seems the bankers have learnt nothing and are carrying on in the same old way. The Chancellor can and must rein them in before they do more damage.”
This is a classic example of a well done hack, simply for the sake of hacking. [Jorge] wanted to be able to chart his weight changes. His solution wasn’t to simply buy a scale that could be hooked to the computer. Those are available and aren’t really that expensive. He could have even used pencil and paper to chart it in a few seconds. Instead, [Jorge] started hacking. He took apart a digital scale he already had and installed his own circuit to display weight and write the values to a CSV. The CSV resides on a removable card which can then be put in his computer to chart the data in openoffice.
Heading south on the New Jersey Turnpike, Ford Motor Company engineer Jerry Engelman swings his 2010 Taurus into the left lane to pass a semi. The Taurus hesitates, slowing down, and then Engelman adjusts his heading. The car takes off. “Larry,” he calls to his colleague in the back seat, “write that down!”
Engelman is driving, but just barely. The Taurus has a radar-based adaptive cruise-control system that lets him set a top speed and then simply steer while the car adjusts its velocity according to traffic. He’s been weaving and changing lanes, doing between 45 and 70 mph—and hasn’t touched a pedal in an hour. Over the past few years, Ford engineers have driven 60,000 miles to test, tweak, and optimize this system, which also provides collision warning alerts. They’ve been focused on the future in a financially dismal present—analysts actually praised Ford for losing only $1.4 billion in the first quarter. “It’s a tough market,” says Derrick Kuzak, VP of global product development, noting that the Taurus is important for “reestablishing us in the large-sedan market.” That’s executive-speak for “This car really needs to sell.”
The 1-Wire HVAC monitoring system is for residential Geothermal HVAC systems. This project utilizes the so called 1-wire temperature sensor. A single board computer handles the brunt of the work including web accessible trend data. With access to the underling temperatures, the over all system performance may be gauged. Earlier this year we covered a HVAC web enabled monitor that adds an element of control. As the industry adopts modern control architectures, we hope to see more HVAC hacks around.
