thumbtribes distance daemon
Intro:
thumbtribes has now morphed into a D-Bus daemon. More details will appear at thumbtribes.mobi. In short, thumbtribes is a low-bandwith distance calculation daemon. A typical use case would be to obtain the distance of a specific user and trigger a alert on the phone when they are within a certain distance. The daemon has been designed to continually run and attempts to minimize the amount of traffic by using encoding techniques based on ASN.1 Packed Encoding Rules.
Features:
- Simple interface
- Self clocking location updates
- No account sign-up or web access needed
- Low bandwidth protocol optimised for phone connections
- Runs on low end hardware such as the Neo 1973
Todo:
I need to work on some documentation for the interface and also do some testing. I have briefly tested on my desktop, Openmoko phone and Nokia tablet. I need to create some binary packages.
The binary built does not have any special dependencies. It is large as it includes the Chicken Scheme runtime etc (make sure you strip the binary). This eliminates the requirement for a separate library and makes it more straight forward to distribute. The benefit of having Chicken as a shared library would come into play if there are other applications using it at the same time. This is unlikely on my phone for example. Looking at memory usage on my phone, thumbtribes appeared to only clockup about 1.6% of memory. If the size of the binary is an issue I may look at separate libraries and/or re-writing the Scheme parts in C.
What next:
I intend to start work on some other D-Bus utilities and clients to make use of this daemon.