zedstar dot org

Here is a picture of the hardware I will use for logging Bluetooth data.

thumbtribes beagleboard, Bluetooth

Bluedog is the name I am going to give to my Bluetooth traffic/stats project I aim to start soon. I have the hardware and software setup with my beagleboard. Ideally I want to setup a few of these at the University where I work and start logging some data in similar nature to http://www.bluetoothtracking.org/

I will post some pics of my hardware setup soon.

thumbtribes beagleboard, Bluetooth

I have built btlogger for the beagleboard. The ipk is available:

http://zedstar.org/beagle/btlogger_0.2.2-r0_armv7a.ipk

It requires the sqlite db some where on the device. Download:

http://projects.openmoko.org/frs/download.php/313/btlog.db

run btlogger -v to see what it does and reference the db file with -d /location/of/file

TODO:

• I am going to modify the program to log more stats.
• I should also add the database to the ipk so it installs automatically

thumbtribes beagleboard, Bluetooth, btlogger

Continuing my theme of projects that suffer from issues of critical mass I have began work on fakesat. I was looking for something to do with my beagleboard so decided that using it for this project would be fun. I have ordered a 100 meter Bluetooth dongle so will see how well that really works. I am interested in low cost community driven alternatives to GPS especially ones that work well in urban environments.

thumbtribes Bluetooth, gps, thumbtribes

I have updated btlogger to allow various command line options. The software should work on any Linux system with Bluetooth. There is a packaged version for Openmoko:

https://projects.openmoko.org/plugins/wiki/index.php?btlogger&id=136&type=g

and a binary for the Nokia Tablet:

http://zedstar.org/chinook/btlogger

An empty database can be dowloaded from here:

http://projects.openmoko.org/plugins/scmcvs/cvsweb.php/thumbtribes_project/misc/btlog.db?cvsroot=thumbtribes

thumbtribes Bluetooth, btlogger

As part of the thumbtribes project I began work on a simple bluetooth logger. It logs the MAC address, the broadcast name and the date to an sqlite database. The code is available at projects.openmoko.org

thumbtribes thumbtribes

I have been getting to grips with OpenEmbedded and in particular bitbake. When everything works it is a great system and makes building packages for different platforms a piece of cake. I created a bitbake recipe to automatically checkout from CVS and build an ipk.

This can be installed on the Neo as follows:

opkg install https://projects.openmoko.org/frs/download.php/167/thumbtribes_0.4-r0_armv4t.ipk

thumbtribes

I have now re-written the Thumbtribes daemon completely in C and moved the project over to OpenMokoProjects.

The server will remain in Chicken Scheme.

thumbtribes

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.

thumbtribes

Recently I have been climbing the steep learning curve of D-Bus. I will be experimenting with turning thumbtribes into a D-Bus daemon and possibly eliminating any web service. I intend to hack something together for Maemo first then Openmoko. D-Bus uses a binary protocol locally which I will extend to communicate with the outside world in an efficient manor using packedobjects.

I will be attending Over The Air and hope to do a bit of hacking there.

thumbtribes