Greetings from Prague. The trip is going great - and don’t mind the 30Kr Pivo ($1.20USD 0.5L beers). I have limited internet access, so difficult to upload some of the great shots I’ve gotten.

While traveling, I can imagine an incredibly useful technology, where you could rent small handheld GPS receivers & maps that were pre-loaded with sites & tours of a city. As you wonder the city, interesting historical facts pop-up, and routes to sites, hotels, restaurants, etc. show up as well. The device would be small and inexpensive. Perhaps rentable from a central location and as you traveled to different cities, you jacked it into a booth and it uploaded new information. Then when you return the unit, your actual travel logs are downloaded and emailed to you or burned on a CD. Then you would have a time history track of your travels and sites. You could even make your own bookmarks & notes of locations.

I think this is what Schmap (Dynamic travel guides) is, though I haven’t gotten to try out my demo cd that recently came in the mail. However, this still requires a full computer to use.

Off to see a bone church & then to Budapest.

Last night I got to attend a talk given by Robin Chase, Founder and Former CEO of Zipcar. Her talk was titled “Sustainable Transportation and Accessibility Research & Transformation”, where she discussed how to decrease the impact of transportation on the environment and also using new transportation paradigms (such as shared car ownership) as a vehicle for bringing out mesh networks.

Mesh networks are simple: everything is a sensor and can connect to other sensors. She referred to it as “Ad Hoc Wireless networking”, but I think that confuses the issue, because then people start thinking it just means WiFi everywhere.

What it really means is that all of these sensors and network devices can talk to one another, gather, share, and use information. For example, if every car was a member of the mesh network, they would all share traffic information, road conditions, and driver destination, perhaps. Then your in-dash display would update real-time traffic ahead of you as each of these cars shared their data. Also, you may be able to get internet down the line as you all shared a common network system.

Other examples that have popped up in the past include finding potential mates/friends around you by a profile you broadcast, or tracking birds with RFID.

Of course, now that you have all this data, how do you share it? Robin says she envisions all of this being built on open-source technologies, to allow for “innovation” (aka ‘good hacking’). Open standards like GeoRSS could also be used to begin disseminating all of this data as it streams in and share it between devices. See the notes on Mikel’s XTech talk for more inspiration along those lines.

If the devices are cheap (< $100), open-design, and run on open-software, this is a great future. If, however, it is run by proprietary, expensive technology, and closed standards, then you’ll have a future where you get fast connections in your Ford car from other Ford cars, but no connection to all those BMW’s or Toyotas on the road.

For the past several months I’ve been playing with the Delorme Bluelogger GPS. It’s a very nice GPS receiver in its own right, but has the unique feature (for BT receivers) of including onboard logging. This is an great feature as it allows me to turn on the unit, toss it in my bag (somewhere on top, so it can still get a view of the sky) and forget about it. I don’t need to grab multiple devices, such as the receiver and a PDA or computer in order to receive and store my GPS waypoints.

This article will give a short overview of how to use the BlueLogger for a variety of applications. I use it primarily for geolocating photographs, but it’s also nice for any location-based activity.

The Bluelogger comes with the following:

• Bluelogger device
• Carrying case (with belt loop)
• Car charger
• Wall charger
• Charging stand (can work with either car or wall charger)
• Bluelogger Windows software

Connecting to GPS

To connect to the Bluelogger, you will need a bluetooth adapter. Many computers now come with bluetooth built-in or as an add-on option. If this isn’t the case, I would recommend the D-Link DBT-120. It’s probably the only D-Link product I can recommend, but I’ve had great luck with them, and never run into any device that it hasn’t worked with (and I have had problems with other BT adapters, especially on my Mac).

Once you have a bluetooth adapter, you will need to setup a connection to the device by pairing them. See your devices’/operating systems’ manuals on how to do this.

A very slick option is to run gpsd, which is a service-daemon running in the background that allows multiple connections to the single GPS device. Normally, only 1 software instance can connect at a time. With GPSd, you can “serve” your location. What would be really cool is to have GPSd be able to connect in with Geolocation by IP or Wifi as well as an actual GPS device to seamlessly switch between location technique.

GPSUtility is a nice, compact, graphical GPS application for Mac OS X. It can connect either directly to the GPS bluetooth port, or via gpsd. You can view location, satellite strengths, verbose NMEA output, and speed.

KisMac, while not a GPS-specific applicaiton, has excellent GPS support. KisMac is actually a wireless stumbler, which can also mark the latitude, longitude, and strength of detected networks and plot these on a map.

Storing & Viewing tracks

The Bluelogger software (currently Windows only) can export the tracks as GPL files. GPSBabel can convert these to a more useful format, such as GPX, which an XML format for GPS data.

Since using the bluelogger usually entails turning it on and off often, the entire track log will contain many separate trips. GPSBabel supports splitting up tracks based on a time separation. Each segment will be a self-contained track.

The following example will convert a GPL file to a GPX file, and make a individual track for any separation of 4 hours between points.

$ gpsbabel
  -i gpl -f Track_2005_11_23.gpl
  -x track,pack,split=4h,title="LOG # %c"
  -o gpx -F Track_2005_11_23.gpx

Displaying tracks

There are several options for displaying your tracks:

GPX Tracks

GPXLoader

• GPX Tracks HTML file

GPS and Nokia 770

ThoughtFix has a fairly comprehensive tutorial on setting up GPSDrive with a Bluetooth GPS receiver. They went with the i-Blue High Sensitivity Bluetooth GPS, which looks like a nice unit, but lacks logging.

Resources

• NMEA Protocol fields
• GPS Running Log -> GoogleMap on website
• Geocode Photos
• RoboGeo Windows photo-geocoding
• OziPhotoTool

Ruby is available for the Nokia 770. (via Maemo Application Catalog)

Of course, I haven’t quite figured out what to do with Ruby on the Nokia 770, but its just one of those “oh, cool” things that’s worth installing and marveling at how easy it is to get programming when you don’t have to worry about binaries, libraries, compiler options, et al.

After receiving “Spot”, my Roomba last Christmas, I have been really hankering to hack it. After digging around forums/mailing lists/google for awhile, nothing was yet available ready to use.

Several months ago, iRobot, the manufacturers of Roomba, released OSMO Hacking Module for interfacing with the Roomba’s onboard serial port. Since then, there have been some very cool projects that have cropped up; everything from a long serial tether, a bluetooth interface, a programmable plugin module, or a full on-board computer with WiFi access.

I think I’ll go for that latter. AutomationWiki: Roomba Entry

Resources

• Roomba Hacking projects wiki
• Make: adding a serial interface
• Make: adding a bluetooth interface
• Adding a serial tether and control software
• Adding a GumStick computer with WiFi access
• Mind Control adapter - program at the computer and then plug into Roomba (sold out until April 17, 2006)