|
|
tags:
all,
apache,
apachecon,
apacheweek,
bryce,
cve,
fedora,
fudcon,
geocaching,
gps,
ha,
jabber,
metrics,
microsoft,
nashville,
north carolina,
oscon,
red hat summit,
security,
trips
|
|
|
mark :: blog :: bluetooth
I've just realised that I never finish anything that I do in my spare time. I tend to keep getting distracted by new and exciting projects so everything sits about 80% complete:
-
Home automation via bluetooth: I wrote a jabber bot which interfaced with my Ericsson phone and added an accessories menu letting me do things like set the heating, lighting, and so on. But it doesn't auto detect the phone coming into and out of the house, or pass on SMS messages, or do anything cunning with images.
-
Put the TiVo in another room:
I built a test circuit to pass composite video over CAT5 which works really well - the idea is use it to distribute RGB from the TiVo (by having 4 such circuits) which means I can bung it out of the way.
-
Java fun: I just bought a T610 phone and started playing with Java on it so I can do cunning things like view the cameras outside my house remotely from anywhere.
-
GTK: A jabber bot for the home automation system that pops up little animated transparant pictures of the people that call the house. It kind of works, but doing animation and changing the mask causes flickers.
Spare time over the last few weeks has been a bit limited what with the OpenSSH and Sendmail issues, and I guess I need to finish off my talk for ApacheCon.
A couple of months ago I was playing with bluetooth - It actually was pretty easy to add a new accessory menu and a perl state engine to allow me to do cool things like dim the lights and get the temperatures and send short messages to the tv via tivo. I kind of lost interest in it and so whilst it works perfectly it doesn't detect you arriving or leaving with the phone, and leaving bluetooth on all the time tends to drain the battery. A few folks asked me how I got bluetooth working with Red Hat Linux 9 (the answer is to cheat and use the bluez packages out of rawhide)
Our new bathroom finally got installed and I couldn't resist adding in extra cables in the new ducts between rooms - so now behind a panel in the bathroom we have various cables and power - quite fancy doing some network streamed audio in there and putting some marine speakers in the ceiling, low quality but the noise of the whirlpool and extractor fan will drown out the imperfections anyway.
This month I decided to play with bluetooth for fun. I bought one of the MCI class-1 USB bluetooth dongles and spent a little time getting the bluetooth utilities supplied with Red Hat Linux 9 working. It certainly has potential, using AT commands I can remotely create menus on my phone, capture key presses, capture and send sms, monitor call progress and much more.
So the plan is that when I enter the house I'll get a new menu on my phone letting me control the lights and stuff, with incoming calls and SMS displayed on the tv/mp3 player and so on. I couldn't find anyone who has interfaced a jabber client to a t68i so I'll have to write that bit first. The other problem is that the bluetooth stuff works fine when it works, but take the phone out of range and nothing notices - so it'll need a bit more effort to get it reliably detecting phones coming into and out of range.... anyway it'll be a fun month.
|
|
