Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Its that time again

Ok its been a while since i've been blogging so here's a big update. So theres roughly bout 5 weeks left to get the project done and i've set myself four main goals. First is to use the Gumstixs bluetooth to keep track of interactions with people based in their phone id and also locations in the form of static bluetooth nodes, more on this later! Next will be to do something clever with a built in screen, need to give this more thought on what exactly it will do which i'll decide once the bluetooth is setup. Also I need to go back to the cues and the website and fix them up with the new data and stuff, maybe add some frills to it if theres time. Last thing is getting the report finished :-)

I've been working on the bluetooth component for the last few days and ran into a few problems. First of all using python it should be quite simple to take in bluetooth ID'd as variables then trnsmit them the same way as the tag reads to the server. Problem is the current
gumstix configuration or filesystem does'nt have certain components i need, which are needed to use bluetooth API in python. After fighting with my laptop a little i have buildroot installed which i'll use to make a new filesystem with all the things i need and send it to the Gumstix. I really didnt want to dabble with buildroot but its actually not so scary now that i've gotten a chance to play with it. I'll get a second gumstix off Lorcan tomorrow so i can do this without making a mess of the Gumstix i already have. Hopefully it will all work well, only problem I can see is setting up the existing code for reading tag data on the new Gumstix so that it still works ok. Wish me luck!

1 comment:

Lorcan Coyle said...

One comment - I'm going to expect to see drafts every week-and-a-half from now on... you'll be graded on the description of what you do as much as what you do itself...
Gluck with the buildroot stuff, talk tomorrow :-)