Lenny von Dohlen in Electric Dreams..

My car sorta does that. It slowly turns on the cabin lights when I approach and lets me open the door. It knows if I'm standing by the trunk and lets me open it. Now I insanely want everything to work that way.

Likewise with my Audi. Just wish I didn't have to carry multiple fobs/keys/devices around. Why can't my Android be my car key?

Mm. What's the battery life hit for doing wifi scanning frequently enough that you don't end up sitting outside (or in the dark) for ages?

For now I manually activate the scanning service when I'm on my way home. Right before I get on my motorcycle I turn it on. Then in ~3-5 minutes I'm home and it opens.

In the future I'll make it automatically adapt its scanning rate based on circumstances. (e.g. if it's 4-7pm and it previously saw the google shuttle's wifi, then it lost it, it can assume I just got off the shuttle and am on my way home and start garage door scanning at a much faster rate.....)

Have you looked into using the Locale API for this?

The location APIs? The GPS won't work in my pocket (it barely works ever anyway) and I don't think the wifi/celltower triangulation database has my home APs in it. More reliable to do it by hand.

Could you use the accelerometer to tell when you're on your motorcycle? Or does that eat up too much battery?

Yeah, but not exactly sure what I'd look for... lots of acceleration and braking?

Do you keep the phone in your pocket during rides? I wonder if the accelerometer is sensitive enough to detect specific degrees of rotation...coupled with a little bit of jitter from the ride I think you could maybe pull it off.

what do you use to actually activate the switch that opens the garage?

X10 relay.

rad. It's sad that iPhone doesn't support running background apps... I guess Android will have a leg up here for these kinds of applications for awhile...

I think you should call it 'Magic Missile' and use it to attack the darkness.

+1. Definitely.

Hmm. I've got a house to myself, with no-one to chastise me for messing with the wiring; this sounds like the kind of stupid trick I want to try. Any ideas what to use to control the lights?

At the catflat I stuck all the sensor wires from an old alarm system into the parallel port pin holes on the fileserver. Never underestimate the power of the parallel port. Great for catching rouge lanlords.

Now, if you can X10 control each individual light fixture and use dimmer switches ... you could have lights brighten and dim as you get closer or further away from them ... all as you travel throughout the house.

It'd be creepy to watch from the curbside, of course.

It's the ability to hack together things like this that make me really excited to ditch my iPhone and get an Android device!

Yeah, it's wonderful not needing anybody's permission.

I can just put apps online and set my webserver's mimetype mappings appropriately and install applications directly from the phone's browser. No certifications or applications required.

And the SDK is lovely. Great command-line tools & great Eclipse tools. And near-perfect emulator. ("near" because I still need to use the real phone to test things like Wifi scanning, but installing to the app vs. the emulator is a trivial change, and they're both the same speed to deploy to.... couple seconds)

Are you using T-Mobile's phone for Android or are there other phones out there?

Yeah, using a production T-Mobile G1.

That's one of the most awesome things I've ever heard of.

Yes.

That sounds really fun :)

are all your AP's on the same frequency?

1) Your garage door on the internet is pretty much the coolest thing about your house (until you manage to pull off the helicopter + hot tub thing)

2) I'm voting for more development of the sad trombone app, with the internal gyro mod for full hand motion effect

This is very awesome, what you have done here. My idea would be to have speakers running through out my entire house and depending what rooms I am moving between the music/audio playing over the speakers follows me. It never plays in a room I am not and even fades from room to room so that I never hear any strange disturbances with speakers going on and off. Possibly than the phone can also be the volume control, or mute(fade to low lvl) the speakers when I receive a call or am in a specific room. That would be sweet!

-digitalmlewis

it is cool, but ask your self, do i need it?

Of course not. It's fucking cool, though.