A similar type of project using IBM Lenovo hardware and OpenBSD http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060803130207 Snip from article Chris Kuethe has written an application which, by taking advantage of some unique OpenBSD features, has allowed him to turn his laptop into a race car data logger. aps(4) is a driver that utilizes the OpenBSD sensors framework to retrieve and report various statistics provided by IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads. The important ones here were the X and Y acceleration features, which provide the same functionality found in expensive accelerometer devices. Since a typical consumer GPS will only update its data once per second, and a race car might be travelling in excess of 200 km/h, on its own, it is not capable of generating much meaningful performance data. It is even less fit to record information about turns and other sudden changes in position. Digital signal processing and sound editing fans might recognize a parallel problem: sampling frequencies too low to properly describe a signal (Nyquist/Shannon Sampling Theorem, anyone?). Since GPS receivers that can provide navigation solutions several times tend to be slightly expensive and less common than those that produce only one solution per second, and 'real' dataloggers are even more expensive, it occurred to Chris that he already had all the necessary hardware, as well as a framework for putting it to use for his task. -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2008 9:42 AM To: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: [tclug-list] Mobile computing I thought this was interesting: Man puts iPhone in model rocket. Uses accelerometers and GPS to track. Unfortunately, the iPhone can't log data beyond 3G (pun intended). http://www.mobileorchard.com/the-iphone-rocket/ Years ago, I worked on inertial accelerometers for aviation, and I can say that this appears slightly lower quality... But what's interesting is that many people will now be carrying iPhones and Androids, both of which allow for easy deployment of software. This is the first time that normal people have carried 'general purpose' computers with internet access. All sorts of wacky stuff is possible. Has anyone made apps for Android (linux, java) yet? J _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list