mobile
Sydewynder
Sydewynder is an open-source SMS receiver and sender application written in Python for the Nokia S60 phones. It can automate the responses of messages and can be used as a mobile application server in areas where setting up a traditional server may be difficult or illegal. It also is very useful for prototyping mobile applications, such as games, without the burden of expensive hosting. As such, it works very well in educational settings. It even includes an emulator for developing scripts off of the phones.
The Sydewynder Logo
Sydewynder requires the latest version of Python for the S60 (>= 1.4.0). If you are using earlier version of PyS60, please update your phone with the latest software.
To install Sydewynder, copy the contents inside the "sydewynder-x.x" directory into the E:\Python\ directory on your S60 phone (this should be the memory card). Sydewynder comes with "Pig Latin", "Ask Tom Cruise", and "We Feel Fine" as example scripts, as well as arcade.py, which will run all of them from a single server instance. Feel free to look at how the files are constructed and modify them for your own purposes. Pay special attention to the comments, as they will make developing new apps for Sydewynder much easier.
Scripts developed off-phone can be run like any other Python script if the syde_emu.py module is in the same directory. When you run your script from the command line, a crude emulator will appear and guide you through a typical interaction between cell phone users and the Sydewynder app you have created.
This project was featured on the front page of the CDT department website.
It was also part of Paul Notzold's Ask Tom piece, which was on display at the Chelsea Art Museum for the Parsons 10 Years Running show. Participants were asked to text a question to a number and received back a random (or is it?!) quote from a famous celebrity whose name rhymes with Bomb Booze. The phone "server" running Sydewynder stayed up for about two weeks straight without much of a problem.
If you're using Sydewynder, be sure to drop a comment on the Sourceforge forum and let us know what you've done with it. And be sure to post there if you need help or run into any bugs.
Sydewynder is copyright 2007 Mike Edwards and is licensed to you under the GPL version 2.0. "Ask Tom" was developed with Paul Notzold. "We Feel Fine" uses the amazing wefeelfine.org API to work its magic.
CC Lecture Presentation and Sydewynder 0.1.1
I presented an overview of the Sydewynder application to Sven Travis's Creativity and Computation lecture class today. I've attached the PowerPoint and PDF below (and an OpenDocument presentation can be posted, if anybody wants that).
Also, I've released Sydewynder 0.1.1, which has the option to take screenshots of the apps as they run (useful for putting together the presentation) and a new "Round Robin" sample app that shows how to send a single SMS messages to multiple recipients and multiple messages to several recipient lists.
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Sydewynder 0.1 Is Loose!
The latest version of Sydewynder, our mobile application server for the S60, has been released! With Sydewynder, any S60 phone, like the Nokia N80, can become an automated SMS gateway. You can grab version 0.1 off of the SourceForge site.
This new version features:
- scripts can now connect to WiFi, making Internet-enabled responses possible!
- emulator for off-phone development. Now students don't need to have a phone to develop mobile apps for it
- two tabbed pane view for logging and status indicators
- start up screen -- very pretty!
- a much better UI
- a new example application using WiFi - "We Feel Fine". It taps into the wefeelfine.org API
And these bugs were fixed:
- recipients in the address book could not receive text message responses
- unicode text problems
Much thanks for Sven, Colleen, Chuck, Eric, Albert, and Chloe for their support, ideas, and code.
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OpenMoko
A new cell phone? Ho-hum. A new cell phone running on free software? It's been done, but you've got my attention. A new cell phone running on free software, using completely open hardware? And they'll give you the tools to bust it open and make it easy to solder stuff onto its I2C port? RAWK!
Kinda makes you wonder... what would YOU hook up to a cell phone, if you could? Gets me wondering about some of the tech I saw in Malawi, particularly in the health sector.
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N95 Blogging
I'm blogging this from a cafe here in jc. This N95 has proved to be a true geek swiss-army knife. Just needs an RSS reader, and I'd be all set!
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Preaching About Sydewynder
I had a great time at the Mobilized conference this past weekend. I taught a brief workshop on Sydewynder to the folks there, and I got a pretty good response. Here's a Flickr photo from the event:
Thanks again to Paul Notzold for sharing his computer and running
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Ten Years Running D Minus One
I'm trying to nail down everything for the big Ten Years Running show that our department is putting on at the Chelsea Art Museum.
So far, the piece I'm working on with Paul Notzold is working pretty well. You send a message to a phone running Sydewynder, and it kicks back a random message from a set of Tom Cruise quotes. I also tried to get it to hook up to twitter, but that didn't work. Lame.
Spy is trickier. We still need to get networking going for that.
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Omigod, omigod, omigod!
I don't know how I missed this:
Holy crap! This could change everything, especially for us. We're neck deep in processing coders, and this opens up huge avenues for development.
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Stunt Phone
Stunt Phone! Just a quick gallery I put together to show some of the possibilities for what a fearless phone can do. Since the mobile-hone cameras are so small, tough, and wireless, they can take stills and movies from interesting and dangerous places. Kind of like Jackass for cell-phone dorks.
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Copyright Mike Edwards 2006-2009. All content available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license, unless otherwise noted.
