Metawatch Hacking: First Prototypes

What’s a MetaWatch ?

Well, it’s a watch obviously, kind of a smart watch but not actually that smart, basically it’s a remote display for other devices to write to, connections are made via Bluetooth using SPP (a serial port protocol).

Still, leaving it rather dumb was a smart move, so I don’t really know what to call it, it’s pretty cool that’s for sure

Anyhow, after few delays, my MetaWatch (which I had originally pre-ordered back in May) finally shipped and I had almost a week now to play with it, here’s what I came up with so far.

Living in the future

With GadgetConnect, Reemote for Airfoil and Reemote for Boxee on my iDevices, or things like tablets, smartphones and htpcs in general life already feels a little like living in the future to me, and I love it ! But I’m not really satisfied yet.

Today I finally managed to fix my broken openAMI system and again it felt like moving one step closer to living in the future, not really the hyped smarthome future with a talking avatar you know from tv, but rather a future where your smartphone is the gateway to pretty much anything, not only the outside world but also your home.

I think this is the way to go, it’s possible right now and doesn’t have to cost a fortune see for yourself.

openAMI – a short Preview

This short Demo is showing a jQTouch-based WebApp that enables a user to control a SmartHome environment powered by the openAMI System.

The WebApp shown is generated and served entirley by an openAMI enabled Asus wl500gpV2 running a openWRT linux with 2.4 Kernel and Python2.5.

Take a look!

Check us out at CoogleCode: http://code.google.com/p/openami/

avrBridge: Current status and future plans

Some words about my work on the avrBridge,

I haven’t had much time to continue development lately but I hope to have some free time during the next weeks.

Next thing I intend to do is to build a wireless avrBridge based on a cheap rf-transceiver unit (RMF12 available from pollin -germany).

Because my motivation for this is to build a smart-home the plan is to have a central ambient intelligence (AmI), to act like sort of a base station for the wireless avrBridges, so the AmI can use them to either learn about the real world or also even interact with it.

Project Introduction: avrBridge – a simple realworld to software -interface

What it is.

the avrBridge started off as a learning project to get a better understanding of how to implement usb communication, i took a microcontroller running obdev’s software-only usb implementation, and played with it for quite a while.
Since i didn’t really have any practical usb application back then, i figured it would be nice to be able to run the microcontroller’s code on the host side instead on the device itself, so i could use the usb device to quickly add “realworld” interaction, like sensors, buttons, leds or various other i/os to any kind of software or application.