Posts Tagged ‘n95’

Nokia Code Camp São Paulo

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Last Friday (Oct 25) I’ve attended to the Forum Nokia Code Camp here in São Paulo. I must admit that the main motivation to go was that the place was very near my house :-P

After finding out that rbp, lhonda and Luiz Irber (friends from our local Python User Group) were attending too I thought that it’d be a nice event. At least we could talk about GruPy-SP plans…

Anyway, I went to the hotel and after watching the three presentations (speaking about Nokia Serie60, Python and mobile development) the fun really started. 4 hours to develop the coolest mobile application in the world :-P

The prize was two E71 (the “new” Nokia Smartphone) for the “winner” application, so we decided to code in pairs. Me and rbp, after talking about our ideas, decided to write a musical instrument using the N95 accelerometer.

The first two hours of “development” actually we spent trying to find a proper way to transfer files to our cellphones (the S60 SDK is Windows only…). Then, with the “bluetooth easiest method” for transferring the app working, we started trying to find out how to interpret the accelerometer data. It worked as expected. Then we needed to play a sound (as it was a musical instrument). Easy, Python for S60 is very intuitive, the API is very High Level. Looking to the reference guide there was something like:

from audio import Sound
Sound.open(“file.mp3″).play()

Just as I expected… except that there wasn’t any sound coming from the freakin’ phone’s speaker. There was forty minutes left to the end of the competition and all we had was a soundless musical instrument, not very useful.

Ok, plan B. I started looking to some old code in my N95 and found a bluetooth webcam prototype. Rbp had an idea of making the webcam “crash” with a movement (using the accelerometer). And then we made it.

It’s a funny application and, as I said to rbp, as programmers we are great comedians. We presented the webcam in the stage and people seemed to like us (the app or the comedians? I really don’t know :-) )

Well, me and rbp won a Nokia E71 (each), it’s a very nice (and THIN) smartphone, I don’t like phones with qwerty keyboards, but this one is really cool (thin, small and almost comfortable to type).

10/27/2008

Thanks Forum Nokia! :-)

Treasure Hunting + GPS = Geocaching

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

Last Thursday, July 7th 8th (thanks Rodrigo), I was looking for some new apps that uses the GPS feature of my Nokia N95 phone and found something more interesting than a software, a treasure hunting game played by lots of people using GPS devices around the world!

The game is called Geocaching and exists since 2000 when David Ulmer decided to hide a “treasure” and made public it’s exact coordinates in an internet forum for GPS users. After three days someone found the treasure and then another one and the Geocaching was created :)

Basically you choose a “cache” (there are many sites with lists of caches around the world, the biggest one is www.geocaching.com), set up you GPS and start the hunt!

Well, as July 9th is holiday here in São Paulo I decided to search for a cache. Me and three friends (Thiago, Ricardo and Pessoal :P ) went to Serra da Cantareira to find the Pedra Grande cache :-)

After some walk (approximately 3.5 km) we were at an altitude of 1010m, what a view from São Paulo!

The cache was well hidden and we took some minutes to find it. The Geocaching rules are simple, if you find the cache you should take a gift from it and leave another for the next geocacher. You also should sign the logbook (if any) :)

We took a plastic dinosaur and an euro coin and left a Firefox tattoo (free software for geocachers, yeah!), a São Paulo train ticker, a public phone card and a card from Ricardo’s music group.

After finding the cache you should also make an entry in the site (geocaching.com for example) talking about you experience.

It was great and a really different activity. I will try to find more caches next weekends!

If you have a GPS unit, go find some caches!