Codebits VI and the project PNS
Another Codebits happened!
Another year full of good things, good talks, good projects, good gifts .....
This year brought me André Gil, Claudia Frutuoso and Gonçalo Basto to make a funny project.
The project is called PNS - Personal Notification System.
The concept is simple, a device that can be added to any garment or accessory that allows a communication bridge between the user and your mobile phone via bluetooth.
This device allows you to interact with your phone without removing it from your pocket, which can be helpful during our jogging session, a meeting, while driving or even in a situation where expose our phone in public is not our intention.
Thus we can set patterns for RGB LEDs that allow us to identify what we are receiving in our mobile phone: for example a twit, a post on facebook directed at us, a SMS, a call from a certain person. We can also program each button to perform an action on your phone. We can reject or forward a call, send a message back to whoever called us to say that we can't currently talk, send a twitt or foursquare post with our geographical location, we can even program a button to check the status of the weather on the internet and show a sequence of LEDs as the weather will be.
The boundary between the things we can do with this device and a smartphone is your imagination.
This device can be used by both advanced or basic users, there is a page like a user community where you could add your code snippets where you can share to the others or download them to your phone and then assign them to our device .
To carry out this project we used a android phone, an Arduino Uno and a bluetooth module as well as a webapp created using Ink.
Obviously a device with these features has to be small and easy to customize and the final version of our prototype was anything but small although functional!
