Project Phone (#projectphone)

Like many people i have several old phones stashed away in drawers doing nothing, so here's my way of giving them a new lease of life...

This project is designed to be permanently installed in the vehicle.
The following was achieved by using Mortscript to control small utilities from throttlelauncher that reads text messages and writes the contents to the registry, and utilities from vijay555 that can send messages, dial numbers etc, plus some other stuff like the FTP app and battclock to hide the tray etc.
By using a certain type of HTC extUSB breakout connector which doesn't short out the headset sense wire unless a headset is actually present, i can turn the display on and off by shorting the wire to ground and monitoring the headset registry entry, and i interrupt the power if the car alarm is activated, by timing how long it's off for (about 18-22 seconds), it can determine if it's a genuine alarm or the car battery has been disconnected.
The GPS receiver output is 'read' by Mortscript, and by using certain commands the latitude, longitude, altitude and speed can be extracted from the data with about a three second update frequency, the speed seems to be an average from the last few seconds.

The phone itself is a HTC Touch Diamond with a ultra lite WM 6.1 ROM installed, and a giffgaff SIM with the £7.50/month 250 Minutes, 250 MB's data and unlimited texts goodybag. That's a lot cheaper than any other live tracking option out there!!!

On-screen information!

It can display how long you've been stationary...

Displays your speed when you're not...

If you're travelling at a constant speed, ie, on the motorway it goes into cruise mode where it monitors your speed to help you stay at that speed...

It tells you to speed up (with rising scale sound effect)...

...or tells you to slow down (with falling scale sound effect) if you slowly drift over the speed boundaries, But if your speed drops or rises sharply (beyond the 2nd boundary) then it resets!

Messaging!

Also i have full control of messaging (read and send), so it messages me if there's a problem, like the car alarm is activated, or the car is towed...

I can query the device statistics...

...and it's location, like the time i lost it in a large open air car park at night, just copy/paste the co-ordinates into google maps and you have its exact location... Notice how it recognizes it's at home!

And i can access the file system remotely via FTP, it tells you the IP address so you know where to point your FTP client...

And while all of the above is happening it's recording it's GPS location to a log file once every minute 24 hours a day, so i can prove where the car was at any given time, these logs are uploaded to my home FTP server daily or on request over 3G.
Also all incoming and outgoing messages, and system information are recorded in other log files.

And it's latest addition is it's own twitter account, which it can control all by itself via SMS, including posting tweets using variables like time since certain events, speed, time of day, month, incoming messages/tweets (But not current location obviously) and some random tweets, and also replying to tweets and DM's!

The Ford Fiesta on Twitter

Please note this project is currently suspended due to an unexpected hardware failure and before that excessive current draw when the device is in standby (300mA was the lowest i could get)!
I was going to investigate using my Omnia 2 and a small lead acid battery, or maybe this PDA...

Gallery

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