Well my first prototype hasn't been truly wearable; It was built on a laptop with dismal battery life, so basically needed to be plugged in at a wall to be used, and also didn't have a wireless network capability yet, but it did show proof of concept for a few features I have setup. 1.) Monitor my fishtank at home via streaming video over the internet from a webcam. 2.) Turn on and off the fishtank lights using an x10 appliance module to switch power to the fluorescent tank light on and off. Can do the same with the air pumps powering the cheezy floating diver accessory. 3.) Turn on the ceiling lights and fans in my apartment. View this over the 'net on a webcam too. 4.) Use an x10 module to set my thermostat ahead or back. 5.) Instant Messenger :) 6.) Monitor home security via x10 hawkeye motion sensors placed at all the entry points to the apartment. 7.) Play mp3's (the truly important part, for me :) As you can see, a LOT of my wearable functionality comes from x10 modules (available at www.x10.com, amongst others). Some more functionality I hope to add in the coming week/months as some new hardware arrivesincludes pda-like scheduling and remembrance features, external sensors for various environmental conditions, an IR output from a server in my apartment to allow controlling the entertainment center, always-on notification of new emails at any of 400 different accounts, monitoring of my home answering machine (this is going to be the cheesiest hack ever, involving yanking the wires connected to the little blinking light on the front of the machine). Next steps for farther down the line is to have location-aware applications, either via GPS or transmitters located at the appropriate locations. When I get close to my apartment in the evening, I want things automated so my thermostat will kick down a few degress to give me that extra bit of cool I like after a 50 mile drive home from work. I want it to turn on my lights and change the tv to whichever station is appropriate. (tuesday night? make sure Buffy is ready to go when I walk in the door!) Does all this sound impossible? It's not. It takes some work to put all together, but all the technology to do all these things is readily available and remarkably cheap. I'm still waiting anxiously for my new hardware to come in; I want to beat Doug to be the first to be able to feed my fish on command via remote commands over the 'net. So close, yet so far... -James On Wed, 2 May 2001, Petr Hires wrote: > What are you doing on wearable-computers? > > Programming new systems? Programs, games??? Or playing Quake :-))) Chatting... > > My wife says: OK! You want wearable computer? Why not, but what you do with this? > > Petr Hi-res > James Davidheiser Drexel University Department of Physics "Tell a man that there are 400 billion stars and he'll believe you" "Say a bench has wet paint and he has to touch it" -- Subscription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org please, Please, *PLEASE* don't subscribe through a forward/false domain
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