William Judd's Bristol Blog: A man, a plan, a group: OSUM

This is the description of one of the winning projects of Hack Bristol by the guys who made it -- Josh Fyne, Simon Krige, Chris Jackson, Tom Hinton & Luke Lanyon-Hogg. To run the application, see the link below.

BlueBrother is a Bluetooth based tracking system. It is highly scalable and can provide live updates of a persons location whenever they are within range of one of the systems sensors.

The system uses a central server and any number of sensor machines. All that is required for the sensor machines is Linux, Python and a Bluetooth dongle. The sensor machines then scan around every 15 seconds for mobile Bluetooth devices and submit the name and signal strength of each device to the central server using the http protocol.

The central server is running a simple web server written in Java which gathers all submitted data to a mysql database. An apache web server on the central machine then provides a PHP interface for the database where users can search for the location of any device that has been spotted. Devices can be registered with the system which enables the database to be searched with the real name of a person to see where they are.

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Instructions: Download the hack here and follow the instructions in readme.txt. By downloading the software, you agree we aren't liable if it breaks your computer (although this seems highly unlikely).

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Hack Bristol was a two day event where small teams competed to build cool technology projects. It was an open source hackstravaganza, and a fun two days. Almost every team that attempted a project were able to show a (nearly) working prototype at the end of the day. We're going to put as many of the hacks onto hackbristol.com as soon as they're a bit more polished, so the open source can benefit from our teams' hard work. I'll also be posting each of the hacks here on my blog, so look out for them. Thanks to everyone that attended!

Hack Bristol wouldn't have been possible without contributions from Sun (David Levy and pizzas, what more could we ask for?), XMOS (XMOS staff, XC-1 boards, and XDKs), Distribution Technology, Research Machines, and Compass Computer Consultants (Prizes and Food). Thanks to all of our sponsors!

Thanks also to Jason Mayes for use of his photos, plundered recklessly from xlinkers.org.


More pictures and details after the jump.

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Hack Bristol has been a long time in coming. It was originally proposed by Gareth Lloyd at the first meeting of the Bristol OSUM as the ultimate OSUM event. We tried many methods of advertising the event -- emails to the computer science department, fliers posted in and around engineering buildings, writing HACK BRISTOL.com in chalk outside university buildings, and giving short talks about the the event in lectures. We also tried but failed to implement a few more advertising ideas: Changing the desktop background of every lab computer to advertise the event (department didn't let us), hiring a billboard or balloon (too costly), advertising in the student newspaper (not newsworthy enough, apparently), and doing prize giveaways (too late, too costly). David Levy, the Sun expert attending Hack Bristol, suggested in future leveraging his own influence and new media presence to attract other universitie's OSUM clubs to join the event and compete.

Overall, the most effective advertising methods were the email and fliers -- dead simple, cheap to implement. I believe the student newspaper would have been very good, as it is a free newspaper available in every university building. This is definitely something we'll push for harder and earlier in the future, even if we have to pay to get in. However, the core of the event will be significantly different, if we're able to bring multiple universities and OSUMs to Bristol -- using the OSUM mailing list will doubtlessly help, and we can all benefit from each other's advertising ideas. I look forward to seeing what new and interesting ways we'll advertise the event in the future!

So, we've just finished our first ever event, here at the Bristol OSUM. Photos would normally be here, but unfortunately my camera is on the fritz.

The Event:

We decided to smart small, with a screening of the film Pirates of Silicon Valley. It's a film about the beginnings of Microsoft and Apple, and the rivalry between them. The tagline of the film is "Good artists copy, great artists steal", and the film explores the spread of the GUI, as it was copied by Apple from Xerox and then by Microsoft from Apple. Overall, it was an entertaining film, which accurately covered a lot of the history of the era while remaining fun to watch. After the ninety minute film, our resident IT & law expert Dr. Andrew Charlesworth gave a short lecture on the history of user licenses, from the early days of source-included computers to the present day of copyright and open source licenses.[Read More]