Day: April 21, 2011

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Your iPhone is tracking you!

Oh yeah, time to freak out, because your iPhone is tracking you! Well, it’s tracking itself, or cell towers, or wifi access points, or… something of interest, but sadly, it’s not doing a great job at it.

For some people, this is “Big Brother” type of scare… and for others (fans of geo-tracking) it’s not quite good enough.

I grabbed iPhone Tracker, and dug through some of my files, and took a look at the SQLite database, and was fascinated by the data (I tend to get fascinated by data) but I didn’t feel like alerting the media about it…

Will Clarke has a nice blog post about this as well. It’s worth a read.

Here’s some data that was marked 2010-12-29. I’m not sure what that date refers to, but this seems to show my trip taken on 2011-01-01. I find it interesting to see this data. Back in mid-2010 I wrote some code to make an archive of my Foursquare data, with the thought I would map it all out at some point. Sadly, I’ve collected a lot of data, but haven’t done anything useful with it yet. Maybe it would make more sense for me to just get my geo-data directly from my iPhone. I mean, I don’t even have to check in and it knows (roughly) where I’ve been!

This seems to do a poor job of showing where I was. I mean, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t in all of these location. Maybe it was just my phone connecting to towers in all of these locations…

A nice table view of some of the geo-data the iPhone records. Now to figure out how to use it for something good. Or bad. Or somewhere in-between.

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Diavolino

Diavolino

Remember when I wrote about Cheap Arduinos? Well, if you do, maybe you remember the Diavolino.

The Diavolino is a damn cheap Arduino clone, coming in at about $13. (I say “about” because if you want some headers, or a battery pack, or a chip socket, it’ll run you another few bucks… but still, you can get away with just $13 for the base kit.)

Even though I said there was an “extremely detailed assembly guide” there were a few places where I got slightly confused, mainly just in the “power options” section. (I wasn’t even drinking when I put this kit together, unlike the last kit I built.) Since I got the Diavolino with the 3 x AA battery holder for $1, it was simple to just go with that option. Obviously you’ll need a FTDI USB-TTL cable to connect it to your computer to program it. Again, leaving out the on-board USB makes this kit nice and cheap. (I did get a socket for the chip, as I don’t like to solder chips directly into place.) My only real complaint is that, even though the board looks cool in red and black, it can be a little hard to read the type on the board to locate the correct pins. Then again, I tend to prototype in dimly lit rooms.

I got this kit put together in about 40 minutes. (In fact, I even made a time lapse video showing the assembly.) This seems like a pretty simple kit for a beginner. In fact, I could see the Diavolino being used as a kit put together in a class for people wanting to learn soldering and basic Arduino programming. (As long as you can send them home without an FTDI cable.)

The Diavolino appears to have been designed knowing that in being low cost, a few sacrifices had to be made, and I’m OK with that. If you know how you want to use it, it shouldn’t be an issue at all. (This one is destined for a robot.)