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The Flashlight for the Fiftieth Century

One of the fun things about writing texts like this is that we get to dream up ideas for funky (there's that word again) devices and then build them. As part of this I've come up with the "Flashlight for the Fiftieth Century" which is .NET Micro Framework controlled, flashes so that you can find it in the dark (always a good thing for a flashlight to do) and also performs data logging, so that you can tell how much you have used it... It is unlikely that anyone will actually want a flashlight like this, but you never know... and it does provide a nice framework to show of bits of the, er, Framework.

Today I decided to make the flashlight location aware, so that you can find out where people have been taking it. Perfect for keeping track of your night watchmen. To do this I've added a GPS component, so that the flashlight can pick up the data stream, decode it and log the coordinate information. This has been great fun. I've just about got the serial stuff working, and through the wonders of the emulator I'm actually able to feed live location data from a GPS device connected to my PC into the Micro Framework code running inside Visual Studio 2005. If all goes well (and I don't see why it shouldn't) I can get all the code working on the PC before I need to go near any hardware at all. Wonderful stuff.

For readers of the book, this means that you will be able to pick up a GPS NMEA decoder as one of the worked examples too, which will be nice.

Posted on Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 03:41PM by Registered CommenterRob Miles in | CommentsPost a Comment | References8 References

References (8)

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    Response: Marketing Basic
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    Response: Affiliate Marketing
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    at Songstexts,lyrics,songs texts on December 7, 2007
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    at marine gps on December 16, 2007
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    Response: GPS Bargains
    at GPS Bargains on January 19, 2008
    Thanks for the site. I'm just strting to get articles up on my site, but we have great prices on GPS equipment.
  • Response
    Response: marine gps
    at http://marinegpstimely.info on March 14, 2008
    Narration for marine gps.

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