Now that developers are pushing out the first wave of hacks we are seeing ideas and concepts that are amazing. The latest hack that we have stumbled upon is the garage door opener. Now you can program your G1 to open your garage when you don’t have you real garage door opener.
Brad Fitzpatric has managed to bring the T-Mobile G1 more use in no time at all. As far as we know you wont be seeing this “hack” in the Android Market. Every time we see a new hack it is always bigger and better, we just can’t wait to see what will be next. The one hack we are still waiting for is the ability to remotely control your PC through the G1.
“I got it all working. I now have an Android Activity (GarageDoorActivity) which interacts with an Android Service I wrote (InRangeService), letting me start and stop the service’s wifi scanning task. The service gets the system WifiManager, holds a WifiLock to keep the radio active, and then does a Wifi scan every couple seconds, looking for my house.
When my house is in range, it does the magic HTTP request to my garage door opener’s webserver (HMAC-signed timestamped URL, for non-replayability/forgeability if sniffed) and my garage door opens. Complete with a bunch of fun Toast notifications (like Growl) and Android Notifications (both persistent ongoing notifications for background scanning, and one-time notifications for things like the garage door actually opening).”
Brad has made the source code available as would anyone who truly supports the open source community, to anyone who wishes to give it a try. We must warn you it takes a little bit of work, this is not your standard point and click application download. We would love to hear reports and reviews for those of you who were able to get this to work.
[Via Brad's Life]
Yeah....first of all one of the radios inside the phone has to be physically capable of radiating at the same frequency the garage door opener uses. Unlikely, but OK, I guess between wifi, BT, and GSM, one of those might be close enough to work.
Second, you'd have to sync your phone to your garage door opener's code. If I remember, they typically use a bit-shift register to roll codes.
But if it does indeed work, you should be able to also unlock your car doors with your G1 as well, correct? Control X10 hardware? Control RC cars and aircraft?
Need I go on?
Yeah....first of all one of the radios inside the phone has to be physically capable of radiating at the same frequency the garage door opener uses. Unlikely, but OK, I guess between wifi, BT, and GSM, one of those might be close enough to work.
Second, you'd have to sync your phone to your garage door opener's code. If I remember, they typically use a bit-shift register to roll codes.
But if it does indeed work, you should be able to also unlock your car doors with your G1 as well, correct? Control X10 hardware? Control RC cars and aircraft?
Need I go on?
1. Get a standard garage door opener (does NOT have to be web-enabled).
2. Set up an insteon controller to open/close door (easy).
3. Write a web app capable of talking to the insteon network over a serial or usb plm (not extremely assuming you know how to program).
4. Use your android phone to access the web app.
All he's really done is write the web app such that its runs based on unique time-stamped url so it can't be duplicated by passers-by.
This system could be expanded by implementing insteon devices throughout your home. Your android phone could control house lights, entertainment systems, security, garage doors, anything. No special wireless or frequency mapping required at all.
It is not a remote desktop client, and does not bring the 'desktop' your PC back to your phone or anything, but it does allow you to remotly control the mouse and keyboard inputs on your PC.