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]
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It’s a lot Easier than that folks. All you need is an Internet connected security or home lighting system with a replay output and you can do this over ones cell or wifi connection from 2500 miles away or 35000 feet in the Air.