Restarted NORS development
It has been quiet around NORS, the open source remote sensing platform. I reported before on this blog on NORS but my departure from Nokia (the ‘N’ in NORS stands for Nokia) stopped the NORS development, at least temporarily.
Until now: I started developing again, this time in my remaining free time (if there is really anything like that). Originally, I had planned to change the name to something else, carrying over the copyright notices and all. But then, I decided to leave the name as it is. This is not only because NORS was published and therefore changing the name might disrupt. But another reason is also that Nokia, after all, agreed to open the platform (although I avoid thinking too much about the pain I had to go through for this) and I want to acknowledge this by keeping the name.
So what will be new: first off, I removed all (sensor) handlers that were based on Nokia-internal developments. These are of no real use for anybody out there. Examples are the motion band (which does not really exist outside Nokia Research) and some proprietary SSI implementations over internal USB. But apart from removing certain functionality, there will also be new functionality. Currently, I am adding calendar events as internal sensors, if you will, and also will add a handler for reading the Alive Technology heart monitor. This device allows for connecting an ECG sensor via Bluetooth. The protocol is proprietary but available for me to implement in NORS. Integration in NORS can then enable certain medical and sport scenarios. Personally, this work will support some of the monitoring tasks of Dana’s PhD at Essex University.
Also, I’m investigating to re-implement the SymbianServer that comes as an executable in the NORS package (I did not manage to open source the source code for this). The server is rather trivial in functionality (a simple TCP server with string operations) for somebody familiar with native S60 programming knowledge, which excludes me still. Through re-implementing this server, I would like to extend the range of information I can obtain from the mobile device, such as battery level, cellID, accelerometer (on phones like the N95, N96, …) etc. But this will still take a little while. If you are familiar with native S60 and think you might be able to implement this, please do drop me an email. I would appreciate some help on this.
On the server side, there will be little change. I am thinking of putting some SQL support in the code, i.e., dumping incoming notifications into an SQL database. We’ll see.
Oh, one other change will appear in the new NORS package: I will cease the support for the IMP platform, e.g., implemented in the former Nokia N12 devices. Although I liked using NORS on these embedded devices, not many people are seriously using these and they’re hard to get through Aplicom Inc.
On a final note, I have no real firm timeline yet when to release a new NORS package. But it will be within the next two or three months, I would think.