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Building The Smart Phone Location Pinger

Submitted by John Geraci on 10 March 2009 - 7:53pm to Discussions.

I've been meaning for a while to post an invitation to everyone to work together on the mobile phone pinging system that has been discussed on the site as an alternative to expensive centralized bus tracking systems going in to some cities.

This seems like it would be really easy and straightforward to build, especially the way roygbiv approaches it in that thread linked to above.

If anyone is interested in figuring this out and getting it built, send an email to diy@diycity.org and we'll get going on it.

10 Mar21:55

critical mass?

By dan.greenblatt

my main concern here would be how to achieve critical mass. something like this is only useful if you can rely on it, and i think it could be difficult to get reliable data without a lot of pings coming in....

11 Mar22:18

re: critical mass

By John Geraci

I agree, and I'm not thinking it's the kind of thing that would take off once you built it. But it is such a versatile thing, that you could do a lot of proof of concept projects with it, with a relatively small number of people, and build the case for cities to adopt it.

I think for it to really work on a large scale you would need to get mass distribution. But I don't think that's the place to start with this.

Build it first, get it out there, do some tests, get some attention, build on that. That's how I think this needs to go.

Also it just seems really straightforward to build, and it'd be fun for DIYcity to offer the first version of what is sure to become a standard component to future DIY cities in one form or another.