I have been following the growing number of wii related accidents on the aptly named, wii have a problem, which ranges from black eyes and cut hands, from inadvertently hitting light fittings or friends, to broken monitors if the straps on the controller break.

This is interesting to me as we are just finishing a project called Poppet which allows the 5500 motion sensors to be used as a PC controller via Bluetooth. Perhaps I need to get some better accident cover before I test this!

PS: Has anyone got any details of how to get the J2ME drivers working. We have done the project for S60 and have got a J2ME version working on the emulator but cant get it to install on the phone.

I was asked by a colleague in Environmental Science about using a mobile phone to relay pictures back of one of there remote sites every half hour for hopefully about a month. Like most engineers I can’t resist a challenge so we have created an application that provides the functionality ( I roped my student Will in as he could utilse some of the camera work from LocoBlog), taking care to power down the camera between photos, which relays the information back to a website. We have also integrated a motorbike battery and solar panel to extend the life and we are currently testing the system.

The picture below shows the basic hack set-up and the panel has been waterproofed and placed outside the window as we found the reflective window coating impeded its operation.

 So far wehave added a nice feature were we can trigger it via sms but no doubt others may come to mind. Overall it will be interesting to see how effective we can make it work and given the relatively cheap nature and computational power of phones there are lots of possibilities for projects of this kind. It certainly links in with the NRC project and ideas surrounding sensor planet.

I will give an update on how its works out in a later blog