2016 is coming to an end. We hosted a hackathon this year in Catania, Italy. It was my first trip to Europe too. The hackathon was again a success. Several students and a professor from Norway and Qatar won the price and took four Android phones home.

We will host another hackathon in 2017 with SAS’17, in Glassboro, NJ. Conference website.

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Our app is back! Check it out at the Google Play store page.

We will use this app for our hack-a-thon at SAS next month.

We will host a Hack-a-thon workshop at SAS’15 on April 14. After a successful workshop last year, we are excited to host it again with SAS. This time it will be in Zadar, Croatia. We hope to see you there building cool apps with your team! We will give out Android phones to winning team 😉

Apologies for not updating for a while! Over the past months our team has been fixing bugs to make the platform more stable. We have a new version just released. Please check it out here.

There are quite a few students working with us this summer to make Sensibility Testbed more stable, having more functions. For example, we are adding sensors to read data in your cars!

Our new github repo has both Sensibility and BlurSense code. Please check it out here.

We had a newer version of Sensibility app in Google Play store just a few days ago. The tickets fixed include some initialization problems with SL4A, and the new code is much more stable than the earlier version this February.

Note that if you experienced any webpage access issues, please refer to our Sensibility page for more info. We are currently working on getting this resolved.

UPDATE: after just a few hours, our HTTPS has be restored.

The Sensibility Testbed Hackaton at SAS 2014 Sensor Development Workshop in New Zealand was a big success!

It was a all day long workshop where we introduced the Sensibility Testbed for the first time to the public. The participants spent a few hours at our tutorial session, with step-by-step instructions to learn how to use the Sensibility Testbed to build mobile apps on phones and tablets donated by users to our testbed. The process is quite straight-forward: install our app from Google Play, download a command line tool, and deploy apps on other people’s devices. Participants can easily make each other’s device beep, vibrate, and speak! They can also do background measurement of data of their interest, like WiFi signal, Bluetooth interface, battery usage, and GPS, etc.

At the end of the workshop, all teams presented their apps with a 5-minute pitch and demo. The top team was from the University of Houston. They built an app that monitors the battery level and whether WiFi and Bluetooth are turned on. If battery is low, the app uses text to speech to tell the phone user to turn off his WiFi or Bluetooth. Other teams built exciting apps too, e.g., using accelerometer, GPS, and noise data. They really impressed us how fast they can learn, how creative they are, and how powerful Sensibility Testbed is.

Here are our demo and Repy V2 tutorial page, Repy V2 API and sensor API with examples.

I setup the wiki page here. We have Repy V2 beta released a few days ago. Hopefully with a new installer, the setup steps can be simplified. Stay tuned for updates.

In the past few weeks, we got Python and SL4A (scripting language for Android) working with Repy V2. Here are some steps and script provided by Albert. Our purpose is to use the SL4A API in Repy V2 to interface Android sensors. See this link for an API overview and help.

1. On your shell, specify the AP_PORT for SL4A to listen on, e.g., export AP_PORT=45678
2. Start SL4A in server mode using am, the Activity Manager, on that port (CAUTION: That’s one long line!) am start -a com.googlecode.android_scripting.action.LAUNCH_SERVER -n com.googlecode.android_scripting/.activity.ScriptingLayerServiceLauncher –ei com.googlecode.android_scripting.extra.USE_SERVICE_PORT $AP_PORT
3. Finally, run the readout program and supply it with the AP_PORT, e.g., python repy.py restrictionsfile test_sensors.repy $AP_PORT

Here’s a very basic example Repy V2 code you could run. It connects to the configured AP_PORT, sends a JSON request to vibrate the phone, and receives the sensor result. (No attempt is made here to construct/parse JSON in a reusable way YET.) Bear with me spaces don’t work with wordpress..

if callfunc==”initialize”:
try:
ap_port = int(callargs[0])
except:
# Not castable (-> ValueError) or missing at all (-> IndexError)
# That’s the user’s fault! Teach them!
usage()
exitall()

# Connect to SL4A, do some random test.
sl4a_socket = openconnection(“127.0.0.1”, ap_port, “127.0.0.1”, 12345, 5)
jsonstring = ‘{“params”: [], “id”: 100000, “method”: “vibrate”}\n’

bytes_sent = 0
while bytes_sent<len(jsonstring):
bytes_sent += sl4a_socket.send(jsonstring[bytes_sent:])
log(“Sent”, bytes_sent, “bytes.\n”)

while True:
try:
log(sl4a_socket.recv(1000))
except SocketWouldBlockError:
sleep(0.001)
except SocketClosedRemote:
log(“The remote side closed the connection. Exiting.\n”)
exitall()

I tried this API to read latitude/longitude pairs, using Python script on my Nexus 4. The example they gave has some bugs in there. Can you spot ’em? 🙂

To run it, you need to install SL4A, and upload your code with “adb push” to /sdcard/sl4a/scripts. You can put some print statement to print out your latitude, longitude, and droid.geocode(la, lo).result will lookup your address given the latitude/longitude pair.

Pretty neat API, and performance is not bad either. Will keep you posted.