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March 04, 2006
UBi.ach Gmail Reader
Gilad, Tracy and I have begun to talk about our midterm for our NetworkedObjects class.
Lots have been talked about. We've already had three meetings, simply discussing about our concepts, the technicality that would be involved and the final object that we envision in the end. I have to admit, so far, the group dynamic has been really good. I've always wanted to work with both Tracy and Gilad and this is the most ideal setting. I'm really quite excited.
After much talk about applying RFIDs into a language translator on the floor at ITP, haptic objects that would give biofeedback etc, we've decided to create a "Gmail Reading Doll"
I think we've decided to explore in the lines of "Calm Technology" with emails in our daily lives.
Yes, it is true that this idea has been done before, on a parrot, but we would like to give this "doll" some preferences that would suit the user and give it a lot more character than the parrot.
We had originally thought of this idea of a ubiquitous doll that would read out emails, smses and the things to do in that day, but I think it would be of an enough challenge for us to get one part going. For the miterm, we plan on prototyping a very simple idea, demo and then hopefully carry on into the finals to realize our original concept.
Essentially, these are the underlying ideas behind our UBi.ach.
- whenever an email is sent out to ubiach@gmail.com, the perl script, cron tab will refresh and update the info that has been received. This then gets taken into PHP and the data will be separated and parsed into subject, sender, body etc of the email.
- this all then gets sent into our ITP SQL server and gets stored in a database. there is a system within that separates the important emails from the less important ones and will create a list of important contacts (eg. if my mums were to send me 10 emails per day to remind me to call, the UBi.ach will give me a constant reminder of the message)
- in the hardware side, the PIC, XPORT will communicate with the PHP script and the SQL server to check up for constant incoming email messages, events and reminders etc.
- the data will then be sent to a Text to Speech application and stored as a .wav or .mp3 file on the ITP server
- the sound files come into a flash card inside the doll
- PIC will read and play the sound files
Our first FlowChart for our project.
We had our next meeting again on Mar 3rd. After hearing some options from Patrick D, we have decided to go ahead with a single board computer that he recommended to Gilad.
Posted by min at March 4, 2006 08:18 AM