[HH] Some updates from last night's lectures...

[Kurt Keville]

A-GPS class positioning

We did a study on indoor positioning with Linux dev boards and made an
instructable out of it... much of it is abandonware now since, at
least in my case, work was done for the Nokia Research Center in
Kendall Square and there was no IP entanglement back then so I suspect
there is even less now... here is the escalator pitch (shorter than an
elevator pitch)
You can get decent 2-D positioning from (fast, frequent and many) RSSI
sampling with a little OBEX pushing and pairing requests thrown in.
Note that even if a pairing request is rejected you can get some
physics from it. Get the good USB "long range" dongles ... Bluetooth
2.1 + EDR, class 1 with ideally CSR radios... I think ours were cheap
AZIOs... they will show up in lsusb as Cambridge Silicon Radio, Ltd
Bluetooth Dongle (HCI mode)   CSR radios appear to support every
feature available in the BLE spec.

Our experience has been that it is fairly simple to implement... and
as long as you don't move your base stations much you are in pretty
good shape... code can be gleaned from...
http://web.archive.org/web/20140220001615/http://www.btessentials.com/   and
https://github.com/mboyd/BTScan  and
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/Articles/
and  http://rvsn.csail.mit.edu/location/   (or Waybacked Versions thereof)

There has been tons written on this; and analytics / utility studies
... I am interested in seeing if there is a good A-GPS API for the
LoRa system we discussed last night.

"Minority Report" style UI ...

There are a bunch of DIY versions of the
http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/  gloves... I suspect
they perform as well as the expensive ones since, unfortunately, you
really need hyperprecision in a gestural interface, especially if your
standoff distance is a couple of inches. You can conduct a virtual
orchestra with BT gloves because noone notices your error bars at 12
feet but registration is much harder to get with a 3-pixel wide
browser window...  I will see if I can find those instructables.