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So, I spent a few hours yesterday starting to see what I could do with BlueProximity. I got up to the point of locking my computer, turning off my monitors, and pausing my music. Today I spent a good number of hours continuing to experiment with it to see how far I could take my ideas. I decided to migrate my work to a VM since that is where I planned on running my final product. I’m attempting to kill off the 4 computers currently running in my room and dropping that down to 1-2. My solution is to migrate all my current machines to VM one by one. So, using VMWare 2.0 I was able to attach my bluetooth dongle to my Ubuntu VM under Windows Server 2008. It took a bit of work just to get the sound and bluetooth adapter recognized in Server 2008, but that is for another post. Once I had the adapter attached and working with local apps I decided to take it to the home automation level. I wrote scripts to control a fan and lamp in my room. I attached the serial port to the VM and sure enough whenever I leave my room my lamp and fan turn off and when I return they turn on. I migrated my music collection into Amarok for an idea that I’m saving for later (I’ll let you know if it works). So, I can leave my room and have my lights turn out, my fan turn off, and my music pause. Was that enough, nah not even close. I decided to start working with festival, a text to speech synthesizer for Linux. I expanded the Amarok pause and play commands to include nice fades and on top of that when I enter my room the music fades to 20%, reads me the song and artist of what is playing and then fades to my previous level when I last left.

Some of you might be thinking there can’t possibly be more. Well, I have several other ideas that I plan on implementing including integrating a sunrise/sunset calculation to decide whether or not to turn the lamp on when I enter the room. I also what to add a proximity script so that if I’m in my room and it gets dark then my lamp will fade on at sunset. I want to do something similar with my fan using weather data. I haven’t decided if I just want to use online data, or if I should get/make a USB or serial thermometer to get conditions inside of my room. Another idea I had was to include an email checker in the proximity script and to fade out any playing music and play the “You’ve got mail” sound when there is new mail in my GMail account. I know of several other things I really want to do, but they’re dependent upon me saving up enough money to buy a network based IR blaster.