Let's talk underwater...

Greg Jones has asked me to assist him on his capstone idea ROV Labs. This is an interesting idea with a lot of promise.

The draw to this project comes on two fronts. The entire intent for the project is an educational outreach for field trips, and classes wanting to understand about underwater life and the use of submersibles in research. Once groups get an understanding of how the technology works they are allowed to work in groups to assemble their own submersible out of a provided kit. They will put together a working ROV that they will then get to test. The ideas behind how the ROVs work will be discussed and groups can take those ideas online too an ROV at the aquarium in Boothbay Harbor, ME. This ROV will be accessible online where students can queue up and control it real time. After they have experienced building their own ROV and controlling the aquariums, students will have the opportunity to provide feedback and alter the design of the online ROV. Iterations will be presented on the website to see how the community of students have adapted the design to try to improve upon what's been done before.

Development of the control system for the ROV and the integration of that system online will be a great technical achievement personally. A working prototype of the ROV and the computer control system is the goal for the end of the fall semester.

Breakin' off

James would like to take Divvy solo, so that is where we are. I will begin research today on new ideas.

Intents are fun.

1, 2, 3 little projects

So, in speaking with James about what exactly he needs my help in for the capstone he wants me to work on server communications. I finally snagged a login for our development server and will be parsing through the code he has up now. I've been doing research on session handling in ajax/java/perl/ruby/C to find something that will be efficient for us. A large snag that we were hitting last year in divvy initial iteration was the use of javascript timers to handling maintenance of an active session while still handling all the data calls needed by Ajax. Already I've found a few ways to re-implement the session handling plus offer additional features to turn divvy into more application than web in the "web-application" world.

Links to some of my readings can be found on my del.icio.us site.

As a tag on, I'm going to be researching a side project for the divvy team to work on after divvy gets its initial fleshing out.

divvy reborn

James and I spoke about divvy again, and after looking at the work James had already done this summer I got quite a few sparks of ideas to make divvy a real catch. Jon said in class that Divvy doesn't have a real catch to differentiate itself from other sites (facebook.com/myspace.com), but James' group concept for divvy is already a differentiating factor.

There are many groups and organizations looking for a way to easily facilitate discussion/communication online. For example, gaming communities often have a large group of people online or just may not have a simple way to communicate with each other regularly, and often times those groups lack an individual with the experience to facilitate an online presence.
Another example would be a community college or regional center that is holding a training seminar (much like a class) that wants to keep tasks, calendars, and important information in a central online location that will allow discussion outside of the class/meeting.

The custom SHARED applications built on an API structure to allow users to customize their own sections of their group. RSS feeds, news accountments, movie times, sale information from web sites. Even integrating those news posts to other services like twitter for broadcast blogging.

At the very least, divvy would be a fun project to get working on a full scale.

a-e-i-o-uTrainer

The idea from James about a digital logging system for physical training is very interesting. Doing some searching around I found a site called OpenFitness.net that has an entire system to allow people to enter food, exercise cycles, and even suggests routines depending on certain individual goals.

The direction I'd like to take James' idea is as sort of a business model for groups and clubs that allows feedback from clients and an easy online way to track progress. Instead of the traditional clipboard and paper and filing cabinets to track client progress I would like to develop a system that provides hand-held PDA-like devices that trainers can enter in data and it would store this information. This would provide easier access to information for the trainer, and to the client by taking that data and linking it to a web-interface that is available (with an account) to see the charting of someone progress with tips and reminders from trainers.

An individual adaptation of this would be to create a site that can integrate with SMS and messaging so that people with cellphones can message in their reps/workouts/meals and have those integrated into their progress that again would be available to them via a web interface or even a message requesting status with a simple table of percentage of progress based on the individuals programmed goals.

Lots to think about and still more to research. I'd personally love to create some hand-held apps though.

What to do...

I wrote james this week about what concepts we have left since my DIY themed site idea had already been created. I'm more inclined to stick with our group-centric divvy site. The focus will need to heavily be into interest based groups to organize the networks. In talking to James, this group organization theme could turn into a few different things. Classrooms could create groups to organize their students/assignments/events, bands could create groups to announce news/concerts/promos, etc. There seems to be more to this than I had origanally intended.

I'm going to try to find a consistent time with James that we can sit down together to work on this project, at least until we're 100% certain who's creating what aspects.

Capstone Begins

Spoke with James during our capstone in regards to our divvy manipulations and machinations. I discovered the DIY (do it yourself) site Instructables. This is VERY close to the direction I wanted to take Divvy in, so we may be left finding a new route.

James already has a few other ideas on the back burner, and I'm going to do some research as well in hopes to having a new solid idea this week.