Dash Express now Twittering
posted Jun 17th 2008 10:50pm by Eliot Phillipsfiled under: gps hacks
Here’s a quick hack to satiate our appetite for location aware applications. The Dash Express is a GPS unit with cellular and WiFi radios so it can do two way communication. Out of the box it can download maps and traffic on the fly. A little while ago they opened up the API so the device could receive info from other web services and owners could give feedback, like reporting speed traps live. The handy hack embedded above publishes your location to Twitter; we would have preferred it hit an actual location service like Brightkite. This just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to possible applications. We wonder what the adoption rate of the Dash Express will be, since the iPhone also has a touchscreen, GPS, and of course a cellular connection.
We’ve got a Dash Express in the lab and it’s based on the OpenMoko design. What sort of tomfoolery would you like to see us do with it? What do you think the killer app for the Dash Express will be?
[via Gizmodo]
What about a crash cam/incident recorder? If the thing sits on the dash and has a little memory add a camera to it and an accelerometer to record a few seconds of video before and during an accident. Or a panic button to do the same thing?
Implement with a rolling loop of images that runs all the time and is stored/uploaded in the case of a trigger. Would not need to be really high quality or a lot of images, maybe 10-30 taken at quarter second intervals.
Posted at 11:34 pm on Jun 17th, 2008 by Andrew Cooper