New Toys! New Toys!

Earlier this week I had to give a short demo of the open-source AFIS system to a few people from the GEO secretariat . It went OK, i.e. the services actually gave responses and the client, (miracle of miracles) actually worked. We run a custom written Fire Alerting Service that talks to a Sensor Observation Service (SOS), a Web Feature Service (WFS), and a Web Notification Service (WNS) in order to process incoming hotspots, relate them to the features a user is interested in, and send the user and alert if necessary. The adapter allowing the system to get feature info from the WFS is new. Previously, the system was accessing feature information directly from a PostGIS datastore. This was the last time the thing worked. It’s taken me quite a long time to fully integrate the WFS adapter into the system.

So today I decided to reward myself by opening up the group’s new toy, a a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit . This is going to be our first pass at a mobile sensor in our sensor web corridor that we setting up to be a laboratory environment. So now I have to back up my pc, install windows in a spare partition, presumably then fix all the things that the windows install screws up, and voila – I will have a system capable of talking to a robot.

Then, once I can test the thing with the included software, I need to figure out how to do it from Linux. I found a couple of sites for programming the NXT from Linux – so if I can get my bluetooth up and running I should be sorted. Sometimes I quite like my job!