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xmas.lbi.co.uk

Mobile Mobile is a joyous seasonal story of re-cycled phones, collaboration and derring do.

Following an agency-wide mobile phone upgrade, an idea was hatched to re-cycle or “up-cycle” the phones in the form of an interactive sculpture. Essentially each phone is assigned a tone and is individually addressed by a computer to play the jingle or whatever the qwerty keyboard wants it to do.

Our COO not normally the most frivolous of elves, got in touch with his inner Jospeh and painstakingly sawed out the giant plywood polo from which all the re-cycled phones now hang. One of our colleagues in finance with piano skills played the midi file for the tune and the lads in IT took time out from turning it off and turning it on again to figure out the complexities of making all the kit work. And an army of agency staffers from designers and writers, to the facilities team and our managed services hosting heroes got together to hoist the beast up in our lobby. You might call it crowd sourcing, you might call it the hive mind of the agency. For us it’s just the way we work and a lovely way to celebrate the end of another great year.

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The plan was to make 50 mobiles to each play a different note of a Christmas carol, and flash in time. We set up a test mobile phone - an HTC Touch - to connect to a wifi access point whilst being powered by a charger.

We 'ping'ed the IP address of the phone for two days to verify that it would remain contactable. The phone did get a tiny bit warm, but it worked. We noticed that the ping time changed significantly between different power modes on the wifi of the mobile - from 100ms down to about 2ms on 'performance'.

The plan was to write a small program that ran on the phone that understood a small set on instructions and have a controller running on a PC sending the commands. The basic list of commands was: light on/off, change colour 'wash' and beep.

The first challenge was turning the backlight off - WinMobile is a multitasking OS running WindowsCE as the kernel. The power management subsystem allows you to suggest power settings, but the OS takes into account all the running programs needs.

Turning the backlight fully off proved problematic in the project timescales (a matter of days). Next was beeping. The PC has always had a speaker that could beep - it was connected to the chip that controlled the keyboard - so has had a corresponding function e.g. in windows the MessageBeep function.

WindowsCE was designed for a range of platforms and embedded controllers and it looks like beep was not a core function. Luckily the Microsoft developers included some sample code on how to implement a MIDI sound system expecting hardware manufacturers to license third party full musical instrument libraries. It looks like the manufacturers kept with the simple sine wave sample code implementation. This was good enough for our mobile phone beeping musical rendition.

The program on the phone was written in Microsoft .Net C# and consisted of two parts: one registering with a web service - logging the fact that it was still alive and its current IP address, and two a UDP listener - listening for commands from the controller over the network.

The controller was written to read the midi file of the Carol and send the individual notes to individual phones at the right time. Using UDP instead of TCP and the 'performance' setting on the phone meant that the commands arrived promptly on the phones.