My first ever J2ME app, Radio X3M, submitted to Nokia Store QA!

Yep, I did it. My first real J2ME app. And it even works. Now hoping QA does its thing to get it out there.

Oh, you are wondering what it is ? A it's dedicated YLE Radio X3M application for listening to the radio streams offered by the Finnish broadcast company of their Swedish speaking youth radio channel, including display of currently playing song, the program for today and also their news feed. As a added bonus it displays the currently playing artists image. For now it's only for the full touch Asha phones.

Test version screenshot, final is a bit different

YLE already offers apps for the Top-3, Android, WP and iPhone, but they don't seem to care for other devices, so I decided to do something about that.

MouseJoint support added to QtQuick Box2D bindings

I added support for the Box2D MouseJoint a couple of days ago to the QML Box2D bindings. A quick and dirty test video below:



Get it here.

Connecting to the SportTracker ST HRM2 bluetooth belt from the CLI

For quickly getting the raw data out from the ST HRM2 belt, the CLI is the fastest way. No need to code up anything.

Prepare the belt first, you should know how, it will turn on automatically when the device detects a heartbeat. You need to scan and connect to it inside a couple of minutes as otherwise it will turn off automatically, I don't remember exactly how long it stays on.

First, scan for the device:

$ hcitool scan
Scanning ...
    FF:0B:AE:1C:xx:yy    ST HRM2


The do a rfcomm bind:

$ sudo rfcomm connect  FF:0B:AE:1C:xx:yy
...
Connected /dev/rfcomm0 to FF:0B:AE:1C:xx:yy on channel 1
Press CTRL-C for hangup


Now you can access the raw data stream from /dev/rfcomm0 for example with plain old 'cat'.

Unfortunately the data is not in a nice NMEA style text format but binary so to make any sense of it, pipe it to something that can convert the output to a more human friendly format, I used hexdump, like this:

$ sudo cat /dev/rfcomm0 | hexdump
0000000 46fa 81b9 372c 2046 0000 0000 0000 4e00
0000010 425c a0ba 45fa 81ba 342c c448 004e 0000
0000020 0000 5e00 fa47 b946 2c81 4434 0010 0000
0000030 0000 0000 b635 47fa 81b8 352c 1043 0000
0000040 0000 0000 8000 f2c3 47fa 81b8 362c 6443
0000050 007e 0000 0000 5f00 faab bb44 2c81 4436
0000060 00a0 0000 0000 0000 180b 4c10 45fa 81ba
0000070 372c f045 0000 0000 0000 2200 fa43 b946
0000080 2c81 4337 5664 0000 0000 0000 50d8 6363
0000090 46fa 81b9 372c 103f 0000 0000 0000 c800
...

You can adjust the output of hexdump to suit your needs.

Or just get any Bluetooth Smart HRM belt that provides a standard interface that you can use :)

My dream ARM board

They are all very lovely, the small and teenytiny ARM boards that are available these days. I have a bunch of my own, a Raspberry Pi A and two Bs and also a BeagleBone.

But, what I'm wishing for is a ATX or mATX board, that would fit into a standard ATX case and use preferably a standard ATX power supply. And have 4-6 SATA ports and DDR1/2/3 memory expansion sockets. I couldn't care less for HDMI or GPU. And of course be affordable, like the tiny ones. Basically something like this, old EB110ATX board, but a modern version with a more current CPU and expansion.

Anyone?

NFC Teddy Bear

This was one of those WTF moments, I found this NFC enabled Teddy Bear at Prisma in Kokkola.

The Teddy has a unique NFC tag that you register to youself (of course I tried reading it, the tag contains just a URL with a unique ID number) and apparently you can then leave messages on it, or something like that.

A pretty creative idea for NFC don't you think ?

But, notice something in the advert ? The girls is holding an iPhone and last I checked it does not support NFC, so not the most suitable phone to use for advertising a NFC enabled product. (Yes, yes it says QR-Code too, but still)

How to add NFC support to a non-NFC phone, part 2

Have a non-NFC phone ? Friends would like to share stuff with you from their NFC enabled phones without the bluetooth hassle?

Easy, all you need is a NFC tag and another phone to write the Bluetooth connection information to the tag. Obviously this won't magically turn your non-NFC phone into an active NFC device, but will make it into a passive target.

The following video shows what to do.



I got my tags from TagAge