In Traction

I just released version 0.1 of PydgetRFID, the Python interface to the Phidgets Inc. RFID kit I blogged about earlier. It’s free software (licensed under the GPL). It wraps libphidgets with ctypes to talk to the hardware.

The software is now more polished and additionally provides a D-Bus service that allows other applications (written in any language with D-Bus bindings) to use the hardware. Currently this means you can connect to the hardware from Python, Ruby, .NET, C, C++, Perl and Pascal!

This DBUS service allows to start and stop reading, and emits a signal whenever a different tag (including the nil value) is read. I modified the original PyGTK GUI to use this daemon for communicating with the hardware. Furthermore, I improved the HAL support so that plugging the device in and out is detected. Unfortunately, the daemon cannot yet handle this though. That’s for a next release

Here is the GUI (which you probably remember from the last post). Nil values are now colored red:

And this a screenshot showing the communication between the daemon and the GUI logged with dbus-monitor:

More information can be found at the PydgetRFID homepage.

On Monday I got the notification that our submission for WoSSIoT’07 was accepted. This means I have to travel to Lisbon and Salamanca (for EIS 2007) in the same week

The paper is titled Tangible Mashups: Exploiting Links between the Physical and Virtual World. More details on my publications page.

Last Sunday I went to FOSDEM. Saw some interesting talks, but from a presenting point of view, the talks of the two Mexican guys were the best

The videos of the presentations are available for download.