Thread: What data to collect?

Originally Posted by Bugbyte

Definitely an offline mode. There will be times when you lose the data connection even if you have internet in the car. It should be robust and able to recover from signal loss.

As for having or not having connectivity, can it be written so that it uses the available net connection? My iPhone is able to switch from WiFi to Edge pretty seamlessly without intervention.

I dont think I was clear. My current app keeps the server updated when ever there is an internet connection (either wifi or other). It has all the robustness etc you talk about as well, however I dont see the point of live updates. What I see is it creating a log that gets sent to the ftp site.

Now my question was whether we can rely on sending the log via the car (I guess this is ok because most people have atleast wifi) or we need a standalone app where the logged data can be removed from the car and sent to the ftp site from any desktop.

for you personnally it would just use your cars net connection but what if you didn't have any way of connecting from the car. Do you think you would be bothered to take data from the car and send it manually? I can do both so the point's mute but I was interested how easy it should be made.

Last question. My app stores everything in an sqlite database (its free). If this was sent to the ftp site would you be able to use it or does it have to be in another format (I used xml for the first versions of my app but it had issues)

Originally Posted by soundman98

lambosprit: after re-reading your last post i would say that i would prefer to control when the program sends the data-- i have configured my wifi card to automaticaly connect a couple of access points along my way into work, but becasue i am still driving, internet goes in and out very quickly, and for a app like this, i think that while it would not pose a immediate threat, it could cause issues later on with data corruption from partially sent info.

also, how easy would it be to reconfigure the program to use the features of the server program(random data cutoff, logging, etc.) on the car side, and keep the server side 'dumb'-- where it only looks for a certain access code/login, and then allows the upload?

I'm spending a couple of weeks abroad soon so intend to make some progress on this.

My list of tasks is

1) Convert my client to give each user an automatically generated user id.
2) Provide data to mp3's ftp server through a proxy site.
3) Allow user to specify if updates to ftp are automatic (whenever a network connection exists) , a user defined time (each day) or manually. Data corruption shouldn't be a problem as I check for that, may be a different story using ftp though, have to see.
4) Data collected would be user guid, lat, lng, alt, sequence (replaces date). Possibly some other stuff , see below. It will also be collected every minute regardless of user settings. (I may make this speed related to cut down data load) so we have a referance to time. Data accuracy setting will also be hard coded so we have control over what data is collected. I will leave the user setting for them to change what data they wish to use but for this project we need to set the limits.
5) I'll allow a user to decide if he is privacy mad or not and allow a random point removal setting.

I know we want real updates on traffic flow etc in the future but for now I think getting the maps up and running is the most important so I won't collect current speed and an accurate date/time.

What I'm then going to do is work on sign recognition. I dont think speed limits are the important thing for now although if things go well I'll try and do this. What I think we need is understanding road signs that tell you where you are like road names and numbers. I've researched it and it looks doable and it'll be fun to try. What I hope to get is road names, number of roads off junction/roundabout (I'm UK based but will make it any country configurable I hope), type of junction etc.

Now this last bit may be beyond my capabilities but I'm up for trying.

As for privacy statements I think we should make this a free for ever thing. I used to use pocketgps but was pretty miffed when they privatised all that freely collected data for their own benifit.

progress update.

items 1,3,4 done .

Excellent! Keep us posted!

Sent the first test data file to the ftp site today. Can someone check it got there ok and send it back to me to make sure its what I sent.

Thanks