I was watching an epidose of modern marvels called Star Trek tech. In the episode, they where discussing real life tricorders. They showed a professor who have made a device that instead of having internal sensors liek a real tricorder, it used data from in-place sensors like termostats etc to give a tricorder like interface to different recording devices around the lab.

So, i was thinking: this is (in theory) possible with the IT. of course it would requie a lot of hardware and programming, and I realize that and can settle on toying with the idea in my head, but still, imagine this:

You have a computer set up at home. the computer is tied into such devices as termostat (inside/outside, heck even the refrigerator), maybe detecting wifi signals contineousely, power consumption etc and at the same time be tied into media center control +++. The computer sends a combined report of all these interfaces to the IT which displays them as a tricorder. In theory its possible and of course a lot of this is available - just not in tricorder form.

Just a thought experiment, dont put too much into it

It would be interesting to have a good, on the fly scripting interface (node maps!) which ties in to a heck of a lot of conventional sensors. Just regular, unexciting sounding sensors (and outputs) could be pretty revolutionary with an intuitive, flexible interface.

On a related matter, any Star Trek fans here should install the LCARS theme on their tablet right now:

http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/lcars

There are protocols like upnp and then there is the dlna which are suited for controlling all kind of devices. I think dlna is a protocol suite which includes upnp. upnp is not limited to multimedia devices control and it is flexible so it allows writing device profiles for any kind of devices. Also there are the apple's bonjour or was it zeroconf protocol and their open source counterpart the avahi which make possible device control in same way as upnp. Those are things you could take a look before you think about reinventing the wheel. This is interesting subject.

Just for the coolness factor I think there is the star trek theme for the IT's on maemo pages somewhere. I'm not sure but it could make the IT look a bit like tricorder. Lol... Krisse beat me. there it is, the theme.

I know, there is also a tricorder simulator somewhere, but it doesnt really do anything

The thread for my tricorder simulator is here:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=17569

It is true that it is just for 'entertainment' purposes, but I tried to add as much 'useful' functionality as I could to the simulation e.g. bluetooth GPS position, weather data download from Yahoo, weather map/terrain data downloads.

Yes, it would be great if some other miniature (USB-based?) sensors could be attached i.e. pan/tilt/accelerometer sensors, digital thermometer/pressure/humidty sensors, light sensors (doesn't the N810 have that?), etc.. As has been mentioned, though, the actual 'user interface' for the Star Trek 'tricorder' is poor and wasteful.

bug labs anyone?

What about Phidgets for the devices/sensors. Connects to the USB port and allows you to connect all kinds of input and output devices (touch sensors, temp. sensors, light sensors, IR sensors, range sensors, PH sensors, accelerometers, etc) (LCDs, relays, etc). The phidgets are all completely programmable through a wide variety of programming languages, and even have their own native web-based API for things like flash. I even ported the base Phidgets drivers and web driver to OS 2008, so code development would be pretty easy.

The downside is that you can't really hook up too much without needing a USB powered hub to add more than one or two sensors. Of course, alternatively you could connect the phidgets to another device/computer and use the web-based API to access them over wifi... it's all possible, you just have to have some practical reason to want to do it, a bit of money to spend on it, and some time/creative abilities.

Checkitout: http://youtube.com/watch?v=n3TsZcAil6M
Starts with ST:TOS clips, second half shows tricorder 770 project from MIT.