Monday, February 15, 2010

Hello, Android!

Hello and welcome to the SmartAnchor Project Blog!

We are a group of two undergraduate students working on a project for our "Android Mobile Component Development" course at Florida Atlantic University. Our goal this semester is to create an application that guides a user to a previously stored GPS location using the phone's GPS antenna and compass. If time permits, we will also attempt to include a dynamic map capable of showing the location of the destination relative to the user.

We plan to use source code from two different open source projects and integrate them into our application:

Analog Compass: This program simulates an analog compass using the phone's hardware based compass. We plan to modify this program to have the compass point towards the direction the user should head to.

Bearing: Quoting the creator: "Bearing is a simple application that remembers one GPS location and then computes the bearing and distance between that specific location and your current GPS location." This program currently does not have a graphical interface, not even a compass representation. The source code will be used to create a class capable of performing all the GPS related calculations.

Our source code will be available under the GNU General Public License v3. You will be able to browse through it on github as soon as we begin the project.

We hope you enjoyed your visit and please come back often to check on updates!

Sincerely,

J.D. Mathieu and Ohannes Ohannessian