Re: Active Badges

[Ant Skelton <ant@xxxxxxx>]

REB.Barnett@xxxxxxx wrote:
>
> Happened across the AT&T research site looking for something else,
and found
> some interesting HA related stuff.

I used to work at a company called Online Media, which was a spin off of
Acorn, owned by Olivetti, and back then AT&T labs was Olivetti Labs, so
we got a shed load of their gear for free, including an active badge
system.

As I recall, the system was hugely expensive (if you were actually
buying it ;), but it did work very well. The badges controlled building
access, and were also picked up by zone detectors, so that a central
application could tell you whether a person was in the building, and
what their location was (along the lines of "Ant was last seen in the
kitchen, 136 hours ago"). Spookily, phone calls to your direct dial
number would follow you round the office, so you just picked up the
nearest extension.

As well as IR, the badge has some sort of RF signature, because all the
desks had inductive loops to detect a badge within a small radius. This
meant that you could sit down at any vacant desk, and your vnc session
would magically appear on the nearest PC, altho I never really got that
working very well.

The IR comms to the badges was two way, you could get them to play
little tunes when you got email or voicemail, and there were a couple of
buttons on the badge which you could program up to do stuff.

Unfortunately, our badge server went up in smoke one day, and it wasn't
feasible to replace it, so the system was discarded - most of it is sat
in a cardboard box in my garage. Occassionally, when rummaging around in
the odds and sods draw I accidentally expose my old badge to daylight,
and it forlornley tries to register with a sensor. Maybe one day its
persistence will be rewarded! ;)

ant

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