BlackBerry DevCon Americas

The breakout schedule for DevCon Americas has been released. I'm happy to say I'll be attending sessions on PlayBook development, integration with BBM, building Tablet and Smartphone applications the work together (Bridge API?), secure program development, and much more.

BlackBerry Messenger SDK

BlackBerry Messenger SDK V1.1 was release late in July. Downloaded, installed and starting to encorporate it into SARMobile. BBM connectivity will allow people working on a search to stay in contact seemlessly and without the need for a dedicated central server.

Jzy3d - A Java 3D Library

A lot of our software is written in Java for easy porting to smart phones. We also need to produce graphics of results and simulations, so I whent on a hunt for a good Java 3D scientific plotting library. Jzy3d distributed under a BSD license seems to fit the bill perfectly. If you don't absolutely need to be on the bleeding edge you can download a pre-build Eclipse project of the library, dependencies and demo programs. This makes it very easy to evaluate the package.

Pretty cool!

Aural Null Simulator

Over the years of my involvement in Air Search and Rescue I have noticed that there are a number of people who do not fully understand the subtleties of how radio signal propagation and reception affect electronic searches. This is quite natural since these people are not regularly exposed the nuances of radio signals. However it does make explaining how the Aural Null search patterns work, and cementing the requirement to follow the procedures layed out in the pattern descriptions difficult at times.

To help with this situation, I've taken some of the technology being developed for the SARMobile project, and some of the technology I've developed in my professional career and used them to develop an Aural Null Simulator. The current version is very rudimentary, but is sufficient to practice the techniques and hone the skills.

This is, at the moment, very much a Beta release, so I ask anyone trying it out to bear that in mind and report any bugs here on the blog, or to the email address provided on the applet description page which is available on our Java Applet Server.

World Flight Planner

An other tool I've used, though at $10/month it is a bit on the expensive side for a casual flier, is World Flight Planner. If you're looking for a good web-based flight planning tool check ot their site.

Our Airports

There is a great tool for pilots, and aviation enthusiasts at OurAirports.Com, or for mobile users OurAirports.Mobi. I will let you explore to find out all the information that is available there, but one of the tests of a great web site is the ease with which other tools can use it. OurAirports is such a web site. Not only does the author make the data available should you wish to use it for your own projects, the mobile pages are very compact and well organized, an are easily processed by software. So I'm using the mobil site to fetch airport information when needed. Here are some pictures:

Software Coming Together with Time

I've been doing smart phone development professionally, and Search and Rescue as a volunteer for a number of years now. I've done some work assisting others with developing software to aid in navigation and management of SAR missions. Now I have the time to work on projects that have been in the back of my mind for a while now.

I'll be providing more information and details in the near future, but for now here are some teaser screen shots.

The first should be familiar to most pilots, is an HSI display.

HSI Navigation Display

Next is a search pattern (an Expanding Square) plotted as an overlay on BlackBerry maps.

Expanding Square

And finally an other search pattern (a double pattern Sector Search) also plotted as an overlay on BlackBerry maps.

Sector Search (double pattern)