Cool Android Hack of the Day: Garage Door Opener

Adding to the growing list of Android hacks is a new garage door opener from Brad Fitzpatrick. The hack does exactly what you think it does… opens your garage door! I would do it no justice trying to explain what he did, so here it is in his words:

I got it all working. I now have an Android Activity (GarageDoorActivity) which interacts with an Android Service I wrote (InRangeService), letting me start and stop the service’s wifi scanning task. The service gets the system WifiManager, holds a WifiLock to keep the radio active, and then does a Wifi scan every couple seconds, looking for my house.

When my house is in range, it does the magic HTTP request to my garage door opener’s webserver (HMAC-signed timestamped URL, for non-replayability/forgeability if sniffed) and my garage door opens. Complete with a bunch of fun Toast notifications (like Growl) and Android Notifications (both persistent ongoing notifications for background scanning, and one-time notifications for things like the garage door actually opening).

Now the really cool thing about this (to me at least) is if you have the know-how and the patience, you can do this yourself! Brad has released the source code for his nifty garage door opener. Gotta love open source!

[Via: AndroidGuys]