Sex, Circuits and Deep House
Wow, this is incredibly well-executed. I worked in a lab with Bunnie years ago; it's great to see he's still as thoughtful and thorough as he was then. I wish I had the dedication, time and aptitude to execute as well as he does.<p>A great tidbit:<p><i>I designed a very simple protocol which will only reveal if your friends are nearby, and nothing else. Every badge emits a broadcast ping every couple of seconds. Ideally, I’d use an RSSI (receive signal strength indicator) to figure out how far the ping is, but due to a quirk of the radio hardware I was unable to get a reliable RSSI reading. Instead, every badge would listen for the pings, and decrement the ping count at a slightly slower average rate than the ping broadcast. Thus, badges solidly within radio range would run up a ping count, and as people got farther and farther away, the ping count would decrease.</i>