Is there a way I can help contribute to the development side of TinCan? Admittedly I have almost no android experience, but I'm a very skilled developer on other platforms and knowledgeable about wireless protocols. I think I have good ideas about where we could take this project beyond just disaster relief. That is a great and meaningful goal, but I don't expect it will allow tin can to become very popular (god willing). Please, let me know.
Hey nhalden. Thanks for the offer. There are quite a few people jazzed about TinCan that have contacted us, and we may very well find that we need to reach out for more help. In the very short term, we are focused on getting TC working on as many phones as we can, and that's what we are up to now. We will probably have a better idea of where we want to go as that much is accomplished and things progress. I'd love to hear any ideas you might have. We do expect that it will be used for things other than disaster relief, at least we hope.
Not a bad idea. Thankfully, we have "community tags" and I just dropped the #tincan tag on this post!
Ah, sorry. I'm a new poster to the hubski community, forgot about the tags. But yeah, we should get some kind of meeting or listserv for people interested in working on it. We could see what kind of skillset we have at our disposal. Would be interesting to see what other backgrounds people have who want to help. I imagine some people on the business/PR end would be helpful as well, not to mention web dev.
The enthusiasm is definitely appreciated. I'm sure mk is getting some well earned sleep, as is insomniasexx, but we are all excited to work on this project moving forward and we should definitely pool the resources to take Tin-Can where it can/should go. Thanks nhalden!
Cool, thanks for responding mk. One of my ideas was to solve the problem of early adopter issues. You could place TinCan hubs at various hubs (bars, coffee shops, bus stations, airports, etc.) so that you aren't COMPLETELY reliant on the travel of people to spread the messages. I'm thinking these could be as simple as normal phones running special versions of the software that keep the messages alive longer, or even special hardware too something like an embedded linux board running android but with way more storage. I guess some android phones have USB OTG so you could plug a hard drive in. Is there a more detailed technical description of the protocol TinCan uses? I.E. what happens when two phones which are both using TinCan come into range. Since they're both currently 'hosting' a hotspot how do they talk? Is it using just advertising packets to communicate or something? Anyway, as for getting it working on lots of phones. I can report it seems to run properly on my Samsung Galaxy S2 (rooted, CM10.2) though I have not exchanged messages with anybody. I did notice something a little annoying, but I'm not sure what you could do about this: If I decide to close TinCan, the hotspot is still active. When I deactivate the hotspot, it leaves my regular WiFi turned off. I could see that annoying people, but I'm not exactly sure how you would fix that. Unfortunately, I do not have any other phones to test on =(