PlaceLab Phone Stumbler HOWTO

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Using the Phone Stumbler
3. Uploading Stumble Logs
4. Downloading Map Data

Introduction

Place Lab determines position estimates based upon visibility of known beacons. The process of finding beacons and obtaining assigning them coordinates is called stumbling. This HOWTO outlines the use of the phone stumbler that runs on Nokia Series 60 2.0 phones. The phone stumbler is designed to be used with a Bluetooth GPS device to log GSM cell information and GPS data, correlating them together. It does not require a laptop to be carried around, thus stumbling can be performed for many hours without requiring constant attention.

If you are trying to stumble using a laptop (i.e. for 802.11, Bluetooth, or through a slave GSM phone), you should read the Place Lab Laptop Stumbler HOWTO Guide instead of this guide.

The entire process involves stumbling for GSM beacons, uploading the stumble data, and downloading the most recent data to your phone. Once you have map data on your device, Place Lab is ready to be used.

Using the Phone Stumbler

In order for the stumbler to work properly, it must be able to connect to a localhost native application called Servers. This is a native Symbian application that provides the Java portion with GSM cell information. Make sure this is running before starting the stumbler. If you are not running this application, no GSM data will be available for stumbling. You can make the Servers portion of Place Lab start automatically by installing the placelab-autostart.sis file instead of the placelab.sis file. The autostart file will always keep the Servers application running unless you explicitly exit the application.

From the main menu choose the option Start Stumbling. You will be asked to allow placelab-s60 to make a network connection. This is establishing a localhost network connection to the native Symbian server described above. There is no outbound connection being made from your phone, and no charges will occur. Select yes to continue.

The following screen shows two items of interest. The first is the GSM readings. Every second a reading is taken for the current GSM cell information. The second item is the GPS readings. When the Stumbler is started, a Bluetooth inquiry is done to find any Bluetooth devices advertising a string with the name GPS. If a GPS device is found, you will be prompted to connect to the device. Select yes to connect. In this example, our phone has connected to the TomTom Wireless GPS. As valid GPS information becomes available it will be shown on the screen. However, if a GPS device is not found, the application will sleep for 5 minutes before trying another inquiry. Assuming a GPS device is found, you are now able to stumble everywhere you go!

NOTE: Although a Stop option exists while the stumbler is running, this is not guaranteed to work every time. We suggest closing the stumbler application, then starting it again if you need to stop stumbling.

Uploading Stumble Logs

After stumbling, the logs obtained can be uploaded to the main Place Lab database through the Bluetooth server. Select the option Upload Stumble Logs from the main menu. This will bring up a Log Uploader screen to choose a Bluetooth server to connect to. Refer to the Bluetooth Transfer HOWTO for instructions on uploading the logs.

All uploads are currently done with a default account "phone" with password "p\ hone". In order to use your own Place Lab username and password, setup your Place Lab properti\ es file under the directory

C:\Documents and Settings\johndoe\placelab.ini

placelab.dir=C:\\Documents and Setting\\johndoe\\placelabdata

placelab.uploadLogs_username=johndoe
placelab.uploadLogs_password=placelab

Downloading Map Data

The Stumbler application is the access point for downloading map data from the main Place Lab database. Choose the Show/Get Map Data option from the main menu. There are several options for loading map data.

1. The first method is using the Bluetooth server for downloading data from the main Place Lab database. Select the Update (Bluetooth) option, then follow the steps outlined in the Bluetooth Transfer HOWTO for connecting to the Bluetooth server. Using this method will always give you the most up to date map data for the phone platform.
2. The second method is to update from a local file packaged with this distribution. We have taken the most current map data at the time, and packaged it with the application to provide a fairly recent, quick way of getting map data.
3. The final method for obtaining data is updating from a test file. This is a file packaged with the distribution that contains test beacons which are not in the main Place Lab database. This method is the way to load your own database of beacons that are separate from the Place Lab beacons. If you do decide to do this, you must edit the TestBeacons.txt file in the midpbuild/resources directory of the source and repackage a jad/jar distribution for yourself.