Android Opens Your Garage Door For You

We’ve all seen the many cool applications that have been created for the iPhone, but what about a cool application for T-Mobile’s G1? Well, we don’t see that on the news every day. If you have an Android device (i.e. the G1), then you’ll be intrigued by what Brad Fitzpatrick has created for his phone. He has created a program to let his Android device open the garage door for him. In his own 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).”