I attended the Triangle Open Source Open Mic group’s Lightning talk at TransLoc in Durham. It lasted for three hours and several speakers went up and gave a 5-10 minute spiel on something open source and recent they have been working on. Overall, I enjoyed the event as it exposed me to different kinds of projects in different areas, some of which I had no exposure to, so it expanded my horizons so to speak and gave me a better idea of what else is out there that I can explore. I’ll just go into some of the projects that stood out to me.

One of the coolest ideas involved integrating Amazon’s Echo with Sonos (a networked home audio system) to enable playing songs via voice commands. For example, you could say something like “Alexa, tell Sonos to play Rock” or it could be room-specific commands like “Alexa, tell Sonos to start playlist MY PLAYLIST in the ROOM” where ‘ROOM’ is a preset variable that denotes a particular area in the house (kitchen, bedroom, etc). It kind of reminded me of Jarvis from Iron Man. It used the AWS Lambda system which allows you to run code on servers without having to manage the server since all of it is handled for you. This github repo gives a more detailed explanation of the entire system and I thought it was pretty neat: https://github.com/rgraciano/echo-sonos

Another interesting idea was using JavaScript’s Leaflet library to build an interactive map of where people were traveling. The person who was presenting was working at TransLoc (which provides public transportation services particularly in the RTP area). TransLoc has a mobile app called TransLoc Rider that people can use to find transit options. As long as the app is running on people’s phones, TransLoc is able to obtain their location data. The interactive map showed with color streaks the paths that people took over the course of the day (there was an option to toggle the time of day). As long as the app was active on their phones, TransLoc was able to collect their location data (anonymized of course). So from this map, it’s possible to tell where the greatest concentration people are traveling at any given time of day. It allowed the user to zoom in and zoom out as well. Although it definitely brings up questions of privacy and ethics, I was really impressed by what he had accomplished with the data.