The only living biochip in Nu Cross.

Rogue Trooper is the last genetic infantryman. He’s a blue, genetically-engineered supersoldier bred to be immune to the deadly chemical war-poisoned atmosphere of Nu Earth. But that is not all. No, that is not all. On death, a GI’s mind can be downloaded on to a biochip and embedded in equipment. Rogue travels with his fallen comrades, Gunnar, Helm and Bagman, embedded in his gun, helmet and backpack.

At the Internet of Things hackathon on Saturday, @jodrell and I set out to create Rogue Commuter. We’re not allowed to do genetic engineering any more – not after the last time – so instead we concentrated on bringing Umbrellar and ManBagman, Rogue’s trusty commuting sidekicks, to life.

Umbrellar and ‘Bagman are small javascript programs that start life on a server and can be edited through a simple webpage. They can talk to each other, and say things out loud, but that’s about it.

Meanwhile, running on a smartphone is a personality host – much like the server, but mobile. When it detects a bluetooth id linked to one of the personalities on the server, that personality migrates from the server to the phone and starts running there.

On the phone, the personality has access to all its host’s senses – GPS, Bluetooth, etc. When the bluetooth id goes out of range, the personality migrates back to the server, along with anything it’s learnt along the way.

So, when Rogue Commuter picks up his backpack in the morning, ‘Bagman starts running on his phone the phone in his pocket. Bagman checks if the pack is lighter than it was yesterday – have you forgotten anything? He dials up the weather report, wait, where’s Umbrellar? It’s likely to rain later. We’re still in the house so it’s fine to politely remind Rogue.

So, ‘Bagman thinks we’re heading for the 7:22 train, it’s not delayed, but that makes a change. It’s been delayed three times this week and he’s already sent a letter of complaint to SouthEastern. Hey Umbrellar, how are you? “Not so good, I’ve been carried around for a week and not opened once. I think he’s got a new hat and forgotten about me altogether.” Hmm. Will you two shut up!

And so on…

Amazingly, we got something more-or-less running. A sinatra app with an embedded V8 interpreter ran the personalities on the server.

We used PhoneGap to make an app for the phone. We had difficulty accessing Bluetooth on the iPhone, so Android-only this time.

New species appeared, evolved and died out in the time it took us to get XCode set up to deploy an app to an iPhone. What a waste of time.

Oh, and, with a teaspoon, lots of electrical tape, a microswitch and a butchered Bluetooth headset we made an umbrella that could tell you via bluetooth how many times it had been opened. This was exciting:

I’m taken with the idea that the things around me could have personalities, and that those personalities can be hackable. That they could interact and new things emerge.

Deploying software to my inanimate gear was as easy as giving it a name (or Bluetooth ID). That seems right to me.

I wonder for how long, if I take this forward, I can keep up the conceit that it’s my bag talking and not just another goddamned app on the phone being intrusive.

Not quite a Nu frontier, but at the end it felt, surprisingly, more than the sum of its (rather ramshackle) parts. Can’t wait to play with this kind of thing again.

Tags: iot, pachubehack, ubicomp