.NET Micro Framework

I’ve been working on my Dare to Dream Different Challange for some time now. With the finish of this round comming a little closer (15th of May) I want to lift some of the secrecy thats surrounding it. In this article I’m telling about the idea, sourcecode is not released.

The idea of my project is based on geocaching. Geocaching is a game were the participants use a GPS reciever to search for tressures or “caches”. Each tressure contains information what to do next. Quoted from Wikipedia there are about 800 thousand geocaches registrated on different websites.

The name of my project is called  DreamQuest. The first part of the name, “Dream”, comes from the name of the challange. The second part, “Quest”, comes from what this project provides:  Quests.

A Quest is an combination of the following:

• Information (Text and images)
• Questions (Multiple choice and text entry)
• POI, Point of interest
• Basic Program

Quests are made on a website and can be shared among users. The .NET Micro Framework device is connected to internet trough GPRS with an GM862 from Telit. This enables users to download and start a quest everywhere.

The visibility of information, questions and POI is controlled by the associated basic program. I’ve written an Basic Intrepeter for .NET Micro Framework (MFBasic) for this purpose. Besides access to the items that make up the quest, the Basic program also has access to the current GPS location and time.

With Basic controlling the visibility of information, questions and POI can be triggered with a host of different triggers, not limited to:

• Distance from current location
• Current time
• Current speed
• Travelled distance
• Correctly answered questions
• Many more..

By showing more and more items with different triggeres an adventure or “Quest” can be held without putting things in the ground but the element of supprise and not knowing what will happen next still existing.

When a user is doing a Quest, a score is calculated, so participants can compete with each other for the highscore enabling the social element.

Also tracking is supported so that you can see the track that you have made while doing a quest.

As promissed in the last blog item i’m releasing the sourcecode of the basic interpeter that is used in DreamQuest. I’ve called it MFBasic and made a logo for it

Not all functions that are available in the DreamQuest version are available (Mostly math functions) are available yet. I didn’t want MFBasic need other libraries. I will recreate those functions later.

It’s released with a GPLv2 licence meaning that you may use the code in your projects (also commercial) but you have to release the code of that creation. If you want to use MFBasic in a closed source project you can contact me trough the contact form.

Some of the supported features:

• WHILE -> WEND
• IF, ELSE, ENDIF
• FOR -> NEXT, STEP
• Line numbers of QBasic like labels
• Custom variable names (Variables ending with $ are string variables others are considered floating point)
• Easy to create custom functions
• Basic sourcecode is precompiled to run faster

It’s in alpha state right now.. I’m currently working on a State storage to store and restore current running state. Also I will add more functions and hopefully implement arrays

For more information and downloads visit the MFBasic codeplex website: http://mfbasic.codeplex.com/

Hi,

It’s been a long time since my last blog, I know, I have been consumed by my work and moving to my new appartment. But now I have some happy news, I submitted my video for the Dare To Dream Different Challange and I also want to share it with everybody.

The project is called DreamQuest. As you can see in the video it’s based on the hobby of geocaching.  With Geocaching people hide objects or letters and then share the GPS location. The object or letter gives a clue what to do next.

You can imagine that hiding stuff in the middle of a city centre can be difficult and not very vandalism proof. Here comes DreamQuest to the rescue. DreamQuest is a mobile device with an internet connection and GPS reciever made to do one thing, run Quests. A Quest consists of information, questions, points-of-interest and a script to glue everything together.

You can design and share your own Quests. The script is made in a simple but powerfull Basic language. This script controls when items appear or hide. This can be done based on location, time, distance, answered questions, etc. etc. You are in full control!

I will release the sourcecode of the project and the basic interpeter as soon as possible!

Here is the video: