The Server

Inside one of the cupboards (we call it the server room) of the kitchen lives our server, a Lenovo Thinkpad T60p repurposed as the mobile datacenter for The Code Trip. It's running a stock copy of Vista Ultimate and is running whenever the bus is powered up.

One advantage of using a laptop as your server -- built-in battery backup! :)

PositionUpdate

Currently the onboard machine is running PositionUpdate, a .NET WinForms app that tracks the GPS position of the bus and uploads it every minute to our web site. While riding on the bus, sometimes we'll peek in the cupboard to see where PositionUpdate says we are. It displays our position in human-friendly terms, like "30mi S of Billings, MT".

BusCam

Sometime this week we will be going live with an app that Woody developed on the bus in a matter of days using the DirectShow.NET open source API wrapper. It's a WPF app that takes pictures from any attached webcams and posts them to a file share, ready to upload. A file-watcher will be keeping an eye on this folder and bulk uploading this image data as connectivity is available. (We are hoping to expose this out through SQL Server Data Services for other people to query.) When you hit the site, you'll be able to see what's going on inside the bus and where it's headed from the driver's perspective.