Merul Dhiman's refactor of 2011 Reese Butler 2011 Android Phone Accelerometer as Liquid Galaxy Input Device

This year when GCi ended we had 7 proposals to work on, out of those 7 was to refactor an old GSoC project, a project that allowed you to control a setup using your mobile device. It captured the sensor data from the phone and streamed it to the server, I loved how seamlessly it worked!

Unfortunately though the code got deprecated and ceased to work and we had to refactor it, what started as a journey to change the code a little ended up making me redesign the entire app from the ground up.



Coding this app was an adventure in itself as I wanted to use technologies that will not deprecate quickly and what lasts longer than a webapp, instead of the user having to install an apk, they can simply access it through their web browser, and website code doesn’t deprecate that quickly.



I used NodeJS, ExpressJS and WebSockets to make this application, there are 2 aspects to the application, a node server which handles requests for the pages, and the Web Sockets Server which handles real time connection between the phone and the server, once the phone is moved too much in one direction a corresponding keypress is simulated using an NPM module called RobotJS.

I loved working on this and I hope you like the application too :)



Github repo: https://github.com/coodos/liquidGalaxyAccelerometerCapture

Find my work on the internet at fiverr.com/coodos_by_merul

(Note from the editor: you can find the original 2011 Reese code on Github

and a test video from this year too at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h2ft_i0qFY )