Phone Fight

April 7th, 2008

As a result of an all-night hack at Over The Air on April 4-5 2008, we developed a “bordering on the lunatic” modern-day way to settle disputes. It’s a little app written in Python for Series 60 phones and uses the Nokia N95/N958GB’s accelerometer and bluetooth connections to run a virtual duel between two phones.

The original version was rather buggy, but it proved the concept rather well

Here’s a little video of it in action at MoMoLondon
Lastminute.com labs showcase phone fight at MoMoLondon from ribot on Vimeo.

After a lot of prodding from friends who were keen to get their hands on a version that they could actually install, we’ve put a bit of time and effort into crafting a version that you can now download and play.

Installation Instructions

- Download and install phonefight_bundle.sis, then run the application.  That is all you need.

Technical details

In order to get phonefight to work, the above install file will install a number of pieces of software on your phone.  These are the following:-

- Python for S60 v1.4.5 or newer: see http://sourceforge.net/projects/pys60
- The N95 Accelerometer plugin from
  http://research.nokia.com/files/N95_RD_Accelerometer.zip
  See this wiki page for more details:
  http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/S60_Sensor_API?ticket=ST-5043-0QRWvAYpcDct3UPHZihFFftPc16ytb4ms1E-20
- Lightblue version 0.3.3 to enable two phones to communicate over bluetooth
  http://lightblue.sourceforge.net/
- Cyke64's aXYZ 1.0.2 Python extension from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=132176&package_id=252008
  (install the newest self-signed version)
- Misty - extra python plugins, used to disable the screen saver
  http://cyke64.googlepages.com/misty_selfsigned_infinite.sisx

You should also get the most up to date firmware for your N95 as well.

Happy duelling!

PS – if you are a python developer and want know more, get in contact or have a look at the project’s github