PhoneGap Blog

We’ve started brain storming for some projects that utilize our device wall here in the Adobe Vancouver office. We have lots of cool ideas, but before we can get on those, we have to start with some basic stuff.

Our first project is a device inventory system, which keeps track of all the devices that we have in the office. It needs to be able to detect and register any new devices that are connected to the wall using their serial number and return a list of connected and missing devices. It might sound a little dry and boring, but this comes in handy as we can easily track the number of devices that we have by manufacturer, OS, version, etc. and a lot of work around this will be fundamental for our future projects around the device wall.

So where do we start? The device wall is essentially a massive USB hub powered by a Mac Mini, so we can use a handy command in OSX called system_profiler SPUSBDataType (in Linux, lsusb) which returns a list of devices connected to the host. This data includes useful information such as serial number, device name, manufacture name etc. With a little script to exclude non-smartphone devices, such as keyboard, we store the list data into a Redis database and we use Sinatra to render that data into views. With about a day of work, we got most of this running as you can see below.

The script for this is open source and you can view the progress here. This is just the beginning! Stay tuned for more fun and awesome future projects!