Back from HAR2009

I have just arrived from HAR2009 which was a very awesome event! We were camping for 5 days, drinking beer and attending lectures. Some of us visited Workshops, but sadly I didn’t. I probably was too busy attending talks and visiting the Toasti booth 😉

The CCC has built up a great Dome as well as a big tent for hacking. CCCHH brought Milliways, the last pub at the end of the universe and it was a really cool place to hang out. There were many people from different countries which made it really interesting and enjoyable to just be there. Last but not least, the beer was great 😉

Others have brought a GSM Network! How awesome is that?! Harald Welte and his fellow GSM-Tent members have set up the “42” Network and we were able to place as many (internal) phone calls and SMS as we liked. Of course, we started to script that 😉 So I found out, that sending an SMS via a serial connection to my phones modem is as simple as the following lines:

import serial
import time
 
DEVICE = '/dev/ttyACM0'
 
def send_sms(nr, msg):
    ser = serial.Serial(DEVICE, 115200, timeout=1)
    ser.write('AT\r')
    line = ser.readline()
    line = ser.readline()
    assert line == "OK\r\n"
 
    ser.write('AT+CMGF=1\r')
    line = ser.readline()
    line = ser.readline()
    assert line == "OK\r\n"
 
    ser.write('AT+CMGS="%s"\r' % nr)
    ser.write('%s\n' % msg)
    ser.write(chr(26))
    time.sleep(3)
    lines = ser.readlines()
    print lines
    ser.close()

Sadly, I couldn’t hack more with the GSM network because it was shut down rather early and I didn’t use my computer much during the lecture time. So next time I’ll try to reproduce the Curse of Silence and play around with PDU SMS.

So I have been to a lot of interesting villages and I met some interesting people but sadly GNOME people couldn’t make it. Maybe we’ll have a GNOME Village next time… 🙂 If you are interested in how the camp looked, watch this impressions movie or click through the media.

The next CCCamp will probably be in two years and according to rumours it’ll happen in Finowfurt again. I’m really looking forward to that event!