Making Things Talk, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. How to Locate (Almost) Anything

Address 2007 by Mouna Andraos and Sonali Sridhar

This necklace contains a GPS module. When activated, it displays the distance between the necklace and your home location. Photo by J. Nordberg.

By now, you’ve got a pretty good sense of how to make things talk to each other over networks. You’ve learned about packets, sockets, datagrams, clients, servers, and all sorts of protocols. Now that you know how to talk, this chapter and the next deal with two common questions: “where am I?”, and “who am I talking to?” Location and identification technologies share some important properties. As a result, ...