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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Fonosfera: The FON Development Community

We're working hard on the launch of our next product, the Fonera 2.0. The Fonera 2.0 is a Fonera that will not only make it easy to provide WiFi for yourself and for your neighbors, it will also provide Foneros with great features like the ability to connect a hard drive to it and autonomously upload or download content from the Internet while you’re doing something else on your laptop or when your PC is off. In short the Fonera 2.0 will manage your daily relationship with the Web 2.0 doing such thing as sending your pictures to Flickr, your videos to Youtube, downloading your torrents, etc. Many of the things that the new Fonera will do a PC can do but why tie up a thousand dollar investment doing menial tasks when you can have a $49 Fonera do them.

The Fonera 2.0 will be an open platform for developers to build their applications on top of, much like a hacked iPhone is now. An open platform is nothing without a community of developers, so we’re announcing today the launch of The Fonosfera, our development community program that will span not only the Fonera 2.0 but all Fon products. We know there are already many communities doing great things with our Foneras, adding new features and fixing bugs. The idea behind the Fonosfera is to bring all the development work the communities have been doing and will do in the future to any Fon user.

The Fonosfera will be a chance for all these communities to keep working independently, while contributing to the development of Fon products including the Fonera 2.0 and the applications that will run on it. The Fonosfera will provide a space for gathering and sharing between developers and to make their projects available to end users all around the world. It will include a framework with development and community tools such as svn, trac, forums, mailing list, wiki etc. We already picked a few communities that have proved they can do great things with the Fonera and sent them a test version of our Fonera 2.0.

The Fonera 2.0 will provide a USB connection and users will be able to plug any sort of USB device to it (as long as there’s software support in the firmware, and we invite developers to add support for any device they might think of). The Fonera 2.0 will provide out of the box the ability to connect a hard drive or pendrive to it, so you can access it on your local network and use it to store the contents your Fonera 2.0 will download from the Internet for you. Another interesting feature we are working on is the ability to connect an HSDPA modem to the USB port of the Fonera 2.0, to share an HSDPA connection on the move or where DSL is not available.

We are working hard to make the Fonera 2.0 as open as possible, and we are willing to take all the help the development community can bring to Fon and Foneros. Our users will still have to wait a few months to get their Foneras 2.0, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait.

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Posted by Steve Ross on Foneros
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It's a great idea to leverage the WIFI router as a multi-purpose home appliance since there are many low demand tasks which could be handled without requiring your computer to be on or involved.

An application area I would like would be to facilitate the smart home.

A good starter, is there a simple USB input device which can take 1 or more alarm inputs and make the status available remotely? Most all home alarm systems have a relay controlled output which a USB connected device could use to transmit status. It would be great to have a simple application that provides an on-line log of that status and can e-mail alerts when there is a change. This is an application that practically everyone could use. Even in the college dorm room - notification if your roommate opens your refridgerator using a magnetic contact switch on the door connected to some USB input device plugged in to the FON network.

/Mike

# 1 | Sent by: Mike – Thursday, July 24, 2008 (09:44)

AS for an open source platform...USB GPS for wardriving would be pretty cool. I plan on buying a few of these as long as the torrent client is good...a fon seedbox would mean my computer wouldn't have to be on all the time

# 2 | Sent by: Alex Hortin – Thursday, August 14, 2008 (17:39)

When do you plan to launch Fonera 2.0 ?

# 3 | Sent by: Boris – Tuesday, September 23, 2008 (22:22)

@Boris - it launched in select countries today!

# 4 | Sent by: Steve Ross – Friday, October 10, 2008 (02:21)


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