Walkitalkie Save Abandoned

Android Basic Walkie Talkie

This work was initiated at Mil-OSS WG3 in support of Major James Neushul's objectives to improve both position location information (PLI) and radio communications in the field using consumer technology. The basic idea is to get handheld devices in the hands of individual Marines that can supplement the existing communications tools that may not be as easy to put in everyone's hands.

Position Location Information

In a tactical situation, it is valuable to track three data points about the location of peers:

• Location on the network
• Physical location on the planet
• Location in your organization

Tactical Radio / Walkie Talkie

It would be great if people could talk to each other over a 'Walkie Talkie' service using Android phones in a peer to peer manner consistent with tactical radios. Some of the characteristics of this include the ability to operate on an isolated network, and to emulate tactical radio networks in order to leverage current tactics, techniques and procedures for radio communications in the field.

Some of the basic features desired are:

• Discover nearby peers
• Encourage ad-hoc communication
• Achieve IP voice communication, either point to point or broadcast
• Hands-free operation on smart phones
• Voice recognition in support of existing radio protocols
  • Radio Check
  • Authenticate
  • Identification
• Network creation, management, and control
• Simple user interface inspired by consumer electronics and toys, e.g:
  • http://www.yojoe.com/archive/nottoys/walkietalkie.shtml
  • http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=3756101
  • http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4230605

This has been created as a community project in the hopes that it will be broadly useful. This has the potential to be used for tactical military communications. However, it has been initiated in the public realm so that it could also be used in more widespread applications. Some examples of these uses are things like gaming (paintball, geocaching), personal radio services, public safety (police and fire fighters), public transit, school bus operations, or finding your family or friends in a large crowd.

We hope to leverage a larger community to develop software than is typically involved in military projects. The broad, community-based collaborative development model has lead to growing successes in many innovative projects.

Software Configuration Management

This project uses github for software configuration managment. The project's can be found at:

https://github.com/mil-oss/walkitalkie

Pull requests and patches are welcome. Please use the issue tracker to report bugs, to make feature requests or even to suggest full user stories (we like agile methods).

Credits

The following people have contributed to this effort:

• Gene McCulley [email protected]
• Patrick Reynolds [email protected]
• Chuck Atkins [email protected]
• Richard Bullington-McGuire [email protected]
• James Neushul [email protected]

Many thanks go to the Mil-OSS community http://mil-oss.org/ and Georgia Tech Research Institute http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/ for hosting both the Mil-OSS WG1 (2009) and Mil-OSS WG3 (2011) events that helped to gel the community that supports this software.

The file yourbase.jpg is derived from a public-domain picture from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:AWM_017402_Noemfoor_radio.jpg

The file yourbase2.jpg is derived from a public-domain picture from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Portable_radio_SCR536.png

License

Copyright 2011 Gene McCulley Copyright 2011 Patrick Reynolds Copyright 2011 Chuck Atkins Copyright 2011 Blackstone Technology Group Copyright 2011 James Neushul

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.