Make a hat out of a G1, write some custom code, and you’ve got yourself a pretty ingenious tech support tool. DIYer Dan O’Sullivan did just that in order to help his mom out with her technology questions.
Unfortunately, Dan’s mom doesn’t have an internet connection so he’s stuck footing the bill for the phone and the data transfer, but he admits that a similar design could be worked out using a network camera instead.
The basic premise of the Android setup, though, is that he can instruct his mom to put on her camera hat, which then uploads pictures to a remote server as she stares at whatever she’s trying to hook up, fix, or adjust. He’s able to see what she sees, allowing him to walk her through the problem.
Dan’s next step is to be able to point at an area on his phone’s touch screen, which would then “be reflected by a laser pointer on the camera side.” Awesome.
The code is over at Dan’s site if you’re interested.
[via Make]