In 2018, after reading an article on Hackaday, I picked up an Amazon Echo Dot to experiment with building voice interfaces. It was surprisingly easy, and with no experience, I got something up and running in a couple hours.
I haven’t looked at this in a while, and had another project in mind. Looking at the Alexa development documentation today, all the examples leverage Amazon’s Lambda’s compute service. For my project, I didn’t want to use Lambda, I just wanted to use Express on Node JS. Amazon has NPM library for this, ask-sdk-express-adapter, but I couldn’t find ANY end-to-end example, and I struggled for a bit to get it to work. I think it took me longer the 2nd time around!
SO – here’s a simple example, hopefully it’s got the right keywords for anyone who’s stumbling on the same problem. Keywords:
wanted a content management tool. I didn’t want to be writing pages in HTML
wanted to host it myself. Geocities came and went. I wanted ownership of my hosting.
wanted a VM on the Internet anyway. I wanted something always up, that I could host services on. I had hosted PCs on the Internet at home, but with cloud services, I just didn’t need this anymore
wanted very low costs
needed to support extremely low readership.
So, I built out a tiny VM on AWS I can deploy services on, and it costs next to nothing.
But my content is static. It really makes more sense to host the files on S3, and use a static content generator. It’s much more secure, I don’t have to worry about keeping OSs and applications patched, and it could scale if ever required.
So over Christmas break, I built https://articles.hotelexistence.ca/ with Hugo, hosted on S3, fronted by CloudFront, which seemed to be the only way to host content from S3 on my domain with HTTPS. With Hugo (and any other static site generator), you create your content, it applies a template, and creates the links – it reminds me of working with Fog Creek Software’s defunct CityDesk almost 20 years ago. This AWS Hugo Hosting article was really helpful for the AWS setup. I still can’t figure out how to use Hugo’s Image Processing features, but I didn’t need them. The new site is accessible from the ‘Articles’ section up top. I’m not sure if I’ll move everything over or what I’ll do that moving forward.
In September, I went out apple picking with the kids, and decided to pick up some cider, to try to ferment it, something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. I don’t usually drink hard cider, but I’ve been wanting to try making it ever since reading about the process in Make Magazine years ago.
I really like the idea of working at a small scale – it works really well for our apartment, and limits waste while experimenting. Startup costs were really low – apart from the cider, I picked up everything at Toronto Brewing: – Cider – Starsan sanitizer – Lalvin D47 yeast (recommended by store staff for cider) – Bottles (I re-used Grolsch swing-top bottles I started drinking prior to the exercise for bottling, and a wine bottle for fermenting) – A food grade hose for decanting – An airlock and stopper
My first batch was a bust. It turns out Downey’s farm adds potassium sorbate to their cider, and it didn’t ferment.
For my second batch, I went to our local Loblaws grocery store and bought their house brand cider. I added some brown sugar at fermentation time to increase alcohol content, and then added some dextrose at bottling time for carbonation. I fermented for two weeks, bottled, and tried my first bottle two weeks after bottling. The carbonation was perfect – lightly carbonated, tiny bubbles. But the cider was mostly flavorless – it wasn’t terrible, but didn’t taste great. I tried another bottle today, after 4 weeks – it was still flavorless, but somehow much better.
My third batch is currently in a second stage of fermentation. I fermented for two weeks, decanted, and have let it sit for two weeks. I plan to bottle it tomorrow. Should be ready to try around Christmas!
I love my bike – it is a workhorse I can park anywhere, a mid-1990s hybrid. After years of limited maintenance, in the past year, I’ve had to replace a tire, cassette, all the cables, pads, grips, and shifters. I’ve also just upgraded my headlight and taillight – the improvements that have been made in bicycle lighting over the last 15 years have been incredible.
I’m using my bike more this year – my downtown office recently moved to a building with badge access indoor bicycle parking and showers, with towel service, for cyclists – what a cool perk. So, I’ve been biking to work for the first time since I started at this company in 2006, 17 km down Yonge St in Toronto, about twice a week since June.
My rides have been great. Drivers along my route leave a lot of space. But it’s hard to assess risk. The City of Toronto keeps detailed data on cyclists killed or seriously injured. There have been 11 KSIs on my route since 2008. But how do I compare that against, say, the risk of the 30 km drive to my Mississauga office? I’ve been rear-ended 3 times since 2010 commuting by car to Mississauga, but all have been at low speeds, only resulting in damage to my car – the consequences of getting hit on my bike are far more severe.
I was trying to think about what I could do beyond riding cautiously and ensuring I am visible. And, I have to say, a part of me is just always on the lookout for small, fun projects.
Envision a bicycle dashcam
Bicycle dashcams have been done before, by Cycliq and others. But I envision something difference, a bicycle dashcam that could:
Recognize the license plates of the cars around you. From a picture, it would look at the plates on all the cars, and then associate a plate number with the picture
Record the speed of the cars around you
Record the proximity of the cars around you
A driver readable display, ie: “Driver ABCD1234, your current speed is 45”. Like a mobile Toronto Watch Your Speed program sign. Would a driver allow a cyclist more space if they were aware their actions are being logged?
Log this data on a remote server
Share this data, with a group. Perhaps associate “near miss” data from many cyclists, and identify troublesome areas, or troublesome cars.
Introducing my Bicycle Dashcam, Mark I
Bicycle Dashcam Mark I
My Mark I dashcam consists of a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Pi Camera (v1.3), a battery pack, running a small Node application which takes pictures, tries to recognize license plates with OpenALPR, controlled through a phone friendly web interface.
Bicycle Dashcam Dashboard
Testing and Results So Far
On the Pi 3, it takes between 8 and 800 ms to capture a photo with the Pi Camera, and another 7-8 seconds to run the OpenALPR license plate recognition process. I haven’t looked into optimizing this, but I would be curious to see how fast this could get by adding a processor optimized for these tasks, like an Intel Neural Compute Stick.
I’ve taken my prototype on a few drives, and a 5 minute bicycle ride. I don’t know why I even tried using a Lego frame to mount the dashcam to my bike – it only held together for a few minutes of riding, and completely fell apart – I’ll have to come up with something better for bicycle testing.
In the car, over a 30 minute drive (~120 photos) in traffic, about 15 license plates are identified. OpenALPR works exceptionally well – it can pick out the plate numbers even when it would be hard for a human to do so from the same photo. The limiting factor is the Pi Camera. At a stop, the pictures are fine, and OpenALPR will recognize the plates.
Pi Camera image quality sufficient for OpenALPR when stopped
However, as soon as the car is in motion, the image is washed out.
Just a blur. Photo from Pi Dashcam while car is moving.
I have spent some time tweaking the photos taken by the Pi camera, trying out different modes. So far, I haven’t been able to get great results.
As I look to take this further, I’ll look at other Pi camera options, run further tests on my bicycle, perhaps move the project to a mobile phone app, as my phone’s camera is significantly better than the Pi’s. Also, I may explore inexpensive LED matrix screens for the driver readable display.
I’m not sure where we got the idea, and the solution we proposed was gimmicky, even at the time, but the exercise was more about design process – my team did fine. Imagine my surprise, when I was browsing for something else recently on AliExpress (and on Amazon), that some company builds and sells a device similar to our proposed design.
Commercial Driver Alertness Device – As Seen on Amazon
As automakers have added lane following systems and basic autopilots to their cars over the last ten years, they’ve also invested in systems that ensure drivers remain alert to supervise these systems and are ready to take over. Tesla’s systems have sensors to ensure hands remain on the steering wheel, Cadillac’s Supercruise has a camera that ensures the driver’s eyes are focused on the road ahead. What seemed like a silly idea is now a little industry…
Six years ago, I built a wifi-controlled pop bottle sailboat. Smartphone control wasn’t great, so I turned my decommissioned weather station into a remote control.
RC Pop Bottle Sailboat, V2
My re-used weather station project board is a homemade Arduino board, with an APC220 transceiver radio. I added two rotary potentiometers for rudder and sail control. I removed the Raspberry Pi in the boat, and connected another APC220 transceiver to the Arduino Uno that controlled the sail and rudder servos.
Controlling the sail and the rudder is fine, but with the boat just floating on the pop bottles, the rudder has very little effect. Our boat design itself needs improvement – I think this is currently the greatest issue.
My transmitter and receiver code could use some optimization – as I was troubleshooting at home, my code limited updates, and was only sampling every second – controls seemed “laggy”.
I’m using very inexpensive TowerPro MG995 servos, which many advise against using. They were fine for playing around with interfacing, but they are slow, they seem to have a hard time holding their position, as well as not consistently reaching their programmed position.
RC Boat Halfway Across The Pond
I did write my phone number on the boat in case the boat got stuck in the middle, and someone else eventually found it. In the end, it wasn’t required. We just played with the controls as the wind carried it to the other side – probably about 100 m.
Downsview Park Test Run
Maybe some time over the next 6 years, I’ll optimize the RC code, install better servos, and improve the boat design by adding a keel.
Enter 35 degree weather. I have a window air conditioner, that I install in a metal sleeve built into our wall. For some reason, the sleeve is sloped such that water flows INSIDE. When the A/C runs on humid days, the water it collects from dehumidifying can leak inside, creating an unpredictable annoying mess that has to be cleaned up.
I could pickup a commercial leak sensor, but that’s not fun, the mobile app is probably not very good, it probably sends more information than needed to its cloud service, will never receive updates, and it seems like we’re always reading about IoT device vulnerabilities.
So, I bought a water sensor ($2.20!) in June, connected it to the dev board, and started to write a client in the Arduino environment for the ESP8266, and the server in Node.js. Then summer happened. Today, it’s August, its only 24 degrees outside, the A/C is off, and I’m done! The client reads the sensor every 10 seconds, and calls the server with a standard web service call, which will check the sensor reading, and send an alert by email if a water leak is detected.
ESP 8266 Water Sensor
The code is simple, but I had challenges getting the ESP8266 to HTTP POST a JSON payload. It seemed every example I found used different libraries or versions than the ones I had installed. I eventually got it working.
In the end, we didn’t have any leaks this summer in any case, and I don’t expect to make use of this project. If you’re interested in checking it out, you can download the code here: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/projects/watersensor.zip
This website is running WordPress on an Amazon EC2 instance.
If I were looking to keep a blog, this is not how I would do things, I’d just use a service. The micro EC2 instance is slow, I have ensure Linux is patched, WordPress is patched, etc… But playing around with the server is as much fun as writing the blog.
Here are a few changes to the site recently:
I run the EFF Privacy Badger on my browser at home, and I couldn’t believe how many trackers were running on my self hosted site, because I don’t track, and I don’t have ads. I dropped the Youtube videos, that got rid of many (I just link to Youtube now instead of embedding). I can’t remember what else I did, but now I’m just down to Google Fonts, used by the template.
The site now defaults to HTTPS. With default settings, Qualys rates the default Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Apache HTTPS setup on this site as an A. Its funny how many important companies struggle to get this right on their sites, given how easy this is.
Recently update the site to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS – the latest version of WordPress didn’t like the version of PHP on the previous LTS version I had been running (not sure what that was). This is the third VM on which this site has been hosted.
I hadn’t been resizing photos and the site got REALLY slow. I’ve resized the largest ones – it’s not painfully slow anymore. I may eventually move the image hosting to S3, but keep the server/DB on EC2 – I expect the site would run faster without increasing costs.
Update October 5th, 2019:
Google Lighthouse ranks the site load speed at 100
Finally got the fonts loading locally with the OMGF WordPress plugin. The site no longer has any external trackers!
In 2010, I joked“I don’t think any child born in 2010 will get the chance to hear the music of their parent’s youth”, as DRM encumbered media would be unplayable.
Even in 2010, we’d seen Microsoft’s “PlaysForSure” music (launched 2004, RIP 2008) not play on Microsoft Zune (launched 2006, RIP 2015).