2013-04-30

Vacuum Flash test #2

On April 22nd, a sample vacuum flask arrived at work and I was asked if I would like to test the flask. Who asks me a question like that? Of course I wanted to test it! Actually, there were about 5 flasks that needed to be reviewed, but only one was the proper size.... and by "proper size" I mean "a quart" (for all of my friends that use sane units of measurement, that's about a liter).

After my normal quart of coffee on April 23rd, I brewed a second pot and filled the 32oz flask. The filled flask was put in my NaNoWrimo tote bag. Normally the tote hangs out in the trap on my bicycle, but I thought it would be a good idea to use the tote to check for leaks and I didn't want to make a mess of a perfectly good t-shirt.

Anyway, the flask was packed up and I was out the door!

Oops

After managing to make it through my front door without a problem, the tote, which is normally very easy to hold on to, slipped from my fingers and took a tumble down the stairs. hmmmm how does that happen?

On the Road!

There is no soft squishy comfy seat in the back of my car. To be honest, there is no seat whatsoever; just steel and a bit of carpet. Since I didn't have time to dilly-dally, the tote and flask were hastily thrown into the car.

How to Make Everyone in the Office Jump

It has come to my attention that sudden loud noises tend to startle people, and a tote,containing a flask filled with coffee will make quite a bit of noise when it is tossed to the floor next to my desk. Who knew? Not I.

None the Worse for Wear

If it weren't for the few dents on the flask, no one would know about it's wonderful trip to work... and that makes me a bit sad. Oh well.

Hey guess what? The flask didn't leak any coffee and after a few hours, the coffee inside was still steaming hot. Woohoo! Now that is what I call a winner.

Who Wants it?

After the test was finished, the flask was just crying out for some stickers, and while I was applying a few choice decals, the proverbial lightbulb turned on. I need to give away the flask! So, if you would like to be the owner of this vacuum flask, you need to let me know, and.... you need to let me know by sending a postcard to me at my work address.

It's going to go like this:

  1. Write some contact information on a postcard
  2. Mail the postcard to my work address
  3. skip step 3
  4. wait
  5. Sometime in the end of May, I will pick one of the postcards at random and I will send the flask to whomever sent the "winning" postcard.

Now quit reading, and go find a postcard!

Vacuum Flask Test #2 from jezra.net
Comments
2013-05-03 Alison Chaiken:
I want to see a photo of the stickers before I commit.
2013-05-03 jezra:
the last known photo
http://coffee.jezra.net/coffee/20130430
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2013-04-12

Sometimes I start working on projects, talk about the projects for a bit, and then for some reason, I stop talking about the projects. Allow me to remedy that situation.

Code

Heybuddy

On April 4th, Heybuddy Identi.ca client version 0.2.5 Westerlo was released. There wasn't too much added, but there was a fix to an n900 bug that I wanted to make sure was available to everyone.

MuttonChop

MuttonChop also saw a new release: 0.1.4 "Sleepy Hollow". The big items from the changelog:

  • can compile headless (hence "sleepy hollow" hahaha)
  • switched to cmake
  • added server_port to config
  • added server_request_timeout to config
  • added "player/mute" to API
  • added "player/unmute" to API
  • added "queue/add" to API
  • added "queue/delete" to API
  • added "queue/list" to API

The build system was switched from Automake to Cmake in order for me to keep my sanity and enable compiling headless.

The 'headless' compiling allows a user to get a version of MuttonChop without video output support. A big thank you to Jon Kulp for supplying the coffee that fueled this update. Jon also made some scripts that make installing dependencies and compiling for Debian on a Raspberry Pi nice and easy. He also created an init script so that MuttonChop will run at startup. Both of his scripts are now in MuttonChop trunk in a directory called "scripts".

Currently, it is only possible to access the Queue through the mobile interface (and the API of course). The next release of MuttonChop will have a single Web UI and it will most likely be written using jQuery UI.

Blather

What started as a basic commandline speech recognizer is still a basic speech recognizer, but now it has a PySide based UI as well, and it runs just fine on the Desktop and mobile devices that are decent enough to run Qt apps.

The code for blather is available on gitorious. On the night that the blather code was first made public, I sent a link to the code to Jon Kulp. The next morning, I awoke to find that he had created a video of him using Blather.


AWESOME!

Hacker Public Radio

Although this isn't really code related, it is definitely community related.

After recording a "How I got into Linux" Episode for HPR, I thought I should share my recording experience with other and on April 9th, I gave a presentation at the North Bay Linux Users Group that was an introduction to HPR and and overview of recording audio using Audacity. I had a great time presenting and I think I managed to answer every Linux question that was asked during the evening.

Now quit reading, and go be a Blathering Blatherskite! hahaha

Blathering Blatherskite! from jezra.net
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2013-03-17

Those old coin-op photobooths are awesome. Sit down, close the drape, put some money in the coin slot, and in a few minutes you will have some memories in your pocket. Why can't I have one of those? Oh yea, because they take up a lot of room, use stinky chemicals, and I have no idea how to build one. Fortunately, I have some computer skills.

The Mission

if

Yea, that's a big if. If I had it my way, I'd make an art installation piece that was a digital photobooth with a built in webserver, so that after pictures were taken, one would connect to the photobooth over the internet and download pictures. Unfortunately, I don't have the room or the tools to make a photobooth, but I can get cracking on a much smaller, yet curiously similar project that focuses on the computer and software aspect of a digital photobooth.

The Computer

The computer for this project is a Rev 2 Raspberry Pi. See that little wood block that the computer is screwed to? Good. The Rev 1 Raspberry Pi didn't have any mounting holes and it made putting the device into a custom enclosure a real pain in the ass. The Rev 2 only has two mounting holes and a small block of wood was used for both holes.

I'm still waiting for a apology for the lack of mounting holes fiasco. Oh yea, this computer's name is 'shitbird' because I couldn't come up with another name

The Case

A few years back, my buddy gave me two almost fancy Wild Turkey boxes. One box was used for my media machine, the other was used for this project.

A bit of hot glue affixed the wood blocks to the inside of the case.

Notches were cut in the sides of the box to handle cabling.

This case is far too big for this project, but I really wanted to make it and this is what I had kicking around .... so tough!

Big Red Switch

This switch is identical to the emergency 'play Black Sabbath' button, and it is mounted on my wall near the heater and some sweet rotary phones. For input, the switch is connected to the Raspberry Pi on GPIO pins 5 and 6.

The Camera

In a few days time, a 5 megapixel camera will be arriving at my home, but for now I'm using this less than ideal 640x480 logitec webcam that has been placed on a shelf next to some sweet rotary phones.

To be honest, everything in my home is "near" a sweet rotary phone (or two).

Nesting in the corner

Oh hey, is that a Raspberry Pi on your wall? Yes, yes it is.

If my home were a Federation Star Ship, that corner would be the Engineering Department. beep boop.

Aside from a bunch of sweet rotary phones, there is lantern that can be controlled over the network, and there is a toaster with a postcard on it. RAD!

Code

So it is built and all in place. What does it do?

The computer is running Arch Linux and the software for this project is written in the Ruby programming language without any third party libraries. However, in order to take a picture, the code makes a system call to fswebcam which is easily installable from the Arch Linux software repositories.

Pressing the big red button takes a pictures and saves the picture in a local directory. The code also contains a basic webserver that makes accessing the saved images a snap. Included in the webserver is a simple way to make the computer take a picture. This can be accomplished by directing a web browser to http://NAME_OF_COMPUTER:8080/capture

Enter the Ruby

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'webrick'
require 'thread'
require 'observer'

#we might be testing
@@TESTING = ARGV[0].nil? ? false : true

##define some variables
this_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)
@@public_dir = File::join(this_dir,"public")
@@captures_dir = File::join(@@public_dir, "captures")

class Switch
  include Observable  #instances will be watched!
  def initialize()
    #init the switch GPIO
    @io = 3 #this is pin 7 on a Rev 2 Raspberry Pi
    @value_file = "/sys/class/gpio/gpio#{@io}/value"
    @value
    #clean up first
    unless @@TESTING
      clean_up()
      File.open("/sys/class/gpio/export","w") do |f|
        f.puts(@io)
      end
      #set direction to in
      File.open("/sys/class/gpio/gpio#{@io}/direction", "w") do |f|
        f.puts("in")
      end   
      #record the initial value
      @value = get_value()
    end
  end
  
  def get_value()
    unless @@TESTING
      value = File.read("/sys/class/gpio/gpio#{@io}/value").chomp()
    end
  end
  
  def run()
    puts "running switch"
    running = true
    thread = Thread.new() do
      while running
        #poll the value
        value = get_value()
        if value != @value
          @value = value
          #emit the value
          changed
          notify_observers(self, @value)
        end
        sleep 0.1
      end
    end
  end
  
  def clean_up()
    unless @@TESTING
      File.open("/sys/class/gpio/unexport","w") do |f| 
        f.puts(@io)
      end
    end
  end
end

class PictureTaker
  def initialize()
    p 'creating picture taker'
  end
  
  def switch_changed(switch, value)
    if value == "1"
      puts "value: #{value}"
      take_picture
    end
  end
  
  def server_wants_capture(server, value)
    if value
      take_picture
    end
  end
  
  def take_picture    
    now = Time.now.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
    puts now
    new_file = File::join(@@captures_dir, now+".png")
    cmd = "fswebcam -r 640x480 -S 3 -F 2 --no-banner --png 7 --save "+new_file
    #run the command
    start = Time.now
    IO.popen(cmd) do |f|
      output = f.gets
    end
    return (Time.now - start).to_s
  end 
  
end

if __FILE__ == $0
  pt = PictureTaker.new
  sw = Switch.new
  sw.run
  #watch for a switch press
  sw.add_observer(pt, :switch_changed)
  #make a webrick server
  server = WEBrick::HTTPServer.new({:Port=>8080,:DocumentRoot=>@@public_dir})
  #what server actions do we have?
  server.mount_proc('/capture') do |req, resp| 
    resp['Content-Type'] = 'text/plain'
    resp.body = pt.take_picture
  end

  running = true
  trap "SIGINT" do 
    server.shutdown
  end
  
  server.start
  
  sw.clean_up()
  
end

For easier copy and paste, the code is available at http://hoof.jezra.net/snip/ob

What's next?

Aside from waiting for the 5MP camera...

There are still plenty of unused GPIO pins on the computer and there is a lot of unused space in the computer case. It should be possible to find something else to do with the computer.

  1. upload captured images to somewhere on the internet
  2. have the motion detecting toaster tell the picture taker to take (and upload) pictures when motion is detected.
  3. Always skip step 3
  4. enjoy a bit of home security

Now quit reading, and go take a picture.

picture taker computer from jezra.net
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