SensyLight: sensible atmosphere using Internet of Things

The above video is from a research lab at the MIT Media Lab called Responsive Environments. They have a really interesting article [1] about a multimodal mediated work environment.

Internet of Things has been of great buzz these days. It is interesting, but why is it interesting? Just made a project/home lighting on this project.

So, here is the scenario for the internet of things. The thing in the Internet of Things is the web controlled lights – LED strip. The “control” part of the lights is managed by the Arduino. The task of Arduino would be to “GET” data that matters and send that info to the light strip. The ways in which the LED strip can be manipulated from the Arduino can be listed as

1 LED can have 3 inputs, R G B.
Each R G B can value from 0 – 255 which is 256 values.
There are 32 LEDs in the strip.

Which makes a lot of math and logical decisions for the Arduino to handle. That is the whole point of networking these devices, now they have access to on-demand computing resources. This means we need the medium to connect the Arduino to the internet. That is done using the WiFi module which communicates with the Arduino using USART communication.

There are two ways to handle the information flow:

To directly to give out RGB information an hour
- A lot of data transfer between the devices, but all of the computing, the decision is taken care of by the remote server
- the device is highly dependent on the connection for operation
To query the server for Sunlight information (sunrise and sunset) and compute the colour information.
- Having an update system to change the “compute” algorithm makes it highly robust.
- Gets information for a day / a week and then “compute” with the algorithm. Also, listen for any settings like
  - Party lights
  - Work lights
  - get back to sunlight operation

Tools used:

Hardware
- Arduino ATMega 2560
- WiFi module – ESP8266
  - Since the module isn’t compatible with the voltage operation, logic level shift adapter is added and interfaced with Arduino USART
- LED strip
Software
- Arduino IDE
  - Proposed library for ESP8266 – <https://github.com/itead/ITEADLIB_Arduino_ESP8266>
  - Library for the LED Strip <https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-neopixel-uberguide/arduino-library>
- Pycharm
  - for implementation of the web service using Flask
- API for sunrise/set cycle – openstreetmaps.org

Low cost, easy implementation of mediated atmospheres, to make your apartment to provide sensible lighting that can help harmonize the body and mind with the circadian rhythm.

[1] 17161.JosephA.Paradiso.Preprint1.pdf

[2] 192196471

Developing for ESP8266 using Arduino IDE

Cut to action steps:

Install Arduino IDE
Install board support packages to compile for ESP8266
1. ```
http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json
```
2. How and where to do it!
  1. first add that URL in the additional board managers URL
  2. now goto the board manager and look for ESP8266 and install the package
  3. compile your first program, don’t upload yet
  4. To upload, if you have NodeMCU, Arduino takes care of turning the boot-loader mode. if any other, then better to put it yourself into boot-loader mode.

Enjoy ESP8266 development!

3 step procedure for installing raspian SD card image on Mac osX : CLI based

Yup, just like always open the terminal and put in the following to find the dev path of the SD card.

diskutil list

NO NAME with ID disk5 is what we will have to unmount

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk5

Now, copy the data to the SD card using the dd command on the terminal after to cd into the folder where you have downloaded the image. Usually its in the downloads folder when you do it with safari.
sudo dd bs=1m if=2015-05-05-raspbian-wheezy.img of=/dev/rdisk5

After sometime the terminal cursor blinks, it will look like the following image when it is successful. I didn’t come across the error from the actual source page, but when it does, look it up here -> Official Documentation (which is also my source)

as the title says, lets hit the raspberryPi with the new card and kick on with some electrons!

Installing MEAN stack for Fullstack application development

The best one liner for what MEAN stack is given in the following picture.

MEAN stack is more like LAMP.

M = MongoDB

E = ExpressJS

A = AngularJS

N = NodeJS

There has been a lot of development from Google for the AngularJS and NodeJS. They are minimalistic and javascript based, for now cutting edge web development tools.

For installing MEAN stack in ubuntu, follow the commands to set up your MEAN Stack. I deployed my server in Digitalocean which is like my obsessed service for cloud deployment.

Install MongoDB
#~ sudo apt-get install mongodb
Install NodeJS and Npm
#~ sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
and create a symlink
#~ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node
Install Bower
#~ sudo npm install -g bower
Install Grunt
#~ sudo npm install -g grunt-cli
Install MEAN
sudo npm install -g mean-cli
Init your first App
$ mean init testApp
type in your IPaddress with port 3000
http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3000

Generating Heat Maps for eye-tracker data

A heat map is a graphical representation of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors. –Wikipedia

Concept

Here is my approach to deal with it. All that is need is a frequency of a value being repeated in case of one dimension and then creating a color map for high to low and plotting them on a graph. Continue reading “Generating Heat Maps for eye-tracker data” →

TI CC2530DK – Contiki OS – Internet of Things

This blog post is an effort to create a one stop information for starting off your Contiki project with cc2530DK.

There is enough information already available on Github wiki. This post is more than an extension to have all information under one place and as usual my way of documenting my projects!

Continue reading “TI CC2530DK – Contiki OS – Internet of Things” →