My Daily Cycle Commute Email

Every morning at 7am a python script runs on my raspberry PI, uses the Met Office API (if your going to get the weather, you might as well get it from the right place) to get the three hour weather forecast for my area.

It then takes 9am and 6pm (the closest two times I could get to when I travel) and works out what it means for my commute.

The big thing is really rain and windspeed and direction. The API already gives a probability of rain, so that stays but Headwind, Tailwind is unique to my commute. I have a lookup file that turns wind directions in to either headwind, tailwind, side-wind, and slight headwind or slight tailwind.

The Script puts this all together in an email and sends me it.

What’s my ride going to be like

Which is cool, I’m not sure why I do this to myself the other week it said Sleet 25mph headwind, I still brainlessly got on my bike.

Now I don’t really need a RaspberryPi to do this, or even a computer, you could run the script in the cloud, it’s just having a little quite computer always on in the corner makes the barriers to running stuff like this really low.

Around about Christmas I bought a HDMI cable! and I had an idea for my Raspberry Pi, a MeMap (totally making that name up) – I’ve always liked the idea of getting a Harry Potter style Wesley clock to track where I was and Indeed you can get them John McKerrell makes the WhereDial and is Liverpool based as well – but for me having the Rasbperry Pi is all about hacking your own thing, being able to make something i can point at and say “I made that”.

I thought about clocks and dials pointing to mortal peril will always be cool, but it was the Large A-Z map of Liverpool I had randomly hung in the hall that gave me the idea. I could go all retro, and actually light up points on a map.

In our house we are big users of Google Latitude. Its always turned-on on our phones and we can see where each other is at any point and no it’s not creepy it’s actually really useful, especially if your expecting a lift , so the idea of taking the web based map and retro fitting it back to a paper map appealed to me.

The Hardware

the Mess of wires that tell you I’m no hardware expert

It’s not a complicated build my map, and it’s a very messy one, I’m not expert at this, So after much hackery, i have 6 LEDs soldered to a circuit board and connected via a AdaFruit Cobbler to the Raspberry PI pins.  it’s a bit of an extravagance , i should have really soldered a cheep connector to the board, but my soldering isn’t that good so i gave myself some space with the cobbler, besides what else am i going to use if for?

The Code

Now i am a software Geek really, so writing the code wasn’t the difficult part for me. using the Google Latitude API and a bit of Python, the raspberry pi checks every minute to see where i am.

Google latitude gives is co-ordinates (latitude and longitude)  and I have a configuration file, that details a set of locations and the range that I need to be in for it to count – so for example within 50 meters of my house and i am home – it’s good to have the range because there are places like the office where the accuracy can be less, probably all the tall buildings.

With the LEDs connected, all the code has to do is use the Raspberry PI GPIO library, to light up the light where I am – and if I’m not anywhere the lights are, then just blink the last place I was.

My MeMap

MeMap InPlace

So now my raspberry Pi is sitting behind the map in the hall, lighting up my location, it’s all great except i never actually see it light up anywhere but home. the Kids think it’s fab mind

Other Stuff

I do have the RaspberryPi doing other things, not as physical as the map,

1. Every weekday morning at 7am, the RaspberryPI emails me a customized weather report (based on Metoffice API) for my cycle in and our of work. telling me if i’m going to get wet and more importantly if it’s a headwind or tailwind.

2. the Raspberry Pi now have the weather station plugged into it. a certain times of day it tweets the weather to the thejumps twitter account, it also ftp’s some graphs to the internet but that’s been a bit temperamental at the moment.

Nerdy Details

it strikes me as i wrote this that all the nerdiness isn’t actually on the internet – I think I’ll go off to github later and upload the code it’s not complicated, it just has load of API keys in it i need to strip out

These are just my tips for securing you online accounts, you need to find something that is not only secure but practical, going over the top is what gets most people into trouble writing the passwords down and putting stickers on the backs of phones, you have to weight up the risks and impacts on you versus how hard it is do actually do stuff. In short if you are a nuclear physicist in Iran, you probably want to do a lot more than what’s below.

Some ways to secure your online life a bit more:

1. If you can use two factor authentication on important accounts
   1. do this on your Google account now! – if you use gmail – this is probably the most important thing to do!
   2. Facebook can do this here
2. Use OpenID on sites if they have it (that’s login with you google/twitter account on another website) and you trust them

   You can then use your master account to control access to other accounts.

   Google do that here

   Twitter does that here

3. Don’t use the same passwords everywhere

   Have a password tree – pick a theme, – examples, movies by a director, characters in a book, song titles from a band: add some numbers (not replacement that’s pr3d1ctabl3) and put them in a structure.

   These make good passwords because they are easy to remember and longer than a single word. –

   For example (and no I don’t use this or anything close):

   LongJohnSilver93 , BillyBones93, JimHawkins93 – all characters from treasure island (and you unlike me here should pick a book you have at least read)

   If you put them in some form of structure (you might say Jim Hawkins is the main character so you use it on your top account) you are more likely to remember them.

   ( I admit I do reuse passwords, but it’s a ‘bottom’ level password I tend reuse on forums and stuff where the worst that someone could do is logon to the forum and post something stupid – I am perfectly capable of this myself – so it would be a fruitless hack )
   

   This is vulnerable to someone getting a couple of your passwords and spotting a pattern, but if someone is really concentrating to that degree on your account, you’re in more trouble than this page is going to help with)
   

4. Turn on HTTPS for sites that have it

   HTTPS is basically secure internet browsing, everything from your device to the internet is encrypted before it goes, increasingly sites use this by default but some of them you have to turn it on.

   1. Facebook – go here enable secure browsing
   2. Twitter uses https by default
   3. Gmail uses https by default you can check that in the settings

1. Don’t believe everything on the internet – the reality is the above will protect you from brute force/stolen db attacks , a bit, but it won’t protect you from social engineering where you are basically tricked into revealing something
2. Don’t be too scared – the high profile stuff makes the news but even 250,000 twitter accounts isn’t a lot when you consider it against 5 00million twitter accounts, and you are very unlikely to be targeted individually, most hackers are looking for bulk so they can sell the information on and make a fast buck. As Nick Ross would say – don’t have nightmares, do sleep well

Dead simple bit of #legopool tonight. @radiocity967 tower in five pieces. #ItsLegoPool twitter.com/KevinJump/stat…

— KevinJump (@KevinJump) January 27, 2013

Once I’d got the LED to blink, and something to sort of happen when I pressed a button, I looked at my tangle of wires switches and started to think, wouldn’t it be cool if…

The entire internet knew when someone was at the door , and it would be even cooler, if they all got the song from pink windmill stuck in their head at the same time.

The wireless doorbell is a strikingly simple project, many people have done it before, and done better than i could – get a wireless doorbell from your local cheap wireless doorbell emporium, take the bell bit apart, workout what wires make the noise/light work, and plug them into an Arduino.

Once you’ve got that into an Arduino, its software time – make the Arduino do something that makes the computer do something that sends a tweet! – All dead simple project and a nice introduction for me on the ways of the wire.

I’m not going into the how to do detail, here, I’m just going through the amazingly basic lessons I learn’t from making my doorbell tweet.

Lesson 1: Label stuff before you dismantle it.

I was really excited; I’d worked out something I could – probably – make, and I knew where to get all the parts. I trotted off the shops got myself an outrageously cheap wireless door bell, ran home and started to dismantle it, it wasn’t even that complicated inside, it had wires to a speaker, wires to an LED and some to the battery compartment, in no time at all, I had the bell separated from its plastic housing.

A Wireless but un-labelled doorbell

Which was cool, but almost right away, I was beginning to forget what wire was what – which is the point at which I labelled up the picture, hoping I could remember properly.

A Wireless doorbell with labels on the wires!

I did have a multimeter, but in all honesty I didn’t (and still don’t really) know how to use it, I suppose I could have tested stuff, but with my best guesses at the wires I just connected them on my breadboard and got a functioning door bell again (just).

Lesson 2: if it comes apart in one piece, you should keep it that way.

So the doorbell was really one circuit board with some wires for speakers and a light. To be honest I was expecting some sort of obvious aerial bit, connected to a sound bit, with maybe a lighty-up-bit all wired together - but the reality of mass manufacture is they squeeze this into as few a bits as possible, so I just got a circuit board with wires.

At this point with my not very big knowledge of electronics I fell back on my inherent laziness, and decided to leave it be, and just use the wires I could see.

The speaker wire was obviously doing something funky because the bell chimed, that struck me as a more complex signal than I needed – so I decided to connect to the LED instead this would be much simpler.

Lesson 3: Reading (or the software if you’re a programmer) is easy.

With an Arduino reading in a signal is very simple, and as long as you don’t send to much power back there is very little to go wrong and getting software on the Arduino is easy, you just get the complier, type some code and off you go. (at this point you can tell I was in my comfort zone), the hard bit was getting the signal to the internet.

Lesson 4: Connecting to the internet, is difficult (i.e. costly)

Arduino’s are very good prototyping boards, but the standard one has no network connectivity, and the cost of the add-on comes to around the same as a Raspberry Pi (this is the reason I got a Raspberry Pi in the end), but not to matter we were in software land now, and in software land I am like Neo from the matrix, I can do anything (only slower, with three attempts first, and then not really that well)

• To get to the internet  I got the Arduino to send a message down it’s USB (Serial) wire, when the bell was pushed.
• On Windows is wrote a C# windows Service that listened on the Serial port, for the command and then connected to twitter (using twitterizer) to send the tweet.
• simples

Result

Saturday 12:11PM: there’s somebody at the door, youtu.be/EBPwZiAPlsw

— The Jumps (@theJumps) June 16, 2012

Which I think meets all my needs for the doorbell (yes the i wired the speaker up, so you could also you know hear the bell!). Except the amount of kit needed to make it work was quite a lot; because of the Ardunio’s lack of native network support the doorbell in this form has to be connected to a computer running all the time. Not that we don’t have those but it does seem a bit restrictive and not really the point.

You can make an Arduino network friendly with an Ethernet shield, problem is they are about the same as a Raspberry Pi, so at this point I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi – (Sorry I betrayed the hardware fellowship quite early with that one)

True to form the doorbell hasn’t been fitted to the door or indeed ported to the Raspberry Pi yet. I sort of got sidetracked with other projects.

Why a Raspberry Pi?

For those who don’t know a Raspberry Pi, is a very small, very cheap computer – so cheap it doesn’t even come with a case. The idea comes from some people in Cambridge who wanted to build a cheap computer for kids to learn on – built on a single chip with bits for network, tv and other connections a raspberry pi gives you all the basics, and I think the idea of it being all on show is so you can begin to understand how computers work.

For me my Raspberry Pi and Arduino too are about making software more physical. My everyday work revolves around creating applications and websites it’s fun and interesting but it’s all virtual you need a screen and you need some form of computer to use it. With the Raspberry Pi it becomes possible (and more economical) to start embedding the computer into physical things and start to interact in other ways it’s making the software tangible (it’s also a trendy thing called the internet of things)

Pi Projects

So I’m going to talk more about my projects over the next few posts but to give you a taster of the type of things I’ve been hacking together here’s my list of mostly unfinshed things so far:

• Tweeting Doorbell

  A wireless doorbell attached to an Arduino that sends a tweet when someone presses it.

• Wesley Clock

  A dial that moves around when I am in different places (moved onto the me map now)

• The weather station

  Those weather stations you see and wonder who would by one of them ? well we did, and now it’s connected to the Raspberry Pi

• House Pause button

  Press the button (a wireless doorbell again), and all the TV’s, DVDs and computers in the house pause. A great way to call for tea!

• The commuting email

  An email at 7am every morning that tells me what the cycling to and from work is going to be like.

• Me Map

  The (Backward?) evolution of the Clock, the places I go to on a physical map, and they light up when I go there.

• Mail Box (Soon)

  An old servant bellbox, that will give the unread mail counts for the whole family.

I’ll link the projects up as a write about them. It’s a hobby really, just a bit of fun and I know nothing about electronics – I’m googling as a go along.

i’ve made a lego @museumliverpool it’s little but i like it #itsliverpool #legopool twitter.com/KevinJump/stat…

— KevinJump (@KevinJump) January 26, 2013

I’m hoping saying it will make it happen (all a bit starspace ordering I know).

Not that I will have much to say, but I want to exercise the writing muscles a bit more, expect it to be bland boring things, I don’t expect you to read or care – but I need to be writing stuff down that isn’t about strategic objectives.

Picton Reading Rooms

The thing with history as a story, is you’re making it up as you go along. I mean, obviously not – the actual events have some historical basis, to the best of my understanding, but what goes in, in what depth, and with which sympathies, pretty much emerges as the tale unfolds. I was not, for example, expecting to go into so much detail about the 1981 riots and Michael Heseltine. But I seem to have done a reasonably balanced job of it – Daisy interrupted me to say, “I don’t know whose side to be on, now! I was on the side of the black people who were being bullied by the police, but now they’ve started rioting, and there’s no excuse for that!” If she can’t choose a side, I must have presented the story balanced on a knife edge!

So, in case you were wondering, the History of Liverpool started with King John, shooting at deer in Toxteth Park, and issuing a Royal Charter in 1207; there was trade, and commerce, and growth, and a castle; there was the English civil war, and a city that changed hands three times over the period; there was more trade, more growth; there was colonisation and slavery; there was the Industrial Revolution, and growth on an unprecedented scale; there was overcrowding and squalor, and infant mortality, and pollution; there was a Georgian city that stretched barely a mile from the centre, and an Edwardian one that came the four miles all the way out to our house; there were inter-war semis and slum clearances; there was the Blitz and the Atlantic Convoy, and Western Approaches; there was a city of a million people that stretched all the way out to Speke;

Albert Dock

but there was damage and loss, and big, empty spaces where buildings used to be; and then there was decline – there was joblessness and poverty, there was a shrinking city which lost half of its population in forty years; there was racism; there was dereliction, there was police brutality and abuse of power; then there was rioting, and even more empty spaces where buildings used to be; then there was the Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, where some parties were arguing for a “managed decline” of the city – to essentially let Liverpool die (we pointed out that the minutes of that meeting only emerged last year, and people were very angry when they found out); then there was Heseltine, a man who got the worst job in government, essentially because he was being punished for something, but a man who was determined to do any job he was given to the best of his ability; and there was an International Garden Festival, and a fund to restore the Albert Dock from 40 years of bomb-damaged dereliction, and a plan to get Liverpool onto the tourist map; and there was Granada Television Studios, and This Morning, and a man in a jumper leaping from Stranraer to Belfast on a scale model of the country, floating in the newly dredged waters of the dock; there was what we see today, when we look around – fancy new shops, and Japanese tourists, and a city that still has plenty of problems, but which isn’t in decline any more. A city brought back from the grave.

So there you have it. Education by story-telling, a whistle-stop tour of how we became what we are. From King John to Fred’s weather map in 45 minutes.

Anyway, today I remembered my camera, it was a nice(ish) day and I didn’t feel rushed at lunch time, so I went for a stroll. I had no clear aim when I set off, but I ended up at Mann island and decided to take some photos of the much derided Mann Island apartments. mainly to see if I could to take nice pictures of bad buildings.

I’m not claiming these are nice pictures, but they are … interesting.