Valentine's Day book recommendations

John Scalzi, one of my favorite Sci-Fi authors, has an ebook sale today only on his Old Man's War Series and several other books including his Hugo award winner Redshirts. They are each $2.99. Scalzi is a wonderful writer and the Old Man's War Series is great Si-Fi. As Jerry Pournelle would say, highly recommended. Nice escapism for these days.

This is an excellent gift for that hard to buy significant other who's also geeky.  Later!

Tree Bien

So since I began soldering again, we have had an electronic Christmas tree that was one of my first renewed soldering projects and it was similar to this kit.  Earlier this year I saw this kickstarter and decided to go for it.  The neat thing is that it is programmable, it has a Digispark that is programmable with the arduino IDE. There is a bit of soldering but it works perfectly.

They use RGB LEDs so a host of colors are available and they also provide some script generation for standard setups.  The digispark also is a cheap but lowered powered alternative to the arduino and I will be using it more frequently. Highly recommended.   More soon, including a rant on the popular meme that machine learning = AI.  Later!

Thunderboard Sense can Sense Thunder

After a fairly long wait I received The Thunderboard Sense board from Silicon Labs.  It is pretty impressive and could even be more impressive with a few more sensors.

The board is powered either off a micro usb plug or a CR2032 battery.  It connects to a smart phone app (android and iOS) by Bluetooth Low Energy.

I am most interested in the environmental sensors and they include:

• relative humidity and temperature 
• barometric pressure
• indoor air quality and gas sensor, CCS811
• ethanol, CO, "a wide range" of volatile organic compounds
• UV and ambient light
• MEMS microphone

The sensors communicate over I2Cand the board retails for $36 although they are still scarce and I paid close to $50 for mine. It offers  quite a lot for a small package.  Next step is to look at their app code and begin setting up our own system.  And in reference to the title, the microphone seems fairly responsive and it could indeed sense thunder

Definitely something that would be nice in a Christmas stocking.  More posts over the break.  Later!

Who am I?

This is my periodic Halloween post.  First Happy Halloween!  I wish I had the TARDIS to travel to another Dalek free time period at least until November 9th (day after US presidential elections)!

Boards are still coming in, I just have not had time to do much.  Folks in my lab do like the particle photon and we have done some interesting work with it and PIR sensors.  More later - hopefully I will have sometime over the Thanksgiving break. Later

Meet the Robots: Cozmo

I have been collecting a few robots in the past year, some are kits and some are fully assembled such as cozmo from anki.  Here's a picture of my newest robot:

He comes with three blocks and a charging station.  As is the case for most of this mew generation of robots, cozmo is controlled by a smart phone app.  Saves the cost of a controller but I find it limiting.  So far the pre arranged software includes recognition software, cozmo when he wakes calls me Gregg once he sees me (this requires a fare amount of light).  He also has a display which is meant to show expressions.  It plays a matching cube colors  app and spending time playing it gives you points that result in upgrades (new software).  This is all cute but what intrigued me was the ability to code it.  I wish I had more to say but the mac instructions seem a bit warped and required using brew to install the necessary components.  I am not a big fan of brew.  I hope to finally get he sdk installed and give it a whirl.  My goal is to try to develop some apps for it and explore its STEM capabilities.  A stretch goal is to see if I can swarm them but at $179 a pop, it may take a bit.

The real world has me swamped so I have been slow to post and am creating quite a backlog.  Experience with some of the new small boards on the market such as the omega has forced me to search/modify new benchmarks since the linux version is rather limited.  Later!

YUNimpressed!

I finally fired up my arduino Yun and, well, I was really YUNimpressed, err I mean unimpressed.  Admittedly I have only spent 30 min with it but I honestly do not want to spend much more time with it.  I can see why the arduino folks retired this product.  My advice if you are tempted to purchase it, is to avoid it.  One has to stand on one's head to access the linux.  For example one method is to load a sketch called YunSerialTerminal using the arduino IDE and then you can access the linux through the serial monitor.  You also access it through Wi-Fi  but it is not as smooth as the Omega.  I hope to blog on the Omega soon and the newer Omega 2 when I receive it.  I see these as much better choices

So if you are tempted to buy a Yun at the discounted prices don't.  I fear I may use my pricey Yuns as simple arduinos in some of my projects.  Sad really.  Later!

A Luminary

Actually a few luminaries.  It has been a tradition in our family to have luminaries lining our driveway and entrance during Christmas and often also for new year.  A luminary is basically a  brown lunch bag with about two inches of sand and a candle.  It usually works quite well and is a nice touch to holiday decorations.  However bad weather can make this challenging and it sometimes is difficult to get the correct candle at a reasonable price. 

This year while teaching my STEM classes I had an idea of how to solve the candle problem.  The first exercise in my STEM class is for folks to make a throwie.  A throwie is basically a LED and a coin battery (usually a CR2032) taped together being mindful that the longer positive lead of the LED touches the positive side of the coin battery.  My STEM course manual has directions if you cannot figure it out from this description.  It provides a sense of accomplishment for the students and demystifies touching wiring.  The history of the throwie was that makers also attached magnets and they would throw it at metal structure to decorate them.  We usually place tack on the back and they place it on their id badges.  I wondered if such an arrangement would help with the candle problem in the luminaries.

The first  hurdle was that any LED would not do.  It would have to be large 10mm and would have to flicker like a candle.  I experimented with many a blinking, flickering LED and discovered the best candle like LED at http://evilmadscientist.com, a great site for LEDs and other geekie stuff.  I experimented with a few and selected a 10mm white flicker.  It was perfect.  I tested it one night with a paper lunch bag and sand.  I secured the LED to the battery with electrical tape and shoved the leads into the sand until only the bulb was showing.  It flickered nicely but simply was not bright enoungh.  Next night I used two CR2032 coin batteries in series, second battery positive (+) side was against first battery negative (-) side.  Fortunately this did not blow the LED but made it considerably brighter.  Please be careful when you first test yours - since LEDs may differ - wear adequate eye protection.   Here is a picture of them in our driveway.

Not a great picture but you get the idea.  Although they dim every night a bit, they are still glowing enough to see from the street after 4 days.

I am working on a bunch of new posts including benchmarks for the UDOO Neo and the CHIP computer. Hopefully I will do better in the new year.  The best to all of you in the new year!  Later!

We will be the Cylons

There was a fantastic recent issue of Nature that had several great articles on Artificial Intelligence.  I highly recommend the Insight articles which review most current hot issues in AI, specifically Deep learning, Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary computation.

However the section  that gave me pause and was the inspiration for the title was a series of articles from researchers expressing their concerns on the risks of intelligent machines.  In particular, the article by Stuart Russell stands out.  He expresses concerns over Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, LAWS for short.  He sees them as being feasible in a matter of years, not decades.  Once I started thinking about the technologies necessary to make this happen, I agreed and feel that the results would be as accurate or as inaccurate as aerial missiles and bombs.  With advances in vision recognition and  local processing power, it is possible.  Robots without the human in the loop, explicitly ignoring Asimov's Laws of Robotics.  Russell provides some remedies, but nothing that would prevent rogue elements from employing them.  We must prepare for a world with these autonomous entities and consider controls equivalent to those of nuclear weapons.  Unfortunately, unlike nuclear weapons the technology necessary to construct them will be available to most groups.

So have I given our technology too much credit?  Please comment if you have any opinions and as always thanks for reading!  Sorry it has been so long between posts!  Later.

Bots Arrive

On Monday I received an Amazon Echo.  I am impressed.  "Alexa" is the keyword that gets the Echo's attention and it works near flawlessly.  You can barge-in, get Alexa's attention,  any time, even when the Echo is playing music.  The speech recognition works well in our large kitchen, even with  water running!  It is limited in its range of tasks at this time, but they are sufficient to make it worthwhile.  The music quality is fine, especially for an aging tin ear.  Although Siri does much better in search, I am really impressed by the Echo's speech recognition which is better than Siri's due in part, I am sure, to the 7 microphones.  I also am interested to see how Amazon uses the echo app in conjunction with the Echo device.  Currently the app logs your interactions with the Echo. Also  folks have hacked the API!  If you come across it in a friend's house, Alexa deserves a talking to!

  

My experience with Alexa has me thinking more about home bots.  Not all robots need to be mobile and my suspicion is that Alexa like entities will become more common in our homes earlier than Rosie like entities. It seems to be a natural transition to go from our smart phone based, social media and search engine interactions to an ambient bot that provides the same functionality by saying "Alexa."

I am still struggling with my copter but I did get software updates into it and learned a bunch about the arduino.  May have to set for a while as I crank up my iBeacon and other Bluetooth low energy devices. More on that in a future post.  Later!

 

Anyware

I just completed reading an article from O'Reilly by Mike Barlow, "When Hardware Meets Software."  It is short and free and does a great job of framing perhaps one of the next technological revolutions.  It makes at least three key points:  (1) hardware is beginning to achieve the same speedup in product realization that software has experienced using similar techniques, (2) hardware and software will be more equal partners in the future, and (3) software has  to raise the bar on quality, security, reliability, (name you favorite "ility"), internet quality of service is simply not good enough for the combination.

What does this say about the next generation of software engineers and especially hackers? They have to be as well versed in hardware too!  I think the hacker culture still retains it to a certain extent but not as completely as early Ham Radio enthusiasts or the Byte generation that had no choice but to pick up a soldering iron in order to do their software.

This next wave is a good thing.  Just as the rise of social media increased how connected we were to each other.  The rise of the Internet of Things/Industrial Internet/ Internet of Everything/Cyber Physical Systems will provide us with an appreciation of the  things around us, how they work and what they provide.  Great reading for my train ride to Hoboken!

I spent the weekend building some lego and trying to coax a mini-quadcopter to life.  Sadly it is not connecting to my iPhone so a new version of the software is in order. Double sadly I am struggling with earlier versions of Java related to earlier version of the arduino IDE. Hopefully progress this week and the next post will have a video of my success. Later!

Culture Mapping of Higher Education

We are all struggling to understand how we can convey the joy and excitement of technology to our children.  I have been involved at modest efforts focusing on grade school and high school students, some of which is chronicled at my aarphacker site.

Tim Stock and Marie Lena Tupot are focusing on using technology to understand what is available for students and using culture mapping and college syllabi to map and interrelate courses.  What a concept, to understand what is available and how it relates. They have a kickstarter to accelerate this mapping and I just stumbled across it with less than twenty hours to go.  So I am asking you if you read this on January 2nd would you please check out their kickstarter and hopefully back it and hopefully let others know.  Thanks!

I did not meet my resolution of last year for more posts but in 2015 I hope to average a post a week.  It has some probability of success since much of what I am doing in my new gig (Industry Professor at Stevens) will hopefully be of interest.  I am redoing my previous udoo benchmarks and am working on some items from kickstarter, so hopefully more soon.  The best to all of you in 2015, later!

Context and Cities

I just read a book, The Responsive City, by Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford that I highly recommend.  First, it provides great case studies on how apps and analytics could transform city services and the relationship between city government and citizens. But the book is so much more.

In particular many of the case studies relate to what some folks are calling contextual computing(see for example, Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.  To begin their foreword they provide a great Nicholas Negroponte quote, "Computing is not about computers any more.  It is about living."    They define five technologies as forming contextual computing: mobile devices, social media, big data, sensor and location based services.  More on the Age of Context  after I finish it, back to The Responsive City.

More broadly I think The Responsive City  is of general interest to anyone interested in understanding what is involved in introducing technology and building high tech systems. The principles noted are as timeless as those provided in Fred Brooks, Mythical Man Month. Some examples: (1) you not only introduce a system but change the process and empower employees, (2) management support is essential (3) user driven is key - test the apps in actual use (4) be mindful of privacy (5) work within the system but often with a small number of folks outside the system. I could go on but hopefully you get the idea and each is supported by several case studies.  Well worth the read for understanding city hall's side of smart cities and for understanding the general issues with introducing new technologies especially contextual systems.  This goes way beyond the Internet of Things or Cyber-Physical systems and the issues it addresses will greatly contribute to the success of such systems.  Highly recommended!

I have been away for awhile but hope to ramp up my posts as the year closes.  My goal is one per week until the end of the year.  Later!

Active STEM

This was my summer of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).  First, with Matt Amoroso as my TA,  I taught six workshops at Stevens for their ECOES (Exploring Career Opportunities in Engineering and Science) program.  The workshops were three hours, half lecture and half workshop. Workshops were with raspberry pis, a breadboard and exercises.  The programming language was Python.  The high school students had variable experience in computer science, only about a quarter were active programmers.  Nonetheless the labs worked well with some tuning through the summer.  A later post will discuss some of these experiences.

We reprised this experience at r00tz, a spin off  workshop at DEF CON, with mostly grade school students.  The labs held up, especially the first few, and it was nice to see parents becoming absorbed too.

I am making the labs available on my new homepage, aarphacker.com.  I am adding resources and code to this site over the next few weeks and will keep you posted on the progress.  You are free to use any materials on the site with attribution and the promise that if you improve it you wil let me know so I can incorporate it in future versions.  Later!

Death and Bits

I have posted a few blogs on how to prepare your digital property for your demise.  This includes surveying the large ebook providers, commenting on Google's excellent and ground breaking policy and referring you to articles discussing the topic. 

Well another article surfaced today that discusses the topic and how friends and relatives potentially can be in trouble for taking possession of your friend or relatives bits.  Anne Flaherty does a great job in her article, much of the information is complimentary to what has been discussed in this blog.  So take a look at it now or bookmark it to return when you need it.  I hope that day is far away!

I will continually come back to this topic and hope you find the compendium of articles, knowledge and research useful.

Next blog on my summer of STEM with pointers to all the materials.  Later!

Of Course(s)

I have been teaching courses for an Executive Master's in Technology Management at the University of Pennsylvania, EMTM, since 2004.  This is the last year of the program and I decided to provide all my class notes on the web.  The class notes are for three courses: Software engineering, security and privacy in IT and human computer interaction. They can be found at my personal web site.  I hope you find it useful.

Some statistics from my involvement int he program: taught 26 trimesters involving 126, 3 hour lectures.

I hope you enjoy the material.  More posts soon, I have a backlog finally.  Later!

Pi Eyed

Worked on a few kits this weekend from my kickstarter collection.  This one was PiRingo another flashing lights board.

  I am doing this a bit more earnestly since I am teaching a  summer STEM course for high school students on using python to do Internet of Things stuff using Raspberry Pis.
I am appreciating RPi.GPIO, although the lower case i, is a source of error, even though it is cute.
It i sonly 3 hours and I have to teach them the python logic to work the boards so it is going to be more tweaking the code.  Can do light sensing and temperature sensing (and of course the blinking lights) but should I even attempt anything mobile?  I would appreciate any suggestions and will post what I finally do.

Also stumbled across Ren'Py today, a "Visual Novel Engine."  It is strange enough to give it a look.  I will report on that and I owe you one on lua, I have been side tracked by a machine learning tool in lua, Torch7 and am trying to get my arms around it.  For all the apt-gets and brews in the world, some things are still just damn hard to install!

More soon.  I just soldered my first surface mount for a DocJava audio processing shield.    It is not pretty but I think it will work.  Later!

Gone Fishing

This weekend I did a quick raspberry pi i/o kit, the fish dish from Pi Supply.  Not one of my best soldering jobs but it works.  It is a nice, elementary and cheap shield to test using the i/o ports of the raspberry pi.   The board has an elementary speaker, LEDs and a button.  The test program that a user submitted uses python and its RPi.GPIO library, very straightforward on the Raspberry Pi.  The kit is less than $15 and will be out soon.  Mine was delivered early since I supported the kickstarter that launched it.

One caution is that it seems that the latest NOOBS version of Raspberry Pi really needs more than a 4 gig SD card,  I advise 8 or 16 gig.  Now I am wondering whether python scripts or arduino sketches will be my i/o software of choice.  For most embedded projects the arduino will win due to its size and the final will be in C and not in sketches.

So when does one stay pat with the programming languages they know?  Well I am 62 and still want to learn new languages!  I am wondering whether Dart should be next.  Any opinions?  Later!

Christmas Sparks

I had some time to play with my newest chunk of hardware, the spark core.  It is a sweet little board embedded in a breadboard for prototyping fun.  It also connects to Wi-Fi and has a cloud to support it.  You can read about it here.  Of course a picture is warranted:

Registration begins with a smart phone app that assists in Wi-Fi registration, much like chromecast but not as smooth.  Nonetheless it did connect after some handstands - hint you need WPA-2 not WEP and this finally moved me to upgrade my home network!  It is a good thing. 

The spark core folks include in their smart phone app tinker which lets you do elementary operations on the pins.  You can flash an led from your iPhone and more.

More on hacking with it later in the week.  Later, and Merry Christmas!

Killer UX

I just got finished reading Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule.  (Please note that O'Reilly provided a copy of this for free through their review program, which I recommend by the way.)  The book has several features that make it ideal for someone who is interested in usability or has been doing it for a few years.  What is unique about this book is that it provides a very comprehensive case study and weaves it into a thorough usability process.  This book is a great complement for more encyclopedic books such as Designing the User Interface or User Interface Design and Evaluation.  At the end an app, cook,  is produced and I actually downloaded it from Apple's app store.

The book takes the reader through the process using the app to illustrate the steps in the process: Research, Insight, Concept and Design.  Throughout she provides sage advice on when to delve deeper and when to let it go.  She also focuses on behavior and behavior change.  A quote from page 125:

Based on what we know about the users and the environment, what does a [new way of living and behaving] look like?

This illustrates the constant strong emphasis on behavior change and not just cranking out an app.  The book is lavishly illustrated and I do recommend it highly especially for folks interested in usability or in their early years.  Do not get it if you want a comprehensive survey of Usability.  Do get it if after reading the comprehensive books listed above you want to then actually focus on usability in your next project.

Bottom line is that I do highly recommend it.  In fact, I am going to use it in my HCI class in 2014.
It has been a while sicn eI posted on this site, hope to do better!  Later.

(cross posted - also on my Software Universe blog)

Tighten your bolts

Just a post wishing everyone a Happy Halloween and hoping you avoid zombie processes and scary code.  Continuing from my post last weekend the UDOO is quite a board.  More on it soon, later!

And this is my 2014 rendition of halloween:

Hop eyou enjoyed your halloween!