The volunteer Hydrology work I do with University Nebraska-Lincoln is starting to solidify now that I no longer have a formal position at UNL. Last night a researcher in Brisbane, Australia met online to work out the use of the GRIME2 Command Line Interface (CLI) libraries for measurement of water level at what could be over 100 separate locations if we can demonstrate capability. Then today, I met online with a graduate student who we hope will be able to extend the libraries to handle much smaller calibration targets for the purpose of crowd-sourcing imagery and placing small calibration targets at the top of garden variety staff gauges. What is great about this is that these people are starting to adopt and extend the libraries without my involvement other than to provide guidance to get them going and to help them when they get stuck.
Category: Technology Page 1 of 9
This little device arrived literally on my doorstep today and, marvel of all marvels and miracle of all miracles, it was delivered there on a Sunday by the venerable United States Postal Service. Hats off!!! It is a great solution to an irritating problem–keeping my book open at arms length (reading distance given my advanced age and seeing ability) while I drink my drink and eat my snack. It was cheap and works as advertised. It came in a package of two devices, so there is one for Lorena and/or to throw into my backpack for travel.
I figured out a little bit of a medium term project to do now that I am done with college. I have wanted to build my self-hosted, open source video surveillance system for our house for a long time. It is somewhat of a tedious project, but lots of people have done it and I think it will be fun and useful. I bought four IP (WiFi) cameras and a NUC i5 computer to use as a server. If/when I get it going, I hope to install the first system in our house here in Texas, then build up another system to with a few more cameras for our house in San Pedro. I will try to document it here with the specs of the hardware I use and the software I use.
I bought a bluetooth keyboard that pairs with my cellphone to make it easier to write posts. Works great!
We pretty much had to trash our exercise room to get it done, but Christian and I got our new projector installed, hooked up to a NUC (mini-computer) and pointed at the screen on the back wall. The screen was the biggest part of the project, but it was truly a marvel of engineering. The combination of the projector and the screen are nothing short of amazing in terms of image quality, especially with respect to how much we had to pay for the thing. This is actually going to be a great place to even do things like take video conferences.
Christian shocked us all with an amazing gift for Lorena’s birthday–a robotic vacuum cleaner. He got one for himself to clean his apartment and absolutely loved it. I have to admit I was skeptical about how good the thing might be, but have to admit I am a complete believer after seeing it do its thing.
One of the most amazing things about the device is how easy it was to set up. It took about a half an hour to unpack it and get everything installed. Lorena and I can both start it, stop it, adjust what parts of the house it should clean, watch it move around on a map as it is cleaning, etc., etc.
On top of that, the height of devices is low enough that it can go under things that were hard to reach with our regular vacuum. The path in the map in this post is in our bedroom. The side-ways ‘T’ in the middle of the room is the post holding up the middle of our bed. In addition to that, it was able to clean under the sofa and the Barcalounger in the living room. The amount of cat hairs and dust and the repository was nothing short of amazing.
One thing I can say for sure, though, is that it is not really saving us any time because it is so fun that we usually just sit there with a cup of coffee the whole time it is doing its thing.
Christian recommended I get a new, better keyboard a long time ago. I used one he had at his apartment in Tempe every time I was there, but for some reason, never thought it would be a good idea to get one. Well, a couple of weeks, I broke down and had him buy me one for $70 after having spent the last couple of decades using keyboards that cost in the range of $20. The keyboard he picked out for me arrived today and there is truly a world of difference for the better. The keys have a profoundly better action and the whole thing just seems more solid. The keys are back lit, it sits at the right angle. I like it a lot. Additionally, it came just in time for me to work on my journal article.
I am a big fan of Linux and, more particularly, a big fan of Xubuntu Linux. This is not a review of Xubuntu but an acknowledgement of my biennial struggle about when to replace the previous Long Term Support (LTS) release, Xubuntu 18.04 with the new release 20.04 that is scheduled to drop on April 23. I do not think I have made it more than half a day before I bite the bullet and make the change. This will be a pretty straightforward deal with the computer I use for my PhD work and our home computers, but my day job machine is another story. We have lots of heavy lifting going on and the setup of a development computer of any stripe (Linux, Windows, or apple) for the kind of work I am doing is often a challenge and generally takes at least half a day if I am really lucky. I could just install over the top of 18.04, but that kind of defeats the fun and I like the idea of completely cleaning out cruft every now and then, so I plan to wipe the hard drive. I will continue to run into stuff I forgot for a few more days or even weeks. This is true even though I write down all the stuff I need. New thing just keep popping up.
I am all Linux all the time at both work and home. For the first time ever, I have no reason to ever boot to Windows and we avoid allowing the plague known as apple into the house. The guys at work mostly use Ubuntu, but I really like Xubuntu, mostly because its use changes only minimally. I always look forward to a new release and this one is no exception.
In yesterday’s post I talked about my video conference setup. I was frustrated that my Cowin E7 headphones had mechanical problems that led me to buy something new. My Plantronics BackBeat PRO 2 Special edition arrived a couple of days early and I could not be more happy so far. The fit and finish seems good. I will report back if I have problems. The case they sent it in was not as good as the Cowin hard shell case, but fortunately, the Plantronics headphones fit into the Cowin case. I am listening to President Trump’s China virus press conference and the headphones are working great.
I am in a meeting right now with nine of my colleagues, most of whom are in the Boston area, but which also includes myself in Washington state, one guy in Colorado, and one guy in Utah. Everyone in the meeting is in a different location. In addition to the people in the meeting, the guy running the meeting is sharing his screen with information on the topic we are discussing. It works amazingly well. I regularly use three different video conference tools–Google Hangouts, Slack, and Zoom. Every now and then I also use WhatsApp and Skype, but that is mostly that is for personal stuff.
Over the last week, I got in a new microphone and speakers that have made these meetings a good chunk better. About a day after I got these new parts connected and working, my bluetooth headphones (Cowin E7) broke mechanically. This was pretty disappointing because I had been very careful with them, always carefully returning them to their case when they were not in use. I ordered another set of headphones (Plantronics this time) a couple of days. With the China virus, deliveries have slowed down pretty dramatically from Amazon and Walmart so they will not arrive until late in the week–probably Thursday. All my housemates have to listen to both ends my rather boring conference calls until they arrive.
Hemex Health has released their Sickle Cell Disease diagnostic product (PDF brochure here). It is a big deal because it is inexpensive and fast (10 minutes) compared to previous methods of diagnosis. This product will save lives through early diagnosis. I was fortunate to develop some of the enabling technology for this product, for a brief period as a volunteer and later on as a contractor. Congratulations Peter, Patty and the whole team for this successful product release!
I started with a new project this week. I am helping a buddy on a three dimensional tracking, measuring, guidance problem. We each bought a RealSense 2d/3d camera. The bought a refurbished ThinkPad laptop with a USB 3.0 port with this project in mind. The USB 3.0 port provides for faster throughput of image data. It was really easy to get the thing up an running. It will be quite a bit more work to control the camera programmatically.
The main office area of the office in the basement has been being painted over the last week or so. I have been relegated to the dining room table. When I moved back down and was shuffling things around, I found the the lights Gene made for the bean sorting project. I am going to get them sent off to him so he can start sending me some images. We might get lucky and have our original setup work, but I think that is pretty unrealistic. We will definitely have to make modifications quite a few times until we get the whole lighting designed tweaked to the point it works with the falling beans. That is not to mention the fact that we have not even started at all on the mirror setup to see both sides of each bean.
I was able to advance on the bean sorter program sufficiently to send the computer and camera off to Gene so he can start working on the lighting. I am amazed that we are continue to move forward. This project is not moving along at lightening speed, but with Gene’s efforts and great mechanical skill and knowledge we make steady progress. Hopefully, he will be able to take some images of dropping beans and it will allow us to see the spread of the beans and whether I believe I can see them well enough in the images to do the calculations needed to sort them properly. The next big challenge is two-fold: 1) getting the beans to fall as straight as possible and 2) getting the mirror set up. After that, we will attack the lighting.
The new $243 plus tax computer arrived today and I have to admit that it is great. I loaded Linux Mint, OpenCV, Boost, Qt Creator (only for the IDE), the Wt libraries, downloaded the bean sort code from Subversion and had it compiling in three hours or so and that includes building OpenCV, Boost, and the Wt libraries from source.
Tomorrow I hope to get the thing taking pictures via the USB 3.0 port so it will be ready to ship to Gene early next week. The biggest challenge is keeping Kiwi out of the way. Maybe that says something about how hot the thing runs.
A couple of days ago, I broke down and bought a refurbished laptop for the bean sorting project. It surely seems to be a smoking good deal at $243.09 plus tax. I have been working to get the thing running on a Raspberry Pi and that works fine, but is way more hassle than we need during the development stage. It was necessary to hook up a keyboard, a mouse, a monitor, and the camera which, during the development stage, needs to be moved around a lot. It is just easier to do it on a laptop.
The other really big benefit is that, for the Raspberry Pi, I needed to do my development and testing on my home laptop, commit the code to a repository, switch the camera from the laptop to the Raspberry Pi and rebuild the code on the command on the RPi. That was a hassle. Now I will be able to put the entire development environment on the laptop and send it off to the mechanical designer (Gene). We can get all the lighting and controls developed with a full blown computer, then switch over to whatever cheap embedded computer we pick when everything is working. In the meantime, when I get some new code for Gene to consume, it will be way easier for him to build it and test it out with duplicate systems.
I got a book for Christian at Christmas time. While he was with us, I read the preface. I liked it so much, I bought for Kindle on my phone. The premise is that the business model represented by Google will be supplanted by a business model with block-chain money that is fundamentally more secure and monetarily stable. I love the way the author, George Gilder, writes and I believe he is write on this. This is not the first time he rightly called a sea change like this would represent.
One of the things that was particularly interesting about it was that the technology underlying the functionality that will cause the change is precisely what Christian has studied and researched for the last four years for his PhD program: Information Theory
I lost my wallet on my last trip to Boston and suffered through the pain of cancelling all my credit cards, then ordering new ones along with a replacement drivers license and a replacement Nexus card. When Christian lost his wallet, he did something about it that he recommended to Lorena and I. He bought a two Tile key and wallet trackers. I ordered four of them–two for Lorena and two for me. It is the little device circled in red on my key ring. I also have one in my wallet. The application also allows me to track my cell phone in case it gets lost. The way it works is that everyone who has that app running on their phone knows and broadcasts the location of every “Tile” within Bluetooth distance to a central server. As a user, I have access to that server to see where my tiles were last seen. Christian said it has saved him several times. It also allows a user to tell the Tile to beep from his cell phone. The only rub is the sound is not so loud for an old guy with bad hearing like me, but all in all it seems like it will be a big help! A pack of four of these little Tiles with year-long replaceable batteries cost $60.
Kelly sent this photo of her and Christian yesterday. They had a pretty good time in San Francisco over the New Year. More than anything, I think they are pretty tired. Lorena and I had a quiet day at home because I was still suffering from the residual of a cold. We DID have a big steak with a grilled onion, and a baked potato. Also, I spent most of the day working on the bean sorting project. Gene has made really big progress, so I need to get an application going so that he can have a way to see what the camera captures as the beans drop. That will allow him to develop the lighting. It is a little more complicated than just creating a capture application. We really need to find a way for me to upgrade is program (running on a Raspberry Pi) over the internet. I have done this before, so it will be great to get a little more experience at doing this sort of thing.
This picture of Kiwi being miffed that Lorena was trying to sit on her chair does not have a whole lot to do with what I want to write about today, but it was pretty fun. Every time Lorena sat down, Kiwi pushed her away and then sat back with a look of irritation. I needed a picture for the post, this was available, and I wanted to have an excuse to put it up.
The whole family has been inspired to talk about some of the things we do to contribute and to get ahead. A lot of it has to do with the whole concept of life-long learning that Charles Murray talked about fairly frequently. In that context, I have almost always had a project on which I actively worked that contributed to something. I earned money on some of them, but a lot of the time I just worked because the project helped in some way and I was able to learn new stuff. The reality is that I did a lot of this work with now expectation of learning anything, but it happened anyway. Examples of these projects include work on the water level measurement camera (GaugeCam), sickle cell disease diagnostics, labor and delivery management, cataract surgery, water particle measurement in flowing water, and several others.
I think the things they all had in common were that they were hard projects (in the technical sense), they required a longitudinal effort of more than a year, a bunch of non-compensated (monetarily) work was required at the front end, and I had the ability to uniquely contribute because of my technical skills. Virtually every one of those kinds of projects turned into a significant amount of money–maybe not significant for some people, but surely significant for me. In addition, every one of them opened new opportunities. The work I am doing right now would not have been possible had I not learned a bunch of new stuff about embedded programming, web programming, machine learning, etc., etc. that I never would have gotten in my day job. More important than the money is the fact that I am doing invention daily. I know it is critical to have dedicated people to perform the mechanical tasks of daily life like farming, medicine, manufacturing, etc., but it is a gift to have spent a career at the bleeding edge of invention. There is always something new and interesting to learn and use that requires all the mental faculties to even understand, let alone exploit. I know that is not for everyone, but I am certainly grateful and humbled to have had this kind of work.
Christian has been thinking about what he wants to do next. His PhD adviser is a luminary in Christian’s research area and one of the best PhD advisers I have ever seen–he takes great care of his students, is inspirational, pushes them to do hard stuff, and demands quality in every aspect of their research. He gets the very best students because of that, so Christian rubs shoulders with a great group of fellow students every day. The get great jobs in a variety of places and one of them has an idea to start a business. That is a perfect setting to find the exact kind of projects that can lead to life-long learning. One buddy even wants them to start a business together–a highly technical business that requires the kind of preparation one can only receive in a math intensive PhD program. I say go for it!