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Patton Oswalt helps Michael Beatty with medical bills after clash on Twitter - The Washington Post

Well the government is no longer shut down and wouldn’t you know it re-opened the day we were supposed to leave for vacation. Figures.

Good morning… the government is still shutdown … make it stop.

This was an amazing day trip to visit the resting place of Sheikh Zayed in Abu Dhabi and the Grand Mosque.

While I did arrive in Dubai casual I took off the baseball cap to be respectful. I walked around and saw this opportunity but it took me a lot of shots to get the sun just right but I think I finally nailed it to my satisfaction.

If get the opportunity to visit please be respectful and follow the guidelines.

I am behind in sharing the results from my Katy Trail project … sorry.

So, as you can see from the pins on the map that I had some really good success with my project. What did I learn? Well for one .. the Raspberry Pi does not have a realtime clock. I guess I should have known that but I didn’t for some reason. Thankfully I setup a portable WiFi router for the little Pi before I left home. I logged into the Pi daily and download the files to my iPad and also reset the clock. The next time I do this I will make sure that I use the time stamp from the GPS reading. Oh well … live and learn. The other thing I noticed is there was a dead spot for a whole day … I’m not sure why that happened except that the specific section of the trail was well covered. All and all I did get some good images and the group was happy with the results. I really liked the randomizes photos that were taken. Oh and another thing I need to account for next time is the break cable and move the mount so that it is not in the photo.

Here are some example photos from the Bike Pi along the way.

Next up — I’m going to work on some electronics projects as well as maybe some AI stuff using Tensorflow object detection. My current challenge with TF is that installing the lite version on a RPi has been difficult to say the least.

That is all for now.

Alright for those of you that do not live in the KS/MO area and know about the Katy Trail here is a site for you. ( bikekatytrail.com ). The short version: This bike trail runs along the former Katy RailRoad line and is about 250 miles long from Machens, MO to Clinton, MO. My wife and I have done several pieces of the route, but in a couple of weeks the whole thing will be attempted over a week. We have some friends coming in to town that will be accompanying us along the trek. I had an idea to document the trip via photos for them taken along the way and that is where the Raspberry Pi comes into the story.

Pieces of the puzzle:

• Raspberry Pi Zero
• Pi Camera module
• RPi Zero case with the camera hole
• GPS module
• Bike Mount

So, like I said I wanted to document the trek down the Katy trail with the end goal of doing a couple of things.

1) Create a time lapse video of the photos that were taken along the ride.

2) GEO Locate the pictures so they could see the progress along the ride with the photos and where it was taken.

So, lets get started.

First I had to find a way to mount a computer … as luck would have it, I found a solution at the local bike store for about $20. I used a generic bike computer mount and stuck the receiver on the back of a RPi Zero case.

From searching around I found this pretty cheap micro USB GPS dongle.

I just let it hang on top of the handlebars since that seems to work just fine without having to attach it to anything besides the Pi and once around the handlebars.

This allows me to take it on and off. I had to add the rubber bands to keep the cover on. We discovered on one of my test runs that the front can pop off. So, that was easy … next how to get GPS data.

Now, after the Pi is mounted I connected a 4000 mAmp battery to it and from my testing it kept the Pi working for 12 hrs. And btw, this is about 10 hrs more than we will be on a bike. I setup a cron job that executes a python program I wrote ( 10 min intervals ) to read the gps data, take a picture and add the gps data to the photo and save it. I learned that there are two modes on the gps mode 3 is the ideal one since it can tell you speed, altitude, etc whereas mode 2 does not include these data points. No big deal I just made sure to hopefully code around it properly.

That is about it for now until we take it on the road and I stitch together a time lapse video. I’m interested to see how all of this works when I get a bunch of still photos to combine.

If anyone is interested in the code just send me a message and I’d be happy to share.

Recently I was discovered a couple of new topics that I wanted to explore with my massive computing infrastructure.

• MQTT
• Bluetooth Sensors

At a high level it is a light weight message platform that implements the publish / subscribe pattern. Pretty simple huh? Actually, it really was pretty simple. More info here: https://www.mqtt.com/ and the implementation I used on my Raspberry PIs: https://mosquitto.org/

If you have not read about MQTT or know about it, let me try briefly.

So, here are the players:

For my first project I wanted to find something that would generate random, yet useful data that I could feed into MQTT — enter the wireless sensor. The sensor that I’m using is the “SensorBug” from BleHome. They are only $25 at Amazon. http://www.blehome.com/sensorbug-PC.html

Raspberry PIs ( 2 RPi 3b+ )

MsgPi = Raspberry Pi with the MQTT broker software installed

SensorPi = Raspberry Pi that will be the catcher of the sensor data and publishing it to the subscriber.

CatcherPi = Raspberry Pi with the subscriber process running on it that catches the data and then adds it to the mysql db.

Three wireless sensors to generate data that are scattered around my house. This setup has been collecting data for a while now and has accumulated well over half million records now.

This is just step one for now. If you have any suggestions on what I might be able to predict with this information … put it in the comments below.

Oh and in case you are wondering what data is being collected: Temp, Light Level, Sensor Orientation ( vertical or horizontal ). I want to add humidity into my collection when I can find a sensor. I’m sure there are lots I just haven’t spent enough time looking yet.

I’ve been playing with MQTT and Pythonista over the holiday.

Here is my simple drawing of the configuration / applications. I have not implemented the black lines yet, but that is next on my list. Basically, I have created some simple commands that will generate MQTT messages and the current iPad python app presents them to me.

I’ll write more as I make progress.

I thought I might start my blog off with a photo from long ago. This is … I believe … one of the first creative type photos I took on purpose. I don’t remember a lot about what lead me to do this shot, but knowing the younger me it probably was just something that looked interesting - or at least the concept. From what I remember too, my brother, had a version of this picture hanging in his dorm room in college … that was cool to me. I have not been back to this location in over 30 years so I am sure it has changed a lot. As a matter of fact I showed this to my dad recently and he started to comment on all the changes that have happened in this area.

Anyway … enjoy.