Last year I wrote an analysis of fishy ads on Facebook, among other things because I had no way to escalate the level of scam that I was getting, and I thought that it would be good for others to be able to follow the breadcrumbs to recognize that type of scams. Since this year I switched company, I find myself being unable to escalate the massive amount of scams and spam I see around me in Google Maps… so let me try to show you what I mean.
For the past two and a half years I’ve been living in West London — I’m not going to show exactly where, but it’s in Brentford. And when I moved into the apartment, I noticed that the various pictures I was taking at home (of food, the back of the router, and so on) kept popping up on my notifications with a suggestion by Google Maps to add them to a review of the building my apartment is in. The reason for that turned out to be that the building was marked as Lodging, which had it acting as a commercial accommodation, rather than a residential building. Oops, but why?
Well, turns out that it’s a smaller version of what’s going on in London and the rest of the world, and it became apparent a few months later, and very clear now. On our floor, there’s not one, but two “holiday rental” units — despite that being apparently against the leasehold agreement between the building and the owners. And indeed, both that company and another few appears to have tried taking over the Google Maps entities for the apartment buildings in our complex, and in a few of the nearby ones, particularly adding phone numbers for inquiries about the buildings — buildings that have no central phone number.
Let me try to show you how deep that rabbit hole is — on your right you can see “Pump House Crescent”, which is a road going around some tall apartment buildings not far from where we live. You can already notice that there’s a Green Dragon Estate that has a pink pin instead of the gray one — that’s because it’s currently marked up as a Lodge and it has reviews — probably for the same reason why I was prompted to add pictures from my own apartment. As far as I can tell, it’s actually part of the various blocks on the crescent, and instead holds residential apartments. I’ve sent an edit request.
When you zoom in a bit more, you can see interesting things. Turner House, Hyperion Tower, Cunningham House, Masson House, and Aitons House are all marked as either Apartment Building or Flat Complex, both of which are residential, and that’s correct. But then there’s Bridgeman House that is marked as Lodging — and that is likely wrong (edit sent and published as I’m typing, turns out Google Maps reviewers are very prompt to fix these issues when you report them).
But not far from it is the possible scam you can see on the left. 360 Serviced Apartments is even showing availability for a residential building — which they are not in. They provide their address as Masson House for Google Maps to put them there, but their actual company address according to their website is in London W5 — and the picture that they posted is quite a way away on the river, rather than where the pin is present. Can we call it scam? I think I will.
It doesn’t end here — there’s another similar scam across the road for another serviced apartment that even managed to put their website’s domain in the name of the point of interest! In this case there’s no picture of the outside, so it is possible that the inside pictures are actually appropriate — but again we’re talking about a residential building, in a residential area, that, as far as I can tell, is not cleared for subletting. Does it end here? Of course it does not.
In the gallery above you can see one of the most blatant scams that I could find on Maps in this area. As you can see from the first picture, down a lane from Kew Bridge station there’s an Apple Apartments Kew Bridge. Once you click on it, you can see that is reported as a 4-star hotel. With a picture of a station — except that the station is definitely not the National Rail Kew Bridge station, but rather the London Underground Hammersmith Station, which as any resident of West London would be able to tell you, is nowhere near Kew Bridge!
And as you scroll the gallery, you can see more pictures uploaded as if they were taken from the hotel, but they are clearly taken at different places. There’s pictures of Kew Bridge itself, as if you were able to see it from the place. And then you can see from the various reviews that this is not a 4-star hotel at all. Indeed, the star rating of UK hotels is defined by the AA, and for 4-star hotels they expect:
4 stars: Professional, uniformed staff respond to your needs or requests. Well-appointed public areas. The restaurant or dining room is open to residents and non-residents. Lunch is available in a designated eating area.
Let me remind you that it’s definitely a holiday let apartment that those “Apple Apartments” are.
I’m sure that all of these examples are not limited to Google Maps, as I remember being a “SuperUser” for FourSquare years ago, and having to review similar spam/scam situations, which is why I’ve been doing this on and off with Google Maps, both while working at Google and now. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s fair we, the public, end up having to clean up after this level of spam and abuse.
Anyway, if you live in an area that has lots of residential buildings, do take a look if there’s a lot of them marked Lodging, and that have phone numbers (particularly mobile numbers), and consider giving them a clear up if you can. It’s not just about removing scams for tourists, it’s also making sure that a residential area is not peppered with commercial corridors created by rule-bending (or rule-breaking) holiday let listings.
This is yet another of the pre-announced projects, and possibly one of the most procrastinated ones. I own a Sony Bravia TV I bought in Ireland in 2013, and is still working very well for our needs (we don’t watch that much TV). It’s connected to a Yamaha RX-V475 receiver on one input and a cheap HDMI switch on the other input, because there’s too many devices, although we only use three or four of them most of the time: Chromecast, Portal TV, HTPC, and PlayStation 4. They are split equally between the two inputs. So far, so good.
The problem starts with the fact that sometimes if the TV is turned on by the Chromecast or the Portal, the ARC does not initialize properly, and we hear no audio. The solution is worthy of The IT Crowd: tell the TV to use the internal speakers, then tell it to use the external speakers again — turn off and on the ARC itself. It’s annoying and takes a few keypresses.
What I have been wanting for a while is a way to ask Assistant (or Alexa) to “unfuck the TV” — that is to reset the audio channel for us, recording a macro to do that ARC off/on dance. It was for this reason I bought the Feather M4 last year, but I only ended up starting to work on it just this month.
To make this possible, the first thing I needed was to know the commands sent by the remote, and have a way to replicate them back to the TV. I already had some experience with infrared receivers as, a long time ago in a different life, I maintained the LIRC patchset for Linux 2.6, for a while. I even tried writing Qt (3) bindings for LIRC. I wonder if I can find the source code anywhere. But that was not as useful as I thought.
Thankfully, Ken Shirriff wrote good documentation on the protocol, and linked to further details, and even to a full archive of all the Sony command codes. Which made my life much easier, but not completely easy. While Adafruit has an IRRemote library, it does not correctly interpret Sony SIRC commands. I considered adding the support directly into it, but it turned out to be a bit more invasive than expected, so I ended up instead writing a separate package that included both the decoder and the encoder (this was before I started the new job, so releasing it was easy — but now I’m having to wait a little bit to continue on it.)
Now, once I managed to decode the commands, I need to be able to send them. And here’s where things get interesting. What we usually refer to as commands are a bunch of bits. These are encoded, based on the protocol, as a series of pulses, which are modulated on top of a carrier wave with a certain frequency.
Unfortunately, it turns out that talking to a Sony TV is nowhere near as easy as it might sound. Let’s try to figure out what’s going on by providing a bit of vocabulary. An infrared signal as used by most remote controls usually carries a command and, in most cases, an address to specify which device should take the command (since they are usually used in place where there are multiple devices using infrared remote controls). These are encoded in bits according to the rules of the protocol, and then converted to pulses. These pulses are then applied to a carrier wave of a certain frequency, which defines the speed at which the infrared LED is “blinking” on and off. The LED itself has a wavelength which represent the “colour” of the light in the infrared spectrum.
For Sony’s SIRC, the TV expects a 40kHz carrier, and it seems a 950nm wavelength. It seems like you can use 940nm LEDs but they have worse reception, and only works if they are bright enough. The first batch of LEDs I bought, as well as the pre-soldered module from DFRobot, turned out to not be bright enough for my TV to recognize — so I decided to try with desoldering the LED from a replacement remote control from eBay, which worked fine, so I thought I needed 950nm LEDs — but no, it works with good enough 940nm LEDs, just not with the tiny ones I originally bought from Mouser.
So once I had a way to send arbitrary Sony commands to my TV, I started looking for options to trigger the ARC reset — unfortunately this is proving more complicated than I expected: there’s no command that I could send that would provide me with the ARC menu. Instead I can only bring up the Sync menu reliably — but that menu has different entries depending on whether the selected input has working HDMI CEC, which is extremely annoying.
On the other hand, I did find commands that select directly the different inputs directly, instead of showing up the input selection menu and choosing from there. Which gave me a different idea to start with: while I haven’t given up on the macro for fixing the audio, what I can do is to script input selection across the two-level mux.
I started by wondering if I could send the IR command to the HDMI switcher as well, so that I could select between those two easily — that turned out to be another pile of yaks to shave. The switcher uses the NEC protocol, which has a 38kHz carrier wave, but that turned out not to matter as much (the decoder it uses seem to accept 40kHz just as well) — instead I had a hard time to get it to receive the command because it expected a NEC “repeat signal” to seal the command. I guess that’s going to be a blog post in and by itself.
Now, my original plan was to get something running on the Feather, attach an AirLift wing to give it WiFi, and control that… somehow. I also considered re-coding this with ESP32 and ESPHome, despite it not having an obvious way to send SIRC commands while making sense — it doesn’t represent the commands the way the protocol expects, and the most reasonable way I could find was to generate the pulse sequence, and just sending that raw.
But then I thought it over and realised that, at least for the moment, it makes more sense for me to use an USB-to-GPIO bridge, and control this from a full blown computer — the reason for that is that I would want to be able to open a webpage on my phone, or my wife’s, and select the right input altogether. And while there’s a Python module for controlling the receiver, using that from CircuitPython or MicroPython would probably take some work. And even though I could just control the Feather remotely, via MQTT or USB-Serial, it would still likely be more work than driving this all from the same Flask app locally.
Unfortunately, I don’t have code to show you yet. While my new dayjob has much simpler policies than the last, I need to complete the training before I can start releasing new projects. Hopefully next update will come with code and demos.
You probably don’t remember, but I have been chasing the paperless office for many years. At first it was a matter of survival, as running my own business in Italy meant tons of paperwork, and sorting it all out while being able to access it was impossible. By scanning and archiving the invoices and other documents, the whole thing got much better.
I continued to follow the paperless path when I stopped running a company and just working, but by then, the world started following me and most services started insisting on paperless billing anyway, which was nice. In Dublin I received just a few pieces of paper a month, and it was easy to scan them, and then bring them to the office to dispose of in the secure shredding facilities. I kept this on after moving to London, despite the movers steaming my scanner, using a Brother ADS-1100W instead.
But since the days in Italy, my scanning process changed significantly: in Dublin I never had a Linux workstation, so the scanner ended up connected to my Gamestation using Windows — using PaperPort which was at the time marketed by Nuance. The bright side of this was that PaperPort applies most of the same post-processing as Unpaper while at the same time running OCR over the scanned image, making it searchable on Google Drive, Dropbox and so on.
Unfortunately, it seems like something changed recently, either in Windows 10, the WIA subsystem or something else altogether, and from time to time after scanning a page, PaperPort or the scanner freeze, and don’t terminate the processing, requiring a full reboot of the OS. Yes I tried powercycling the scanner, yes I tried disconnecting the USB and reconnecting, none seem to work except a full reboot, which is why I’m wondering if it might be a problem with the WIA subsystem.
The current workaround I have is to use the TWAIN system, which is the same that I used with my scanner on Windows 98, which is surprising and annoying — in particular I need to remember to turn on the scanner before I open PaperPort, otherwise it fails to scan and the process will need to be killed with the Task Manager. So I’m actually considering switching the scanning to Linux again.
My old scan2pdf command-line tool would help, but it does not include the OCR capabilities. Paperless seems more interesting, and it uses Unpaper itself. But it assumes you want the document stored on the host, as well as scanned and processed. I would have to see if it has integration with Google Drive, or otherwise figure out how to get that integration going with something like rclone. But, well, that would be quite a bit of work that I’m not sure I want to do right now.
Speaking of work, and organizing stuff — I released some hacky code which I wrote to sort through the downloaded PDF bills from various organizations. As I said on Twitter when I released it, it is not a work of engineering, or a properly-cleaned-up tool. But it works for most of the bills I care about right now, and it makes my life (and my wife’s) easier by having all of our bank statements and bills named and sorted (particularly when just downloading a bunch of PDFs from different companies once a month, and sorting them all.)
Funnily enough, writing that tool also had some surprises. You may remember that a few years ago I leaked my credit card number by tweeting a screenshot of what I thought was uninitialized memory in Dolphin. Unlike Irish credit card statements, British card statements don’t include the full PAN in any of the pages of a PDF. So you could think it’s safe to provide a downloaded PDF as proof of address to other companies. Well, turns out it isn’t, at least for Santander: there’s an invisible (but searchable and highlightable) full 16-digit PAN at the top of the first page of the document. You can tell it’s there when you run the file over pdf2text or similar tools (there’s a similar invisible number on bank statements, but that’s also provided visible: it’s the sort-code and account number).
Oh and it looks like most Italian bills don’t use easily-scrapeable layouts, which is why there’s none of them right now in the tool. If someone knows of a Python library that can extract text from pages using “Figure” objects, I’m all ears.
Given my background, you may think I’m referring to servers — after all I ran the tinderbox for a long while. But no, in this case I’m referring to actual, physical boxes. And a few virtual ones as well.
See, when I listed my electronics projects, it probably sounded like my house is now top-to-bottom filled with random electronics stuff. This might have been the case if I was doing that in Dublin, but nowadays I’m not alone, and while my wife accepts the need for my random projects, making a total mess of the apartment is probably not a great idea. Indeed the “study” (that is, the second bedroom turned into a home office) is not quite sorted out, but it’s also not a total mess right now (you can see it in the test Live whiteboarding).
The way I’m trying to keep all of this together, is through a significant number of boxes. I already bought a number of LEGO boxes back in Dublin — the reason for the choice was that those boxes are particularly designed to be used by kids, and that made them particularly sturdy. Unfortunately they are also not particularly big. That made them not particularly useful for storing more bulky items, such as my multimeter, the dremel or most of my screwdrivers’ set. I did bring a toolbox with me from Italy – which includes not one but two hammers, more screwdrivers, one older soldering iron, and other similar tools – but this ended up being the kind of toolbox where tools end up to die, because it’s just so uncomfortable to use.
Instead I now bought bigger, bulkier boxes — using one to store the tools, and another one to store my “electronics” stuff, most of which is stored in tiny boxes inside — so that I have a box of transistors, two of resistors, a couple of Dupont connectors, and so on. This makes it easier to sort through what I need at any one time. I considered using bigger boxes with more compartments, but it turns out that most of the time I only need three or four smaller boxes, and sorting between smaller boxes is easier. I have unfortunately not found a very good box to hold the soldering kit – TS-100 and so on – but I might end up looking for something with foam inserts if I ever figure out how to properly design those, after all.
The LEGO boxes are now (mostly) project boxes: one of them has all of the glucometers that I’ve either already reversed or plan to reversing soon; another one has the R205 boards that I never made much progress on, and so on. The fact that I have so many half-complete projects is indeed disheartening when I think of it. Unfortunately there’s reason for that: either lack of skills on my part, the lack of time for myself, or the lack of tooling at the right time. I can for instance tell you that I definitely would have a much easier time nowadays trying to solder those those pins, not just because I improved my soldering skills, but also because I now have tools that I didn’t even know existed back then, including the Dupont crimper.
And this is where the project boxes come into play. Being able to put everything for one particular project into a box and not worry about it for a while is a liberating experience. I had to literally do that when I started my new job — it’s not that difficult passing from one Big Tech company to another, but it is time consuming, and after spending nearly eight straight hours in front of a monitor watching videos and/or reading tutorials, the last thing I wanted was to spend some more time in front of the computer… having all the half-projects in front of me was tough, and I preferred shoving everything into a project box, and going back to it a week or so later — I have indeed gone back to one of my projects already and will likely have a blog post about it later.
But as I said, there’s also “metaphorical” project boxes — that work for me both at work and at home: there are times when working on the same project for months at a time is not feasible. It may be that what was once a priority isn’t anymore, or a higher priority comes out. Or maybe you’re just too burnt out to work on one thing, and decided that it’s time to work on something else for a while. Having the ability to set aside a project, and come back to it later, having state and notes about what something was about is something important. For most of my opensource projects, I leave my own notes in the blog, which is why there’s so many posts of old projects that have not gone anywhere. For work projects, I try to leave design docs or notes, and for other stuff, I started having proper journals dedicated to the ideas. That’s how Birch Books started as well.
The main advantage I found for doing this at work is that it allows collecting rakes without losing track of the main objective of your job. Many of the examples I gave in the previous blog post on the topic have been months-long efforts. Some of those took two years to close the reported issues! And in at least one case, the work had to literally be halted, and wait for two quarters, because one of the blockers could only be solved by deleting the whole source of a service that was being replaced.
So what I’m advocating about is the ability to keep things around, but out of sight. It’s the reason why I can’t stand certain policies in projects (at work and FLOSS alike) that pretty much disallow “long-standing bugs”: sometimes you want to keep all the information you have on a project together, and a bug/issue/task that has been opened for a number of years might just be the right way — closing it for the sake of an OKR target is unlikely to do anyone a good service.
And also allowing ourselves (all of us), to box up projects — whether it is for a while or forever. Being reminded of the stuff you have not completed is not going to make you feel any better, in my experience. Being able to say “Yeah it’s in the box, one day I might or might not get to it” is a way to breathe in, and give yourself space.
I have already written about Genki Gear, which is probably the “uniform supplier” for British Isles’ geeks. They are clearly not alone — and I thought I would give a shout out to another geeky supplier.
TeeTurtle makes clothes, slippers, plushies, underwear, stickers, … with some of the geekiest art ever. You can find on their website original art, Disney and Marvel, Star Wars or, if that’s your cup of tea (it’s not mine), Rick & Morty.
And they have probably my favourite filter selection for an art clothing store: by animals! Because whether you’re into puppies, cats, foxes, pandas, bunnies, dragons, … everybody needs their favourite tshirt.
And, let’s not forget, Unicorns!
Indeed, these are the same people behind Unstable Unicorns and a bunch of other awesome board and card games. If you have not had a chance to take a look at those games, do now. Unstable Unicorns is one of our favourite party games, together with Exploding Kittens.
If you’re locked in with your significant others, or with other housemates, you may want to give it a try… but just remember the advice on the box: Unicorns are your friends now!
In this week’s sARTSurday, I want to show off my own creation, for once.
Because of the lockdown, we had to sacrifice not just our conventions, but also our visits to Kew Gardens — and despite it reopening next month, we’re not sure if we feel safe enough to go and visit, since with diabetes I’m considered at risk. And Kew is where I would usually spend some time taking pictures with the weather we had… and that’s not happening any time soon.
Instead, since I started this weekly column, I have been takingquite a few more pictures inside the apartment. I even decided to invest in a couple of accessories for my camera to make it easier to take pictures of those and my art project — namely a flashgun, and an L-bracket (which will be useful even in Kew when I’ll be able to get there again.)
So for the past week or so, inspired by the last post header picture, I decided to take “candid” shots of the plushies that we have home. Most of these used to be on my desk at the office, both in Dublin and London — but given the current situation, they are likely going to stay at home for a while.
I’m clearly not a professional photographer, I’m not even a particularly good photographer. But I thought it would make people smile to see them, and that’s all I care about.
If you want to see more pictures, particularly of squirrels, you can find them on Flickr, Facebook (separately from this blog) and Instagram. I have some more pictures to take of Star Wars plushies and LEGO sets, so keep your eyes on them if you’re into those.
It’s a bittersweet time to post this, but very sweet content in it, so I hope it’ll brighten your days, as all sARTSurdays aim to. This weekend was meant to be the MCM Comic Con weekend in London, but in the current situation, the ExCeL center where it was supposed to take place is still the NHS Nightingale, as far as I can tell. With the rescheduled July date also cancelled, we’re currently not sure when, or even if, we’ll be back to a convention. And in particular at this MCM we were planning to look out for Sarah and Stef (again), to grab the set of Our Super Adventure books.
At the last MCM (October 2019), we were just walking the floor when we saw a giant kitty showing clearly on top of the booths — cat people as we are, me and my wife ran straight towards it. We had at that point no idea what Sarah and Stef were — but the Pesto plushie was too cute not to pick up, so we bought it, and for the following day I had her mischievous glare staring out of my bag.
A little later we were queueing for my photoshoot turn with Simon Pegg and decided to take a look at the comic — and loved it! But content warning: if you’re the type of person who suffers being alone or lonely, it might be bad for your mood. I know that I wouldn’t have appreciated the comic nearly as much, if I hadn’t found it as a newlywed. But otherwise, it’s one of the sweetest and cutest online comic I’ve ever read — and positive, too! It’s not trying to make it sound like life is completely carefree, but it’s also making light fun of the harder moments of a relationship, and that made out outright laugh on the floor of the con.
Our plan for this MCM was to go and see them again, and pick up a book or two (or three) — we had a preference to pick it up directly from them, also to thank them for the many laugh we got from their comic — but given the situation, online ordering will do. And this weekend there’s an exclusive pin thrown in, which was supposed to be exclusive for the MCM. (Sigh, I did say bittersweet, right? Every time I type MCM I’m sighing.)
In addition to Our Super Adventure, which is posted on their website, Sarah’s Instagram and Facebook page, and probably a few more syndication websites, they stream their game sessions on Twitch, where this very Saturday they have been running an “Our Super Stream Con” from home. (Although by the time you read this post it’s probably mostly over, unfortunately).
So if you’re up for a sweet laugh, particularly while laying in bed with your significant other after an exhausting lockdown day, give a read to Sarah’s and Stef’s adventures. You won’t regret it.
Because of a strange alignment between my decision to leave Google to find a new challenge, and the pandemic causing a lockdown of most countries (including the UK, where I live), you might have noticed more activity on this blog. Indeed for the past two months I maintained an almost perfect record of three posts a week, up from the occasional post I have written in the past few years. In part this was achieved by sticking to a “programme schedule” — I started posted on Mondays about my art project – which then expanded into the insulin reminder – then on Thursday I had a rotating tech post, finishing the week up with sARTSurdays.
This week it’s a bit disruptive because while I do have topics to fill in the Monday schedule, they start being a bit more scatterbrained, so I want to give a bit of a regroup, and gauge what’s the interest around them in the first place. As a starting point, the topic for Mondays is likely going to stay electronics — to follow up from the 8051 usage on the Birch Books, and the Feather notification light.
As I have previously suggested on Twitter, I plan on controlling my Kodi HTPC with a vintage, late ’80s Sony SVHS remote control. Just for the craic, because I picked it up out of nostalgia, when I went to Weird Stuff a few years ago — I’m sad it’s closed now, but thankful to Mike for having brought me there the first time. The original intention was to figure out how the complicated VCR recording timer configuration worked — but not unexpectedly the LCD panel is not working right and that might not be feasible. I might have to do a bit more work and open it up, and that probably will be a blog post by itself.
Speaking of Sony, remotes and electronics — I’m also trying to get something else to work. I have a Sony TV connected to an HDMI switcher, and sometimes it get stuck with the ARC not initializing properly. Fixing it is relatively straightforward (just disable and re-enable the ARC) but it takes a few remote control button presses… so I’m actually trying to use an Adafruit Feather to transmit the right sequence of infrared commands as a macro to fix that. Which is why I started working on pysirc. There’s a bit more than that to be quite honest, as I would like to have a single-click selection of inputs with multiple switchers, but again that’s going to be a post by itself.
Then there’s some trimming work for the Birch Books art project. The PCBs are not here yet, so I have no idea if I have to respin them yet. If so, expects a mistakes-and-lessons post about it. I also will likely spend some more time figuring out how to make the board design more “proper” if possible. I also still want to sit down and see how I can get the same actuator board to work with the Feather M0 — because I’ll be honest and say that CircuitPython is much more enjoyable to work with than nearly-C as received by SDCC.
Also, while the actuator board supports it, I have currently left off turning on the fireplace lights for Birch Books. I’m of two minds about this — I know there are some flame effect single-LEDs out there, but they don’t appear to be easy to procure. Both bigclive and Adam Savage have shown flame-effect LED bulbs but they don’t really work in the small scale.
There are cheap fake-candle LED lamps out there – I saw them the first time in Italy at the one local pub that I enjoy going to (they serve so many varieties of tea!), and I actually have a few of them at home – but how they work is by using PWM on a normal LED (usually a warm light one). So what I’m planning on doing is diving into how those candles do that, and see if I can replicate the same feat on either the 8051 or the Feather.
I don’t know when the ESP32 boards I ordered will arrive, but probably will spend some time playing with those and talking about it then. It would be nice to have an easy way to “swap out the brains” of my various projects, and compare how to do things between them.
And I’m sure that, given the direction this is going, I’ll have enough stuff to keep myself entertained outside of work for the remaining of the lockdown.
Oh, before I forget — turns out that I’m now hanging out on Discord. Adafruit has a server, which seems to be a very easygoing and welcoming way to interact with the CircuitPython development team, as well as discussing options and showing off. If you happen to know of welcoming and interesting Discord servers I might be interested in, feel free to let me know.
I have not forgotten about the various glucometers I acquired in the past few months and that I still have not reversed. There will be more posts about glucometers, but for those I’m using the Thursday slot, as I have not once gone down to physically tapping into them yet. So unless my other electronics projects starve out that’s going to continue that way.
I have overlooked music in this past series of sARTSurdays, and it’s time to fix this mistake, with a metal band that is close to my heart — Beast in Black. And the reason they are close to my heart is that it was thanks to them that I met my wife — she was coming to the Rhapsody Reunion concert to see them being support, while I was there for the main act.
As you probably can guess by, uh, everything up to now (title, Rhapsody’s involvement, the style of the T-Shirts, …), Beast in Black are a metal band, and so if you don’t like that kind of music it’s unlikely you’ll be interested, but if you are, stay with me. It’s not just metal, it’s metal with 80s throwbacks, pretty much what our generation would find nostalgic if we ever went into that kind of music. Which is why my wife loved them from early on, and I found myself appreciating them with gusto.
I think that for me personally, part of the pleasure is that they are not bass-heavy music — my ears tends to prefer higher pitch sounds (funny how ears work), which is why I originally started listening to Dragonforce. So between Yannis’s voice and Anton’s guitar work, my wife didn’t have much work to convince me.
Speaking of Yannis, make sure you check out his YouTube Channel — in addition to singing in Beast in Black, he’s releasing vocal covers of… lots. Nightwish? Check. Disney’s Frozen? Check. Zayn (uh?)? Check. I shouldn’t be surprised that he seems to have quite the fan club, as proven by the folks we chatted with in the queue to see them in Amsterdam.
Okay so I should probably point out that we can come out a bit… strong in our support. After seeing them in London the night we met, my wife went to Japan explicitly to see them at a festival there, and together we saw them again in London (twice), and then went to Amsterdam and Budapest for two of their concerts — taking the time to make a proper holiday out of them. And thinking back, I’m fairly sure I gained a few kilos in Budapest, the food was so good.
You may have noticed from the t-shirt picture the Beast riding a very surprised unicorn. For once this is not a reference to Unstable Unicorns, but rather to the band joining the Scottish band Gloryhammer in their British Isles tour — Gloryhammer being known for the Unicorn Invasion of Dundee, which does make me wonder whether there’s something up in Scotland when it comes to supernatural invasions.
So, pick your poison between Spotify, Google Play Music YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, CDs, vinyl, cassette tape — and have a listen. Pump up the volume (if you can, your mileage may vary depending on whether your neighbours would like the music), and enjoy some “expensive cheese”, as Derek once said.
As you may know if you read this blog, I have insulin-dependent diabetes. In particular, I use both fast and long acting insulin, which basically means I need to take a shot of insulin every morning (at around the same time, but there’s at least a bit of leeway around it).
This is not usually a problem: the routine of waking up, getting ready to leave, making a coffee and either drinking it or taking it with me makes it very hard to miss the step “taking the insulin”. Unfortunately, like for many others, this routine is gone out of the window due to the current lockdown. Maybe a bit worse for me since I’m currently still between jobs, which means I don’t even have the routine of logging in to work form home, and of meetings.
What this meant, is that days blurred together, and I started wondering if I remembered to take my insulin in the morning. A few too many times that answer was “I don’t know”, and I think at least twice in the past couple of weeks I did indeed forget. I needed something to make it easier to remember and not to forget.
Because insulin injections tend to be one of those things that I do “in autopilot”, I needed something hard to forget to do. Theoretically, the Libre App allows annotating that you took long-acting insulin (and how much) but that requires me to remember to scan my sensor right after and write down that I did. It’s too easy to forget. I also wanted something that would be a lot more explicit about telling me (and my wife) that I forgot to tell my insulin. And hopefully something that I wouldn’t risk telling I took my insulin too soon in the interaction, and then not actually doing the right thing (as sometimes I reach out for my insulin pen, realise there’s not enough insulin there, and need to pick up a new one from the fridge).
The Trigger: Yes, I Took My Insulin
The first thing I decided to do was to use the spare Flic Button. I bought Flics last year upon suggestion of Luke, and they actually helped immensely — we have one in the study and one in the bedroom, to be able to turn on the smart lights quietly (in the night) and without bothering with the phone apps. We kept a third one “spare”, not quite sure what to use it for until now. The button fits on the back of the cabinet where I keep my “in use” insulin pen. And indeed, it’s extremely easy and obvious to reach while putting the pen down — as an aside, most European insulin pens fit perfectly on a Muji 3-tier slanted display, which is what I’ve been using to keep mine in.
This is not exactly the perfect trigger. The perfect trigger wouldn’t require an action outside of the measured action — so in a perfect world, I would be building something that triggers when I throw an used needle into the needle container. But since that’s a complex project for which I have no obvious solution, I’ll ignore that. I have a trigger, it doesn’t risk getting too much in my way. It should be fine.
But what should the trigger do? The first idea I had was to use IFTTT to create a Google Calendar event when I pressed the button. It wouldn’t be great for notifying if I forgot the insulin, but it would at least allow me to keep track of it. But then I had another idea. I had a spare Adafruit Feather M4 Express, including an AirLift FeatherWing coprocessor for WiFi. I originally bought it to fix an issue with my TV (which I still have not fixed), and considered using it on my art project, but it also has a big bright RGB LED on it (an AdaFruit NeoPixel), which I thought I would use for notifications.
A quick Flask app later, and I had something working — the Flic button would hit one endpoint on the web app, which would record me having taking my insulin, while the Feather would be requesting another endpoint to know how to reconfigure the LED. The webapp would have the logic to turn the LED either red or quiescent depending on whether I got my insulin for the day. There’s a bit of logic in there to define “the day”, as I don’t need the notification at 1am if I have not gone to bed yet (I did say that my routine is messed up didn’t I?) but that’s all minor stuff.
The code for the webapp (Python, Flask) and the Feather (CircuitPython) I pushed to GitHub immediately (because I can), but there’s no documentation for it yet. It also doesn’t use the NeoPixel anymore, which I’ll explain in a moment, so you may not really be able to use it out of the box as it is.
For placement, I involved my wife — I want her to be able to tell whether I didn’t take my insulin, so if I’m having a “spaced out day”, she can remind me. We settled for putting it in the kitchen, close to the kettle, so that it’s clearly visible when making coffee — something we do regularly early in the morning. It worked out well, since we already had an USB power supply in the kitchen, for the electric cheese grater I converted.
Limitations of the Feather Platform.
The Feather platform by itself turned out to be a crummy notification platform. Don’t get me wrong, the ease of using it is extremely nice. I wrote the CircuitPython logic in less than an hour, and that made it very nice. But if you need a clear LED to tell you whether something was done or not, you can’t just rely on the Feather. Or at least not on the Feather M4 Express. Yes it comes with a NeoPixel, but it also comes with two bright, surface-mount LEDs by the sides of the USB connector.
One of the two LEDs is yellow, and connected to the optional LiPo battery charging circuitry, and according to the documentation it’s expected to “flicker at times” — as it turns out, it seems to be continuously flickering for me, to the point at first I thought it was actually the RX/TX notification on the serial port. There’s also a red LED which I thought was just the “power” LED — but that is actually controlled by a GPIO on the board, except it’s pulled high (so turned on) when using the AirLift Wing.
The battery charging LED does appear to behave as documented (only at times flickering) on the M0 Express I ended up getting in addition to the M4. But since that is not compatible with the AirLift (at least using CircuitPython), it might just be that this is also a side-effect of using the AirLift.
Why am I bringing up these LEDs? Well, if you want a notification light that’s either red-or-off, having a bright always-on red LED is a bad idea. Indeed, a day after setting it up this way, my wife asked me if I took my insulin, because she saw the red light in the corner. Yeah it’s too bright — and easy to confuse for the one that you want to check out for.
My first reaction was to desolder the two LEDs — but I have hardly ever desoldered SMD components, and I seem to have fallen for the rookie mistake of trying to desolder them with a solder iron rather than a hot air gun, and actually destroyed the microUSB connector. Oops. A quick order from Mouser meant I had to wait a few days to go back playing with the Feather.
A Better, Funnier Light
This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it forced me to take a few steps back and figure out how to make it less likely to confuse the LEDs, beside trying to glue them down with some opaque glue. So instead, I figured out that there’s plenty of RGB LED lamps out there — so why not using those? I ordered a cheap Pikachu from Amazon, which delivered about at the same time as Mouser. I knew it was probably coming from AliExpress (and, spoilers, it pretty much did — only the cardboard looked like printed for the UK market by a domestic company), but ordering it at the source would have taken too long.
The board inside turned out to be fairly well organised, and it was actually much easier to tap into it than expected — except for me forgetting how transistors work, and bridging to the wrong side of the resistor to try turning on the LEDs manually, thus shorting and burning them. I ended up having to pretty much reimplement the same transistor setup outside of the board, but if you do it carefully, you only need three GPIO lines to control the lamp.
The PCB from the RGB LED light I bought. Very well organised. If you want to pair it to a MCU to control it, remove the crossed out IC, then tap into the blue-marked connections. Pay attention to the side of the resistor you connect this on!
The LED colour can be varied by PWM, which is fairly easy to do with CircuitPython. You only need to be careful with which GPIO lines you use for it. I used “random” lines when testing on the breadboard, but then wanted to tidy it up using lines 10, 11, and 12 on the finalized board — turns out that line 10 does not appear to have timer capabilities, so you can’t actually use it for PWM. And also, lines 11 and 12 are needed for the AirLift — which means the only lines I could use for this were 5, 6 and 9.
At this point, I had to change the webapp so that instead of turning the LED off to signify I took my insulin, it would instead turn the LEDs yellow, to have a bright and happy Pikachu on the kitchen counter. And an angry red one in the morning until I take my insulin.
Of course to be able to put the lamp in the kitchen next to the kettle, I had to make sure it wouldn’t be just a bunch of boards with cables going back and forth. So first of all, I ended up wiring together a Feather Doubler — which allows a feather (and a wing) to sit side-by-side. The doubler has prototype areas in-between the connectors, which were enough to solder in the three transistors and three resistors — you won’t need those if you don’t burn out the original transistors either!
Unfortunately, because I had stacking headers on my AirLift, even with the cover off, the lamp wouldn’t sit straight. But my wife got the idea of turning the cover inside out, using the space provided by the battery compartment, which worked actually fairly good (it requires some fiddling to make it stable, and I was out of Sugru glue to build a base for it, but for now it’ll work).
Following Up: Alternative Designs and Trimmings
So now I have a working notification light. It works, it turns red in the morning, and turns back yellow after I click the button to signal I took my insulin. It needs a webapp running – and I have been running this on my desktop for now – but that’s good enough for me.
Any improvement from here is pretty much trimming, and trying something new. I might end up getting myself another AirLift and solder the simpler headers on it, to make the profile of the sandwiched board smaller. Or if I am to remake this from an original lamp with working transistors, I could just avoid the problem of the doubler — I would only need GPIO wirings, and could use the prototyping space next to the M4 Express to provide the connection.
I did order a few more lamps in different styles from AliExpress — they will take their due time to show up, and that’s okay. I’ll probably play with them a bit more. I ordered one that (probably) does not have RGB LEDs — it might be interesting to design a “gut replacement” board, that just brings in new LEDs altogether. I ordered one that has “two-colour” images, which likely just means it has two sets of LEDs. I’ll be curious to see how those look like.
I also ordered some ESP32-based “devkits” from AliExpress — this is the same CPU used in the AirLift wing as a WiFi co-processor only, but it’s generally powerful enough that it would be able to run the whole thing off a single processor. This might not be as easy as it sounds to prototype, particularly given that I’m not sure I can just provide the 5V coming from the lamp’s connector to the ESP board (ESP32 uses 3.3V), and I burnt the 3.3V regulator on the lamp’s original board. Also since I need the transistor assembly, I would have to at least get a prototype board to solder everything on and — well, it might just not work out. Still nice to have them in a drawer though.
While I don’t have a 3D printer, and I’m not personally interested in having one at home, and I’m also not going into an office, which may or may not have one (old dayjob did, new dayjob I’m not sure), I might also give a try to software to design a “replacement base” that can fit the Feather, and screw into the rest of the lamp that is already there. It might also be a starting point for designing a version that works with the ESP32 — for that one, you would need the microUSB port from the USB module rather than the one present in the lamp, to go through the on-board regulator. This one is just for the craic, as my Irish friends would say, as I don’t expect that to be needed any time soon.
All in all, I’m happy with what I ended up with. The lamp is cute, and doesn’t feel out of place. It does not need to broadcast to anyone but me and my wife what the situation is. And it turns out to be almost entirely based on Python code that I just released under MIT.
My new friend who reminds me to look after myself!
