Daniele Nicassio's blog | After all, we're just some kind of local optimum

Raspberry PI powered Door Alarm

This is my last Raspberry PI project. It’s a simple alarm driven by a home-made door sensor which plays an alarm sound and sends me a message via twitter.

The video is in italian.

Here’s the python code which uses the tweepy library:


#!/usr/bin/python

# Import modules for CGI handling 
import cgi, cgitb, time
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import os
import tweepy
import traceback

#fill these variables with your twitter app data
oauth_token = ** 
oauth_token_secret = **

consumer_key = **
consumer_secret = **

auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(oauth_token, oauth_token_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

def send_tweet( api, what ):
    try:
        print "Tweeting '"+what+"'.."
        now = int(time.time())
        api.update_status('@danielenick89 '+ str(now) +': '+ what)
        print "Tweet id "+str(now)+ " sent"
    except:
        print "Error while sending tweet"
        traceback.print_exc()

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)
GPIO.setup(11, GPIO.IN)
state = GPIO.input(11)
#print "Content-type: text/htmlnn";
while not GPIO.input(11):
    time.sleep(0.3)
#print "Activated.."
while GPIO.input(11):
    time.sleep(0.3)


send_tweet(api, "RasPI: Unauthorized door opening detected.")
os.system("mplayer alarm2/alarm.mp3");

In order to use this code you have to create an application on twitter, and then fill the variables (oauth_token, oauth_token_secret, consumer_key, consumer_secret) with the relative value you can find in the site after creating the app.

Embedding Google+ Videos in your Web Page

UPDATE: This method works but the embedded video expires after about a month, and the code must be updated. It might be possible to try to modify the embedded code to make it expire later, but I didn’t test it.

With the introduction of Google+ instant upload, many people started automatically backing up their photos and videos in Google Plus (and many started actively using G+ for this reason).

This is of course great, but there’s also a limitation: you can share the uploaded photos/videos only in Google Plus. I think it works this way to increase the popularity of the social network but that’s not very comfortable, expecially when you have ~300Mb videos already uploaded but you can’t even move them to Youtube, to share and embed them where you do prefer (eg. facebook, twitter, personal website).

I searched the Internet a lot before understanding that probably Google doesn’t want you to share Google Plus videos outside its social network, and i decided to “manually” find a way.
After a little trying i found out how to to embed Google+ videos in your personal website. I found that you can easily extract the html code to embed the video directly from G+:

The steps are few and pretty easy (i assume you use Chrome/Chromium browser because it is very comfortable for inspecting the DOM, but it can certainly be done in Firefox too):

Go to Google Plus, find the video you want to embed and simply play it.
When the video is playing, pause it and inspect the html (you can do this with chrome/chromium browsers by right-clicking -> Inspect Element). Be sure to right click near the video, but not on it (you can’t, it’s flash content)
Search the DOM tree for the “<embed>” tag (See the picture)
Then right click on it -> Copy as HTML (on Chrome/Chromium)
Now you have an HTML code representing the video: we’re almost done! It should look like this:

Now you can (if needed) modify some parameter you find in the code, i recommend to change the
autoplay=1
to prevent the video from autostarting when the page loads.

This is not a official way to share Google Plus videos, of course, so this method may not work in the future, or the videos may someday disappear. But so far, it has worked for me.

Raspberry PI controlled Light Clapper

This is one of my first Raspberry PI projects, and consists of a Raspberry connected to a microphone which detects an hand clap and then controls via GPIO a relay that powers the lamp.

The code used for the detecting the clap (which is not perfect, because it analyzes only the volume of the microphone) is this:
[actually this is not the same code used in the video above, it has been improved, in fact the delay between the two claps is reduced in this script]

ATTENTION: UGLY CODE FOLLOWS.
The code has been written only to provide a proof-of-concept project, and it’s written joining various pieces of code found in the Internet, so don’t expect this code to be bug free or well written. It is not.
You should use it to understand the way it works and to write something better or to adapt it to your own project.

#!/usr/bin/python

import urllib
import urllib2
import os, sys
import ast
import json
import os
import getpass, poplib
from email import parser
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

file = 'test.flac'

import alsaaudio, time, audioop

class Queue: 
    """A sample implementation of a First-In-First-Out
       data structure."""
    def __init__(self):
        self.size = 35
        self.in_stack = []
        self.out_stack = []
        self.ordered = []
        self.debug = False
    def push(self, obj):
        self.in_stack.append(obj)
    def pop(self):
        if not self.out_stack:
            while self.in_stack:
                self.out_stack.append(self.in_stack.pop())
        return self.out_stack.pop()
    def clear(self):
        self.in_stack = []
        self.out_stack = []
    def makeOrdered(self):
        self.ordered = []
        for i in range(self.size):
            #print i
            item = self.pop()
            self.ordered.append(item)
            self.push(item)

        if self.debug:
            i = 0
            for k in self.ordered:   
                if i == 0: print "-- v1 --"
                if i == 5: print "-- v2 --"
                if i == 15: print "-- v3 --"
                if i == 20: print "-- v4 --"
                if i == 25: print "-- v5 --"

                for h in range(int(k/3)):
                    sys.stdout.write('#')
                print ""
                i=i+1

    def totalAvg(self):
        tot = 0
        for el in self.in_stack:
            tot += el

        for el in self.out_stack:
            tot += el

        return float(tot) / (len(self.in_stack) + len(self.out_stack))

    def firstAvg(self):
        tot = 0
        for i in range(5):
            tot += self.ordered[i]
        return tot/5.0

    def secondAvg(self):
        tot = 0
        for i in range(5,15):
            tot += self.ordered[i]
        return tot/10.0

    def thirdAvg(self):
        tot = 0
        for i in range(15,20):
            tot += self.ordered[i]
        return tot/5.0

    def fourthAvg(self):
        tot = 0
        for i in range(20,30):
            tot += self.ordered[i]
        return tot/10.0

    def fifthAvg(self):
        tot = 0
        for i in range(30,35):
            tot += self.ordered[i]
        return tot/5.0

def wait_for_sound():
    GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)    
    GPIO.setup(11, GPIO.OUT)

    # Open the device in nonblocking capture mode. The last argument could
    # just as well have been zero for blocking mode. Then we could have
    # left out the sleep call in the bottom of the loop
    card = 'sysdefault:CARD=Microphone'
    inp = alsaaudio.PCM(alsaaudio.PCM_CAPTURE,alsaaudio.PCM_NONBLOCK, card)

    # Set attributes: Mono, 8000 Hz, 16 bit little endian samples
    inp.setchannels(1)
    inp.setrate(16000)
    inp.setformat(alsaaudio.PCM_FORMAT_S16_LE)

    # The period size controls the internal number of frames per period.
    # The significance of this parameter is documented in the ALSA api.
    # For our purposes, it is suficcient to know that reads from the device
    # will return this many frames. Each frame being 2 bytes long.
    # This means that the reads below will return either 320 bytes of data
    # or 0 bytes of data. The latter is possible because we are in nonblocking
    # mode.
    inp.setperiodsize(160)

    last = 0
    max = 0
    clapped = False
    out = False
    fout = open("/var/www/cgi-bin/clapper/killme", "w")
    fout.write('0n');
    fout.close()

    queue = Queue();
    avgQueue = Queue();

    n = 0; 
    n2=0;
    while True:
        fin = open("/var/www/cgi-bin/clapper/killme", "r")
        if fin.readline() == "1n":
            break;
        fin.close()
        # Read data from device
        l,data = inp.read()
        if l:
            err = False
            volume = -1
            try:
                volume = audioop.max(data, 2)
            except: 
                print "err";
                err = True
            if err: continue

            queue.push(volume)
            avgQueue.push(volume)
            n = n + 1
            n2 = n2 + 1
            if n2 > 500:
                avgQueue.pop()

            if n > queue.size:
                avg = avgQueue.totalAvg()
                print "avg last fragments: " + str(avg)

                low_limit = avg + 10
                high_limit = avg + 30

                queue.pop();
                queue.makeOrdered();
                v1 = queue.firstAvg();
                v2 = queue.secondAvg();
                v3 = queue.thirdAvg();
                v4 = queue.fourthAvg();
                v5 = queue.fifthAvg();
                if False:
                    print "v1: "+str(v1)+"n"
                    print "v2: "+str(v2)+"n"
                    print "v3: "+str(v3)+"n"
                    print "v4: "+str(v4)+"n"
                    print "v5: "+str(v5)+"n"
                #if v1 < low_limit: print str(n)+": v1 ok"                 #if v2 > high_limit: print str(n)+": v2 ok"
                #if v3 < low_limit: print str(n)+": v3 ok"                 #if v4 > high_limit: print str(n)+": v4 ok"
                #if v5 < low_limit: print str(n)+": v5 ok"

                if v1 < low_limit and v2 > high_limit and v3 < low_limit and v4 > high_limit and v5 < low_limit:
                    print str(time.time())+": sgaMED"
                    out = not out
                    GPIO.output(11, out)
                    queue.clear()
                    n = 0

        time.sleep(.01)

wait_for_sound()

The code was found on the Internet and then adapted for my purposes. It uses a standard USB microphone, and should work with most of the linux-compatible USB mics (I think even webcam integrated mics).

Infrared Webcam / Lamp project

I just modified a normal webcam to work with infrared light, following these instructions: http://www.hoagieshouse.com/IR/

Then i created a IR lamp using an incandescent light bulb (which provides almost all frequencies of light) which i filtered with some old photos negatives, which are a quite good IR-pass filter.

The video is in italian.

Blog

Questo è un posto di prova. Ho pensato che visto che anche chi non ha nulla da dire tiene un blog, anch’io avrei potuto farlo. Non sono tanto sicuro che sia vero però.