Jasper for voice commands

I'm rapidly getting to the point that I need to have a simple remote control that I can use around the house.  I've thought about several possibilities, but I ran across Jasper <link> and that would be so cool.  A house that I can talk to.

On their site, they have a great video of the microphone setting a few meters away and the authors gleefully giving it commands and listening to the responses.  I could make a few of these and scatter them around the house to control things by voice; that would really be nice.  Very slick site and seemingly well documented.

So, looking at the directions, they have a pretty complex system that installs voice recognition and speech capabilities on the Pi.  I decided to try it out.  Since their image file is most likely configured differently than what I use, I decided to do the full installation ... DON'T DO THIS.  Their instructions leave a lot of tiny little things out, like what directory to be in when you do things, how long the various steps can take, how freaking big it is.  Y'know things like that.

After 26 hours of installs, updates, compiles (some of which failed) and a whole lot of head scratching, I just gave up.  I still wanted to try it out, so I downloaded their disk image and installed it on my Pi.  After spending quite a while messing around, I still couldn't get it to respond to a command or hear what it was saying; obviously there was something wrong with the audio setup.  The authors used ALSA (google it) so I started digging into it to see how to test the audio.  After changing the terminal interface on Putty several times, I discovered that my alsamixer settings were all set to the minimum.  After jacking up the input gain and the output volume, I managed to get sound into and out of Jasper.

Then the disappointments really began.  I couldn't recognize my voice most of the time, when it did manage to get it, it was mostly wrong.  "What is the meaning of life," one of the built in commands, would check my mail.  Interesting, but not what I expected.  It would do the time pretty well, but most everything else would cause an exception in the python script that was running.  Sometimes, it would fail so bad the Pi actually crashed.  Nothing has done that to me before.  Remember, this is a disk image, I didn't change anything; it failed right out of the box.  The voice synthesis was really, really hard to understand, and playing over and over again didn't seem to help.  My ears just weren't training to the odd sound.  Sort of like the Pi had a really bad cold and couldn't quite get the words out.

I didn't expect it to work like the movies, but c'mon, it should at least be as good as the videos they produced to show it off.  I even used the exact same microphone they show on their site and some really good powered speakers.  I can't blame the hardware at all.

So, I know there are a number of folk out there that installed this and got it to work.  There always are, but obviously, they didn't build it on their Pi, because that simply doesn't work, and not many people have days to waste compiling thousands of source files.  So, they must have used the image, but what the heck did they do to get it to understand them?  Similarly, how the heck did they understand what was being said by the software.  A series of beeps would have been better.

A few hours spent looking at various things on the web didn't reveal any secrets to make this work.  Instead, I found a significant number of people that hadn't been able to make it perform.  There didn't seem to be any solutions either.  There were a lot of, "I think," or "Maybe you can try," and "Have you tried;" but I discount most of those since they are simply guesses.  I didn't find anyone that was bragging about their success; that is very telling.  I'm not willing to dig into it because the vagaries of ALSA are daunting enough without having to delve into the secret and mysterious world of PocketSphinx (the recognition system they use).  I'm not interested in a new career.

I'm burning my original software back on the Pi's card right now so I can try something else.  For you folk out there that want to try it, I certainly hope you have better luck than I did.

Hooking HighCharts Into My House

If you prowl around this blog very long you'll run into a bunch of charts.  I've experimented with several cloud services for storing data and shown examples of my own data using their charting provisions.  All of them are cool, but some of them leave a little bit to be desired.  For example, Xively uses Rickshaw <link>, and it's a nice package, but the Xively implementation is too darn complex for my taste.  If you look at the various cloud providers, they all have their favorites.

Up until now I've been using the Google graph API for my own stuff, but the problem is that Google Graph uses Flash.  Cell phones don't like Flash very much.  That means my home graphs don't work on my phone.  I absolutely can't let that continue any longer, and since my favorite cloud provider, Grovestreams <link>, uses HighCharts <link>, I stole their example and developed my own graph using the same library.

Hey, they stole my idea for the SteelSeries gauges, turn about is only fair play.

But, as usual, it was an exercise in patience.  The documentation on HighCharts is voluminous; it goes on forever and ever with tons of examples and links into JFiddle <link> so the ideas and stuff can be experimented with; talk about information overload.  It's also tough to figure out how the set the various properties in the right place to get things done, and none of the examples did exactly what I needed.  That's why patience was required.  I didn't want to get disgusted with it and just give up.

I finally got one working.  If you put your pointer inside the chart, you can get the actual reading of any point.  If you click, drag across the chart, you can zoom in and see it closer.  If you have a touch screen, you can use the 'pinch' and 'expand' to zoom in and out; when your zoomed in, you can slide the chart right and left to see the data.  By clicking on the labels at the bottom, you can turn off one of the series to make the remaining one more clear.  I could put up a lot of things to examine and choose which one by turning the others off.  I'm not sure I like the colors yet, but they're easy to change.

The beauty of this chart is that it's totally javascript.  That means it works on the phone, so I can add it to the Android app I have:

OK, the chart looks silly.  But look what happens when you turn the phone into portrait mode:

Is that slick or what?  Using the touchscreen I can zoom around it and select points to my hearts content.

The data shown is taken from my legacy feed on Xively and was reasonably easy to grab.  The only real problems I had getting it going was prowling through the documentation on HighCharts; it was all there, but like finding a needle in a haystack.

If you want to steal my example and modify it for your own use, it's on GitHub, drop a comment here and I'll post the link.

Wemo Devices Are Getting Interesting Now

Previous posts about the Wemo light switch: Part 1, Part 2

I'm not one of those guys that gathers tech news items and reposts them to increase my page views or hits, but this is going to be an exception.  I was prowling around looking for ideas for a particular problem I'm having with the Wemo devices I have and ran across a cool news item <link>.  Basically, it says that Belkin is expanding their line of WiFi controlled devices to include light bulbs, slow cookers, coffee makers, humidfiers, and who knows what else.

This is so cool.  Imagine, a coffee pot with an internet address.

I thought I'd capture a picture from a 'coming soon' article that really caught my eye:

I stole the picture and put it here because the advertisement will probably disappear soon.  The link is from the CrockPot web site <link>, and is for a Wemo based slow cooker that is going on my 'gottahavethatthing' list.  Being a widower, I use a slow cooker a lot and this would be great to have.

But look, space heaters, humidifiers, coffee makers, what will they think of next?  Sure, I use things like this to control or monitor a lot of devices and I could probably build my own remote controlled coffee maker, but the neighbors can't.  Now, they can just buy it.

So, it looks like Belkin is in this marketplace big time.  They actually published their API for Android (yes, I downloaded it) so other people can get into the arena.  With the library work in Python and several other languages, the home hacker can start building nice controls for their own use.  Normal folk can use the free phone app and do much the same with no work (or personal satisfaction).

Home automation is looking better all the time.

Android, Samsung Phone, My very own app, and a Raspberry Pi Home Automation Server

I did it; I finally took the plunge and created an app for Android that runs on my phone and controls the house.  I didn't want to go through the learning curve necessary to conquer the Android Development Environment, so I just relied on the web interface for all this time.  The problem is that I got a new phone and it was too great a temptation for me.  I had to do it.

I lucked out and ran across AppInventor 2 from MIT (it was once owned by Google) and it looked pretty cool, so I started trying it out.  The very first tutorial was enough to get me wound up.  Over several days, I experimented and coaxed an app out of it and then went totally nuts.  It's still a work in progress like all my projects, but it is SO COOL!

Here's the screen you see when you first tap on it

The first three buttons: Power, Temp, and Clock open the SteelSeries gauges I've already created and put them up so I can watch them.  The clock is bound to the time at my house so I can see exactly what time it is there wherever I am.  The data is supplied by my Raspberry Pi in JSON format so there is very little traffic to load it down.  All the formatting and such is done exclusively on the phone saving my little Pi for doing the monitoring tasks.  Those buttons were a pain.  Do you know how hard it is to find cool buttons out there?  That is without having to spend days editing them to get them to look OK.  Here's what it looks like with the power gauge showing:

Yes, this is the exact same display code I use for the web interface.  Appinventor 2 has provisions for a little browser that can handle javascript code.  I can't do the fancy graphs yet, because they are Flash based.  I'll have to look into that in the future.  Just for fun, here's the display when I put up the temperature gauge:

I stack the various controls and gauges one on top of the other so I can scroll between them if needed.  For example, Here's the screen when I have both thermostats showing:

I color the buttons yellow to show inactive and green for active which means they should be showing on the screen.  You can see how the two A/C unit selectors are green and below the controls and status of each of them.  One of them is idle and the other is recirculating the air; that's what the green fan is showing.  Yes, the fan turns; figuring out how to make it rotate was painful since the tool doesn't support animated GIFs yet.  The black fan doesn't turn silly, it means it isn't running.  There's also red and blue fans to show heating or cooling.  The tool has a 'picker' screen built into it, so to change the mode from Off to something else I pop up this display to choose from:

There's something similar for the fan also.  I got fancier on the temperature and put up a slider and set buttons:

When you slide it towards the red, the temperature setting goes up and similarly the other direction, then touch set and you have a new temperature setting.  When you touch set, the temperature controls go away and it leaves you with just the thermostat readings displayed.  This gives me darn good control over the thermostats and a nice flashy display.  I put pictures on the lights to show their state:

Those lights were a total pain in the butt.  I had to construct them from pictures that were waaay too big and didn't match the off representation.  Took a few hours using paint.net to get them right.  To turn off the lights, just touch the icon itself:

Notice how I managed to find a nice clear bulb and use it for both states.  No, I can't dim the bulbs, nor do I want to.  The garage doors are still pretty primitive:

But, they get the job done.  I want to fancy that display up some over time.  Similarly, the pool controls are still in the beginning stages:

Lots of refinements are needed here.  All of it works though, I can turn on the pool light anywhere I have data service on the phone.  Of course, no rural place would be complete without knowing the state of the septic tank:

When septic gets too full, the OK icon goes red.  I do the same thing when the acid pump goes low.  I show this to people and they invariably click on the septic tank:

I love their reaction when they have to select "I'm a Dummy" from the picker.  There's a couple of Easter Egg messages like that in other places as well.  Hey, gotta have fun with it too ... right?

Needless to say, I spent a heck of a lot of time just playing with the controls and watching things turn on and off around the house.  I actually had the front lights cycling in a kind of rhythm for a while, much to the amusement of the neighbors.  I guess the new will wear off in a few weeks, but then I'll just make something else and hook it into the system.  I'll also be looking for cute icons to include in various places in the app; it would be nice to have a cartoon garage door to show when it is open.  I'm thinking about using my old cell phone as a house control.  Take the battery that expanded out <link> and hook it to power.  Since everything will work except the actual phone, I should be able to turn it into a house controller that sets by the bed, or maybe mount it on the wall.  It would give me great pleasure to repurpose that device so it would actually get some use ... finally.

I can't wait to show this off.  So, people, what's holding you up from building something like this as well?  No, I won't port this to the iPhone.

Why I'll Never Buy Another Motorola Cell Phone

A couple of years ago I pre-ordered a Motorola Razr Max cell phone.  It came right on time, the day it was released, and was SO COOL!  It was running Android and had all the bells and whistles that modern technology could create.  I specifically waited for this phone because they put a battery in it large enough to last a full day of normal use and because the screen was big enough to actually use the device.

I was so stoked.  I played with it for days, customizing every little tiny feature.  I carried it with me everywhere. It became a companion.  Don't get me wrong, I don't spend all my time chatting on the phone, text messages are mostly unused, and email can wait until I have a real keyboard to use.  But I could turn my lights on using a web browser from the Burger King in town.  This is a techie's dream.

Then one day I was taking a picture in the back yard and the screen cracked.  Yep, it cracked vertically from top to bottom when I touched the little icon on the screen.  I couldn't believe it.  Here was a device that had a Kevlar case and Gorilla Glass screen and was advertised as being able to handle 'real life' that broke under my index finger.

I called the cell phone provider about the problem and met with the, "physical damage is not covered under warranty" line.  I argued for almost an hour that taking a picture wasn't damage, it was normal use, but they didn't give an inch.  I took it to one of the corporate stores and they did the same thing. I was totally annoyed and actually thought about a little mayhem as a possible route to some degree of satisfaction.  I even contacted the manufacturer about it.  The result was exactly the same.  Their logic is that a cracked screen is a result of damage, not bad design or manufacture.  They couldn't possibly be at fault.

Having exactly zero success trying to get someone to acknowledge that there was a problem that needed correcting, I used the insurance I bought along with the phone.  A hundred bucks later, I had a new phone just like the old one, but the magic was gone.  The device was too fragile to trust.  I equipped it with an otterbox, which make it boxy and ugly, but it might survive being used and nursed it along.

During this time I noticed a slight bulge on the back of the phone; the darn battery was swelling.  Yep, the state-of-the-art lithium-ion battery was puffing up and distorting the case.  So much for embedded batteries that you can't change; it was failing in one year nine months and bending the back cover.  Again on the phone with the provider and they say that it's out of warranty and there's nothing to be done, but I could use the insurance again (another 100 bucks) and get a replacement.  I decided not to send good money chasing after bad and continued to treat the phone like a new girl friend until the contract ended.

My thinking was that I'd get a different manufacturer's device and maybe have better luck.  And, as luck would have it, Samsung announced that their Galaxy 5 would come out in a couple of months; last Friday (the release date) my new phone was delivered to the house (again on the day of release).  I'm in love again.

However, I still have a bitter taste in my mouth about putting up with a piece of crap for two years because Motorola created a hunk-o-junk, but I'll get over it in time.  Here's a couple of pictures of the damage done by the expanding battery:

The bulge is really obvious, but take a look at the next photo.

The case has actually split at a seam and you can see inside the phone if you get a flashlight.  This is the damage that Motorola and Verizon won't warranty because too much time has passed.  Just like the crack down the screen they wouldn't cover because of 'physical damage'.  The swelling actually broke the speaker on the back, so I couldn't hear a ring; I had to rely on vibrate for the last month.

What a racket.

Yes, I know that one should get a case for a cell phone.  But doesn't that eliminate the need to make it slim, attractive and stylish?  Take a piece of high tech jewelry and hide it inside a poly carbonate case with a silicon protector around it and it looks like a plastic box, not a cell phone.  Yes, I know that screens can crack, but when you touch it to take a picture??  What the heck is up with that?  That generation of Gorilla Glass doesn't deserve the name.  The good thing is that I tested the heck out of the Otterbox case; I'm certain that the case was the only reason I didn't have to replace the phone a couple more times.

So ends an annoying chapter of my life.  I would change carriers to get away, but no other carrier works out here.

Now, I get to play with all the features of a new phone.  I get to customize every little thing and put pictures of my dog on it to annoy other people with.

Motorola used to be a great company.  Maybe Google will bring some of the life back to them since they took over the mobile phone part, but I'm keeping my distance.

Kissing Goodbye to DynDns

For a long time now I've been using Dyn's free service DynDns.  For those of you that don't understand what I'm talking about, most homes have DSL provided by one of the big names or cable modems provided by some of the same big names.  I happen to have CenturyLink (used to be Qwest).  With these services, your IP address changes periodically so it's hard to have a name linked to an IP address when it changes every time the provider decides they want to.  At one time CenturyLink was changing my IP address a couple of times a day.

So there are a number of dynamic dns services out there that will update the various name servers on the internet when your IP address changes.  Doing something like this saves you the extra fee for a static IP and you can still get to your home machine by some name or other.  These services used to be free, but over time, they've started to charge for the service.  Dyn just did this.  Over the weekend I got an email telling me that my free account with them would be cancelled.

So, what to do?  I simply signed up with a different service and changed the bookmark in my browser.

Now, a lot of you folk can't do it that easily.  You may have distributed the name of your site or machine to friends and relatives and now you would have to let them know it changed.  Or, perhaps wait until they try it and give you a call to see what happened.

Don't misunderstand, I don't mind paying for value.  If they had said that they were going to charge $5 a year for this service I wouldn't have even thought about it, I would have just signed up and paid the five bucks.  They wanted $25 a year (discounted the first year), and frankly, that's too much for such a simple thing as sending an update to the name servers that your IP address has changed.  To be fair, they offer a number of other services and have a good reputation, but I don't need the other services.  Perhaps someday when I have a huge corporation to worry about, I might consider them again.  For now, my one little blog and one little computer will do just fine without them.

So, if you want to visit my home control and monitoring system, use this link <link>.  Strangly, it took me about six minutes to get it working and another ten to find the software to keep it updated through IP address changes.  That's about 1/10th the time it took me to set it up originally with DynDns.

I Want To Complain about 'Experts'

My refrigerator started giving me trouble.  No, it wasn't the Iris Smart Switch I installed in the power, it was that the darn thing started to get warm.  I opened the door and the little thermometer I have inside said it was 55 F inside.  It usually runs under 45, so something was up.  I checked all the obvious things, the compressor was going, the fan on the condenser coil was running; I couldn't see anything obvious.

Once again, a little bit about the refrigerator:  It's a refrigerator (only) that I've had for some years and it has given me trouble before; I even had to have the evaporator coil replaced.  I got this thing because I wanted it to be the last refrigerator I'd ever buy.  To meet that I got the very top of the line GE Monogram model ZIRS36 in stainless steel (ZIRS36NMRH).  It's a really, really old design that doesn't even have a frost free option.  That's because it has no freezer inside and just doesn't form frost.

Basically, the power comes in, goes to the temperature control, then to a temperature sensor on the evaporator coil (to prevent freezing up) and then to the compressor.  There's three fans: one on the top to cool the condenser and condenser coil, one inside to circulate air from the evaporator coil to the rest of the fridge, and one on the bottom to evaporate any water that drains out of the evaporator.  Then the lights are all that's left.  Not much to go bad, and not much to troubleshoot when it has problems.

However, I couldn't find anything wrong with any of those things, so I went to the web and found this discussion on one of those 'Ask an Expert' sites <link>; basically, the expert said the correct thing first, then corrected himself to the wrong thing.  This fridge is a middle level cooling system.  It doesn't cool below freezing anywhere inside except the actual surface of the evaporator coil.  It maintains a temperature of about 38 degrees and doesn't need a defrost timer or defrost heater at all.  The customer in the discussion tells the expert this, but that doesn't keep the expert from getting confused and messing it up.  I chuckled a little bit and then found this discussion <link>;  once again, the expert changes his mind midstream and messes it up.

The last link is especially interesting because a couple of other repairmen get into it and try to straighten things out.  By the very bottom of the discussion, the actual possible problems finally show up.

So, what was wrong with mine?  The door needed to be adjusted.  Yep, the door has sagged a little bit over the years and was far enough down that it didn't close a switch at the top that turns on the fan for the evaporator.  See, if the fan isn't on, the evaporator goes into freezing range and the temperature sensor I mentioned above, shuts off the compressor to prevent ice forming and breaking the evaporator coil.  I drug out the tools and modified the top hinge to be adjustable and reset the door.  Problem solved.

The reason I had to modify the hinge was because GE made provisions for raising and lowering the door, but not tilting it.  They even avoid the subject in their installation manual (yes, I read it) like a door will never, ever skew a little bit.  The experts out there will tell me that I should adjust the fridge to assure that it's square because that can cause the same problem; I did that first with a nice level, framing square, and all.  Nope, the door actually needed to be adjusted.

But the point of this is that after I found the two discussions listed above, I found several others where the expert just wouldn't listen to the customer, assumed he knew everything, and screwed it up.

I'll never, ever ask a question on one of those sites.

But, there were a few good things that came out of this fiasco.  I moved the Smart Switch back to the fridge (I had it on the freezer for a few days), and took a look at the power usage during the problem:

Notice the small spikes?  It seems the compressor was turning on for a very short period, then shutting off for a very long period.  This was because the evaporator coil got too cold (no airflow) and the thermal protection kicked in and shut the compressor off.  This is very different from the graph I blogged about earlier <link>.  Another thing good about this was that I improved the performance of the appliance:

Now, the compressor is on longer, but off longer as well.  I turned the temperature control down and allowed it to stabilize at 38 F and all seems to be well.  Of course, something else can crop up and cause problems, but it looks like I fixed it.

Edit:  It's been a little over a day since I fixed the door on the fridge and I thought someone out there might be interested in the result.  Yes I fixed it, and I made out like a bandit on this:

Ignoring the couple of bumps in the middle of the chart, notice how it has settled down to a regular rythm?  It's on for about 15 minutes and off for around an hour and a half.  The huge spike in the middle is when I had the door open and the compressor kicked on at the same time; 300 W for the lights and around 400 W for the spike of the compressor starting.  The other bump right next to it was where I finally finished up assembling the fridge.  I put the drawers back in that I had take out to check things and also the temperature controller cover.  

Net, over time I'll get a feel for the usage of the fridge and a simple check every once in a while will tell me if it's working OK, or if it needs some attention.  It would be cool to completely automate the operation of this device with a little computer and radio combination, but not now, I want to take a really close look at the freezer setting nearby.  Then I'll take a look at the chest freezer I have out in the garage.  These appliance have been blamed by many people for using too much power, but my experience is the exact opposite.  The pool is my biggest electrical usage followed by the water heater.  Those I have under control with load balancing to off-peak periods and solar assistance.  Next is the two A/C units I have;  if I left them to run on their own, they would far exceed everything else, but I control when they can run also to minimize their impact on my wallet.

So, you folk that are looking at one of those multi-hundred dollar fancy thermostats to control the temperature in your house, think again.  You won't get nearly as much information from them as I do with my set up, and you won't be able to control it as well.  Sure, you'll have to actually learn something instead of buying the hype they try to sell you, but what's wrong with that?

Smart grid my butt, smart house is the solution.