Ever since I got interested in plants getting some sort of metrics has been a part time obsession.
Iteration 1 – No wireless and no outdoor model with always on usb power.
Iteration 2 – Learnt about ESP8266 microcontroller and deep sleep feature
Iteration 3 – Saving battery through deep sleep and battery power instead of usb mains, Adding ESP32 Microcontroller.
Iteration 4 – Study about Lithium Ion batteries
Iteration 5 – Making model wireless and usb free power, running on batteries
Iteration 6 – Containerising the entire software and integration with AWS and Telnyx
Iteration 7 – Making the model sustaining on itself through solar power and making it weather resistant
This completes an End to End IOT Model with a micro controller , a moisture sensor and two lithium ION batteries which get charged based on a small solar panel. Am going to extend this to LoRa Wan and will try to achieve ultra low power long distance.
The idea is that there is an allotment 6 kms from the place I live and I will see if AWS and LoRa Wan Supports me for protocol needs.
I am enjoying insights into deep learning and computer vision and how machine learning is applied on images. While Deep Learning and Nueral networks are subjects for experts in field, I wanted simply to be an end user to do some experiments on my dog and nothing more. I have to mention that I had internal resources to get training on image augmentation techniques, DLL Nueral network frameworks pretrained to be used readily but am still trying to find some way into what this technology is all about and how to implement in my AWS Deeplens.
This is a good book to get introduced into pytorch and deep learning terminology. There is a very interesting examples of doing image manipulation of a horse to zebra, and how you can transfer that learning to anything.
Below is how I used on my Dog and results, I had fun starting this and hope you will have fun too, you dont need any great programming or math to just access some of the Neural networks and do some analysis
Normal Image
I wrote this post to let anyone interested to know that I dint had to write any complicated coding or anything just followed text, this is something you can learn in your spare time if interested.
One of the hardest things to do is to keep up with tech, now thats some thing every once in a while we hear from our colleagues and we might say it to ourselves as well. There are two things which needs some discussion here
New certifications in Networking scope
New paths like programming and cloud services
After working for a while, am at a point where I have been exposed to so many technologies within networking, there is Service provider, datacenter, enterprise and other aspects like programming and cloud services.
The choice to take both paths is not efficient if I give it a good thought, but on the other hand its always good to know other aspects of the job as well, am not trying to be diplomatic but rather speaking from experience here.
One path is to be an expert in certain aspect of the field, the other side is to invest time to learn new things, choice is not easy, any field is vast and it takes life time just to be good at one thing, imagine trying to be good at multiple things, it wont work for many people.
Other day I had to explore Amazon Athena and Amazon Glue and Finally Amazon quicksight, I have never used these services before nor I had real reason to do so, its mostly Big data aspect, but as I took a look at them for a simple task, I quickly discovered how handy these services were and what could be processed and analyzed in such a short time for someone who was looking at them for the first time.
Often times we are at a point where we need to know about many things at a nominal level, firms like Amazon has one thing in mind when they launch a service they make it easily adaptable rather than making it insanely tough and technical to understand.
I Quoted Aws, because I like AWS!
Trick to study : Always think that who ever who has better sense of business will always make it easy for people to operate and understand, and by that logic whatever you are learning just recall this that its supposed to be easy and straight forward for most of the complicated tasks as well. Technology design now a days is vested more and more about easier adaptability.
Just thought about writing about this experience as when i first saw Athena / Glue / Quicksight, I thought what am I doing with big data technology services, after spending a day or two, it was easy straight forward and I could use data to build and visualize in a certain way which made sense to my requirements, no one needs to be an expert to use a tool and complete a small task, a basic understand will suffice is what I concluded.
What is the issue: I have never explained the use-case clearly in that post, let me try to re-attempt the write-up again
you see, on a personal basis I need to access few websites which are hosted in India, issue with these websites is that they dont allow any traffic external to the country
There are many browser based proxies out there which can do this task just fine and also paid services, my problem is that when you are exchanging user/password information and financial transactions over these proxies you don’t know how exactly all this data getting exchanged and transmitted
Few Tips from my experience before i get into the post :
-> you need to change ubuntu instances ipv4 forwarding so that it will forward packets through the instance also nats it
-> Make sure you dont start routing everything first, take public DNS’s and test the system with allowed_ips in the configuration file else you will loose internet access and if not done correctly you will also loose access to cloud instance
-> If you want to do complicated nat and other extensions, make sure you have a public static route via AWS back to the IP
Solution:
Aws has presence all over the globe , I simply chose a free offering ubuntu instance in Asia pacific zone which covers India to setup and install wireguard VPN service.
Below is my wg0.conf file and I will use wg-quick to quickly bring up this instance
Post-up and Post-Down concepts are really handy, you could ask the config file to do the NAT only when the interface is up and Delete the interface when the interface is down. This covers the server side, what about client ?
Wireguard has been supporting a client gui version as well along with QR code which we have seen.
Here is the screen-shot from my mac end-point
mac ~ traceroute 8.8.8.8
traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 10.0.0.1 (10.0.0.1) 768.096 ms 150.332 ms 267.774 ms
2 ec2.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com 211.881 ms
ec2.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com 432.133 ms
ec2.ap-south-1.compute.amazonaws.com 190.867 ms
3 100.66.8.40 (100.66.8.40) 171.070 ms
100.66.8.198 (100.66.8.198) 166.135 ms
100.66.8.70 (100.66.8.70) 357.351 ms
4 100.66.10.128 (100.66.10.128) 183.827 ms
100.66.11.228 (100.66.11.228) 311.162 ms
100.66.11.230 (100.66.11.230) 333.343 ms
Mac configuration file
above traceroute is from my laptop and we see public DNS 8.8.8.8 is tunnelled through EC2 instance in Asia pacific region and for outside world its the natted Elastic IP on Amazon aws instance.
Hope this helps you to build a VPN of you choice instead of relying on un-known proxies.
Contunuing from the previous post, I was determined to learn some sort of image classification in my free time, I went with Tensorflow/keras as the language or ml language as they have a lot of tutorials around it.
Below youtube series from tensor-flow team will help you get started if you are interested in this
The other part that was a sort of problem for a long time is integration of Dyson Fan with any sort of automation platform like Alexa or python api, Dyson does have an app but apparently they have some issues in UK/Ireland integration, after some research I found that home-assistant supports integration and after a lot of documentation and trials, it looks like home-assistant has now support for it.
Here is the below file that you need to use in the configuration.yaml snippet.
Now on first look she is so adorable, don’t be fooled by looks this dog is responsible for destruction of usb cables, foot wear , headphones, trash can openings and garden destruction.
So here is the idea, over the course of next few days to months, I will start capturing many constructive and destructive images of my dog and start training a AI model which will give us a reasonable idea on what exactly she is up to when we leave her alone and alert us accordingly.
Am not a ML developer let alone be an expert, but aws makes it easy to train and deploy models and you don’t have to know much to get started. I developed another ML model with aws rekognition which identifies unwanted plants and shrubs in a raised bed.
I got set up this deeplens and deployed a model project in no less than 5 minutes and am being honest. Here is a sample model which identifies cat vs dog , this model comes is among example models.
It has a Mqtt topic which you can subscribe as well
Well, there are multiple aspects to the design itself
The system always required usb external power – batteries well dint last long
The system always required to be internal or inside home – reason it wasnt weather resistant
Costly [ Mqtt Push and and if plant dried out, it would make Telnyx API send me a lot of messages which in turn is a cost ]
I never wanted a 24×7 system, I wanted something which comes online once per day and then sort of sleeps for rest of the day
Wanted to use micropython, python programming language is something I always found easy on beginners like me, where as C and CPP are difficult in my opinion.
I wanted something small and less or no clumsy at all.
So I began working on the project, I always wanted this to make a self-sustaining model and in my effort, now I hope at least I could last it long. Here is what I did so far
Used a Weather-resistant, waterproof box to embed two lithium-Ion rechargeable 18650 batteries in parallel. This should technically provide ESP32 (Microcontroller) to update me 4 times / Day for least to least good 2-3 weeks and if I remove the Red LED then even more and also I can reduce the frequency
I think i finally could use the benefits of a Micro-controller like Esp32 which can deep Sleep for a good amount of time compared to Esp8266 which could only do it effectively for 70 odd minutes.
The applications are now endless, you can use the same idea for measuring, monitoring or alerting anything anywhere based on any condition that you could think of, PS I used electrical tape on the edges so that screws won’t go rusty
final Image from monitoring system looks something like this, the system is designed to get an update every 6 hours, I will write a follow-up post with the relevant code block.
The last thing this needs a small solar panel which powers the two lithiums and this will go as long as it can when placed properly in any location.
suffice to say, this helps and it already did save my plants multiple times.
Don’t get me wrong, I dint migrate because I wanted to get into web development, its not the case and Am not even at intermediate Level there!
Why – This is a custom domain. This is hosted with Route53 Amazon, WordPress is build on AWS custom instance. The Reasons are very simple
I Wanted to include short flash videos in my old blog, word press apparently dint allow it
Secondly, I wanted to take frequent backups – was only possible with a huge yearly cost for customization
Paying for 1 Route53 domain, opened a lot of DNS options, I cancelled my Dynsubscription which was costing 54 Euros per year, while AWS would get most of it witht 12 USD.
Most Importantly, I don’t have to pay anything just to block Ads!
So, This is where it is, I will try to maintain the website now and see how this goes, Till now Infrastructure was maintained and patched by WordPress , from now probably i have to take care of it.
It exciting and equally rewarding that you can customize and also get rewarded at the same time, this also opens a lot of opportunities to spin up load balancers and experiment with my AWS technical skills.
Fancy a VPN build in under 10 minutes? , there are many vendors outside who offer mobile App and connectivity all through the world, most of the times ofcourse they under perform. Be it for beating Apps which impose Geographical restrictions etc.
Simple and easy to build your own VPN service plus Pay as you Go by turning off the cloud instance and Wire-guard has some cutting edge encryption at the software level, which makes it performs better even in cloud instances.
Network Tracing sometimes is really important, although most of the times tcpdump utility is quite handy there are other tools that can make life much easier.
while am no expert in eBPF and scripts, i do know how to use bcc-tools in some scenarios.
