The Narrative

Teasing out my cultural connections through genetics

Posted on by charlie

Special note: Talking about personal genetics is difficult: what you say not only reveals so much about you, but also your parents, your siblings, and your children. I’ll be talking about genetics here, but from a broad sense, more about origins than any underlying disease or pre-disposition.

The setup
My brother received a gift from his family for a genetic test. I had an idea what to expect, though not the percentages. I also knew that whatever he found out would be the same for me, though he wanted to see what I would find out if I did the same test. I told him, being brothers, I would be the same, except for percentages varying slightly due to variability in the tests and when the test are taken.

He eventually did share the data with me – one part told me more than I already knew, and one part hit me much later.

Roughly speaking, based on my brother’s test, I am mostly (leaving out some minor percentages):

  • German 25%
  • Portuguese 21%
  • Jewish 21%
  • Native Amazonian 10%
  • West African 5%

The breakdown
The quarter German is from our paternal grandmother, who was from Hartmannsdorf, in southeastern Germany, just outside of Chemnitz (ex-Karl-Marx-Stadt).

The quarter Portuguese is mostly from my maternal grandmother. She was born in northern Brasil, first-gen, but genetically fully Portuguese (or so I suspect, see below).

The quarter Jewish is Jewish from Central Europe and is from my paternal grandfather. He was an ethnic German from Leitmeritz (Litoměřice to the Czechs – though when he was born it was Austro-Hungary). I wasn’t sure if he was Jewish as he never really practiced anything and his wife was Lutheran (German, right?). But in the past few years, I’ve started realizing he was most likely Jewish (as evidenced by name and geography). Then two years ago, a (third?) cousin (with a shared great-great-grandparent with my father through his paternal grandmother’s side) found us and helped me make the full connection. At the same time I discovered a ton of photos and references to folks in my cousin’s genealogy. Yeah, my grandfather was 100% Jewish – had to be for me to be 25%.

What’s missing
Now, if you’ve been keeping score, you see that I’ve still a quarter unaccounted for, and I have yet to mention my maternal grandfather.

My maternal grandfather was Northern Brasilian. And, as many long-time Northern Brasilians, he would have a bit of Portuguese, a bit of Native Brasilian, and a bit of West African (where Brasilian slaves came from).

One thing that hit me was why I don’t have more Portuguese from him. This could be because one or both of my maternal grandmother’s parents were not 100% Portuguese, but had a mix of other European ancestors.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t surprised that I’ve received from him a bit of West African and Native Amazonian. Though for me, this is more than just genetic. Brasilian culture is heavily influenced by West Africa – samba, capoeira, feijoada, Iemanjá on New Years, macumba, manioc flour. And up in Northern Brasil we have been influenced by Native Amazonian culture, as well, such as the foods we eat and the words we use. Parts of these cultures make up MY culture. Indeed, when I lived in Finland, I had to go the African food store to get my usual comfort foods. And sometimes I don’t realize I am not clear to other Brasilians when talking about foods or using words that are from Native Amazonians, because it’s always been part of my life.

Adding up the surprises
For a long time I was fine with the bits of heritage I carried. And I kept saying that, of course my maternal grandfather would have this mix, indeed, such mixes can be stable if everyone has a mix of some sort.

But then, recently, it hit me: my father was 100% European, my mother’s mother was 100% European. That means that the non-European part of me doubles with my mom and doubles with her father. That means he was (based on my numbers) 20% West African and 40% Native Amazonian. If we roughly round to a genetic multiple he could be 25% West African (a grand-parent?) and 50% Native Amazonian (a parent?).

That suggests that he was much closer to West African and Native Amazonian that I thought. And if we say he was about 25-40% Portuguese, this would translate to about a 6-10% to me.

Cool. And something to further explore.

Latin American mutt
The most exciting thing for me about this walk through my genetics is the matching of culture and genetics. I grew up in such a mix of German, Portuguese, West African, Native Amazonian, Brasilian, and North American food, culture, language. While I look like a European (due to dilutions by my maternal grandmother and my father), I’m still a krazy mix and belong to and live with way more than a single culture.

And I am proud of this.*

 

*I will admit, due to where I’ve lived, I might push the Latino package more than the others. Also, I am well aware that my upbringing (and looks) have shielded me from a life that folks who are more West African or more Native Amazonian than me have had to suffer. Lastly, I’m not so aware about North Americans and how mixed they are, but I do know that Latin Americans can be as mixed as me. I know of someone from the Caribbean who also has done one of these genetic tests, which revealed West African heritage, but also Native Caribbean heritage. And these are also expressed in her words and cooking.

Image – no, I don’t know who these folks are, this is just a stock image with a mix of folks that I liked

The Narrative

“The road less traveled”: getting it wrong, but getting it right

Posted on by charlie

Back in 2014, I was invited back to my graduate school as part of a professional development series for science grad students. Most of the speakers before me were from industry or academia, showing the students the traditional path forward. I was the odd one, brought in specifically to talk about ‘making the jump’ out of the traditional path (the talk was titled “When Opportunity Knocks…Navigating Job Transitions”).

Frost on the path
One poem that is often quoted regarding decision folks make is “The Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost. Everyone I hear quote that poem quote the last three lines, puffed up and proud of their decision:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by, 
And that has made all the difference. 

What folks usually don’t know is that’s a misrepresentation of the whole poem. Indeed, Frost’s narrator points out that BOTH paths were identical and they just happened to choose one and knew they’d build a narrative that they took the more significant one.

Wikipedia has a nice summary of all of this, and the origins of the poem inspired by a friend of Frost. Do read it.

Forks on the path
As I alluded to in the opening, my path has not been seemingly linear. I have made interesting jumps in my career and life, with a long list of interesting binary decisions along the way. And at each juncture, while perhaps not equally unworn, a different decision would have led to radically different futures for me.

I don’t normally regret my decisions, as I know that I have no idea what life would be like if I had taken that ‘other’ decision at the time. While I am not nihilist, I’m not fatalist, either – we make the decision, best we can, and then live with it. I won’t waste time wondering if I would have been better with the ‘other’ decision.

Narrative on the path
At my talk with the grad students, one of the first things I dispelled was that there was any formula for making the jump to new job outside the traditional path. And I make it clear to them that they won’t know, when faced with a binary decision, if they are making the right decision. Not to mention that usually, time and information do not cooperate and you have to make as best a decision as you can at that moment and with what you have and know. Not ideal. Ever. Change and uncertainty are part of any life path, so make a decision and run with it and be ready to accept, resolve, or tolerate issues on the path you chose.

Also, the path forward doesn’t need to make sense to anyone but you. The one constant in that path is YOU. If you are true to what interests you, what you thrive doing, what you enjoy, then that’s the path you choose and those things will guide you in your decisions and be the common thread in your path – the narrative you walk.

The narrator of the Frost poem sorta knows that ‘the one less travelled’ is a narrative they prefer – the narrative keeps them from wondering if they made the right choice, what life would have been like on that other path, and to quell their FOMO.

So, in a way, when folks say ‘the one less travelled’, in a way, they got it right, even if they got it wrong.

 

Image from Wikipedia

Strategy/The Narrative

My greatest story, never much told: Nokia Cloud

Posted on by charlie

In early 2004, I joined the small Nokia Lifeblog team to lead sales and marketing. Over the roughly 18 months I was with the team, I learned so much about the fusion of internet and mobile, became the first in the company using blogging in marketing and influencer outreach, and engaged with a huge range of characters (many who were foundational to what was then called Web 2.0).

When the team was dissolved in June 2005, I spent the next few months in relative obscurity within Nokia (another interesting story in itself) working on an idea, inspired by all the work I’d done with Lifeblog.

Basically, I saw that the web was fragmenting (into morsels, is what I said back then) as media and social streams multiplied. My vision was a way to bring all those morsels into one view, on any platform, and to remix and republish as folks found, used, and shared social media.

You have no idea how that was so alien to many I spoke with. I learned the hard way the difficulty of articulating something folks could not see.

Nokia Cloud
In 2006, I was picked up by the Multimedia product management team, to focus on the online side of things (I had PC and a Mobile peer product managers). By the end of 2006 I had managed to secure a fuuuuuckload of money (I’ll never be giving that kind of money ever again, I suppose) to work with IDEO (who brought in Digital Foundry (DF) and R/GA for the technical and visual) to make my idea become reality.

We called it Nokia Cloud.

Cloud.

In 2007.

Yup.

In any case, I must say, 2007 was a wicked amazing year, working with really smart and enthusiastic folks. The cool stuff was doing field research (which did a good job of validating what I envisioned) and design workshops to refine the ideas, which R/GA and DF made tangible in designs and early protos. The not so cool was the pressure from a multi-billion euro company wanting the product to be immediately available in a zillion countries and languages, and what I called the Nokia Jello – when a big company just can’t help but kill your agility (no pun intended, we were the first to introduce Agile to a traditionally Waterfall company process).[1] And not sure if it was cool or not when we went to launch the service, by then called Ovi (“door” in Finnish), at Nokia World 2007, that Orange had taken out a full page ad in the FT to warn us off.

iCloud, but before iCloud[2]
The spirit of my vision drove Nokia Cloud. You could see it in the way Ovi was described as the ‘door’ to your online services, which was sort of the way I always described my vision.

With Nokia Cloud, you’d have an app on your phone and desktop that would, through a single view, help you see various levels of your social streams and media (peek), get details (reveal), or dive into the social media service (dive) – providing a range of interaction to rapidly go through and remix all your streams. In the early days, I also wanted to apply some analytics to help folks find and manage everything (Last.fm style, which was a big thing back then).

We were also inspired by the Sidekick Danger (same founder as Android), where all your mobile life was backed up and like a soul, could be placed into another device should you lose one or get a new one.

One cool feature that came up was a ‘stub’, where you start something on one platform, say your mobile, and then grab the stub on another, say your PC, and complete the task. Of course, in the past few years, you can do such things with your iPhone via Handoff. But we wanted to do this back in 2007.

Alas, we spread product dev out in phases and the Danger-like phone contacts and calendar and media recovery were the first to roll out. But I left the team before any of the later parts were rolled out (I don’t know if they were ever rolled out, actually).

I wish I had kept my notes, as so much of what we saw then foresaw where mobile and internet were going. That the iPhone and Facebook were taking over the world in 2007 served as a background for what Nokia had to get right, and fast.

And while we’ve come so far since back then, the world didn’t go the aggregation route I had hoped for (open, choice for all, competition), but instead the world doubled down on stove-piped platforms – Google, Apple, Facebook – where users stayed in walled-gardens, just like the mobile operator walled gardens at the time we had all hoped would be busted open by an open internet.

I did have a bit of a fantasy that Nokia could be the one to stave off the dominance of what became FAGMA (or is it MAGMA, now?). Nokia’s mission was ‘Connecting People’, and the greatest social media network was the contacts in your phone. I wanted to make the phone the door to your online life, and I wanted Nokia to do it.

Alas.

Fifteen frakkin’ years
I left the Cloud team in early 2008, for various reasons, but mostly how I thought I’d not be able to contribute effectively in the new re-org that had just happened (the ones that stayed behind were more than capable to carry on). But what I did during the time I led Nokia Cloud taught me so much about design, products, the fusion of hardware and software, organizational structures, and how to convert disparate insights into a coherent manifestation (and evangelize it).

Since the launch of iPhone in early 2007 was a big thing for us on the brand new Nokia Cloud project, I usually use the anniversary of the launch to take stock of how things have progressed since 2007.

Sadly, when I see where we are today after 15 years, I’m a bit disappointed: NFTs, crypto, Web3, MetaFrakkinVerse – not sure these are anything new, as it all seems way derivative or gimmicky.[4]

Though, in many ways, what I see folks trying to do with their social networks, media, personal narratives, is still the same as in 2007. The difference is that the MAGMAs of the world are dictating the interactions, tastes, and content – so we’re all in the passenger seat, more passive than one would think. Indeed, the medium defines the messages, and so long as MAGMA serve as the pipes, we need to engage with each other on their terms.

Alas, the MAGMAs of the world are just getting more ingrained in our lives and I do wonder how we break that stranglehold. Which is rich coming from me: I am very much beholden to the Apple ecosystem. I am railing from inside the asylum, so to speak.

Next fifteen
I have no idea what the next fifteen years will bring. My interests still reside in the intersection of data, internet, software, and hardware. Not sure where it’ll take me, but I’m a tad wiser. Looking back at the Nokia Cloud project and what it could have been reminds me, again, how I should trust myself more and fight for the visions I see as important.

And sad that this insight might be all that remains from such a fun time.

[1]Make no mistake, I thank Nokia from the bottom of my heart for the freedom and opportunity they gave me. I would not be where I am today without what Nokia provided me in my tenure there, especially during the time working on Nokia Cloud. There were no assholes (well, maybe one or two, but I didn’t have to deal with them for Nokia Cloud), just a bunch of enthusiastic folks who had a track record of doing great things. I am grateful to Nokia for permitting me to work with such folks.

[2]You won’t f-in believe me ever, but in 2002, a few months after we had launched our smartphone[3], I proposed some sort of app[3] that would serve as a market place for folks to read up on apps and download new ones. As I was already oversubscribed, a colleague on my team was given a budget and built it. Funnily, the mobile phone biz dev folks who were appeasing the operators flipped and took over the project and made it their own to let the operators use the on-phone portal for their own apps. Yup. Basically, the app store, long before the App Store. From 2002.

[3]What, you think the iPhone in 2007 was the first smartphone? And did you think the iPhone was the first smartphone to have apps? Oh, gosh, you have a lot of history to catch up on. Haha.

[4]Ok, perhaps I’m not one to judge. I think all of Western Civilization is a footnote on GrecoRoman history – they did it all, in sandals and togas, 2000+ years ago.

Strategy

Unlocking value in plain sight: not as common as you’d think

Posted on by charlie

I like to walk expo floors that have a lot of machines, gadgets, and gizmos and engage with vendors, doing some research and testing out some ideas.

Last fall, I walked around a local pharma manufacturing vendor expo. At this expo, I was particularly interested in folks who had sensors or sensor-based solutions (I was in an IoT state of mind).

My hardware side was interested in the size and variety of wired and wireless sensors, the different protocols used, the range of choice customers had to match their use case needs.

My real interest, though, was driven by my software side, to see if any of the companies went beyond sensor manufacture and had some software-driven business model, some value-added service for their customers. For example, I asked the sensor companies if they ran any monitoring services for their customers.

Blank stares
Interestingly, none (save two) of them really had any business where they ran monitoring or offered a monitoring dashboard for their customers. Indeed, one guy so didn’t understand my question, he kept talking about his installation and maintenance service. That seemed exemplary of the limit of the sensor makers’ business models.

Two companies, tho, were indeed focused on aggregating sensor data – one focused solely on temperature monitoring, the other on more general sensors for lab monitoring. They were collecting the data for recording and auditing, compliance, and alarms. One of them told me that they created a network just for the sensors that report to them, but I didn’t get a clear picture how that was done.

I also spoke to a few big-machine makers, at least the ones who seemed to offer some level of equipment data available to users. But of the ones I asked, none did the ‘phone home’ sort of business model for their customers (think GE and RR jet engines). Like the sensor folks, whatever data they provided was up to the customer to manage and analyze.

Opportunities
There’s a gap between what the sensor and equipment vendors offer and what the customer will find useful (notice I don’t say ‘need’ – read on for why). These hardware vendors could generate a new recurring revenue stream by adding value atop their hardware for their customers (see a bit of a related discussion here; and why it’s not easy, as I discuss here).

Ok, so note that I didn’t say customers ‘need’ something more than what the vendors offer. That’s because I think not only do you get blank stares from the hardware vendors when discussing any addition of a software layer of value, but you’ll also get blank stares from the customers as well.

With any new way of thinking, often the customer themselves do not know the value a new bit of software could add to their business. And so you not only get in a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in building the market, but the players (vendors and customers) in the market don’t even know that there is more value to unlock from the hardware they have.

How do we make the market, where there is value to be unlocked, but neither the manufacturer or the customer even know how to uncover the opportunity or even articulate the need?

What do you think?

I have some thoughts on this (and have actually helped vendors and companies unlock this value), but I’ll save them for another post.

 

Image by Kerstin Riemer

Strategy

Why changing your spots is hard: shifting a business from hardware to software

Posted on by charlie

Particle.io CEO Zach Supalla’s latest Atoms and Bits* newsletter issue analyzing “Hardware/Software Business Models” reminded me of many discussions I’ve had with organizations shifting between very different business models. The newsletter covered six different hardware-software business model mixes and the hardware-software offering implications of each business model.

What the newsletter issue didn’t cover, and I suspect will be a topic for a later issue, were the business and organizational implications for the organization attempting to switch from a hardware-centric business to a software-centric business (except for a quick “Going from a traditional hardware sale to a full subscription business model is a heavy lift”).

Tale as old as time (or at least not a new problem)
Most of the companies or teams I’ve worked with in the past 20+ years had some mix of software in their predominantly hardware-driven business model (indeed, I’ve often been one the software folks at these hardware companies).

Most of these companies knew that software, media, and Cloud services could help drive more revenue. Though for most of them, revenue was really meant to be derived from hardware sales and software and services were just something to throw in to entice the hardware purchase.

But all of them spent some effort trying to understand how to use software and services, tied closely to their hardware, to generate new revenue or accelerate their current hardware-centric revenue streams. And I do recognize how they all flirted with one or more of the six business models Zach mentions in his newsletter.

Once a leopard…
What I was most interested in exploring at these companies when they attempted to shift away from their hardware-centric business was to figure out how to do the shift and what it implied for how the company operated.

Zach hints at the challenge of the shift briefly at the end of the newsletter, talking about the need for a hybrid business model to “shift from purchase-heavy revenue to subscription-heavy revenue.”

Keep in mind, though, that a hardware-centric business model is built around discrete product design and manufacturing, embedded software engineering and UX, hardware design and supply-chain constraints, logistics, and unit and volume sales and commissions. From end to end, the whole company is built to design, make, and distribute atoms. And the marketing and sales are mentally and organizationally architected to serve the pushing of those atoms.

Moving into the bits world of software, Cloud, and services calls for a quite different way to design, make, and deploy. You can’t get hardware designers designing web services. You can’t get your embedded software engineers building your service back end. You have to shift your usual expenses spent on factories, machinery, components to servers and software which are priced and paid for in a different way. And you’ll need to figure out how to incentivize your sales teams, especially when software subscriptions can have a much lower cost than the average hardware sales your sales team is use to. Also, I’ll even claim that there might need to be a wholesale change in leadership – leadership with deep skill in hardware, might not be able to understand or take full advantage of any of the more software-flavored business models Zach describes.

Heavy lift, indeed
Despite that, I still agree with Zach that there’s so much more value a hardware organization can unlock by folding in software. But I’ve seen first-hand that to get there the hardware-centric company needs to gain a whole new set of competencies, reconfigure the manufacturing and logistics flows, change how the company speaks and sells.

No, I don’t think it’s impossible. Just hard. And companies who are not paying attention or investing in the needed organizational shifts will end up failing, or, like some I worked for, vanishing.

Thoughts?

 

*I first heard the term ‘atoms and bits’ decades ago from Nick Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab. And I’ve always lived at the intersection of bits, atoms, and narratives. So I smiled when I saw that Zach chose to title his newsletter Atoms and Bits, especially as Particle.io adds more bits to their atom-based business.

 

Image by Michael Siebert

Innovation

Living the IoT dream: adding to my vaccine fridge monitor

Posted on by charlie

In a previous post, I talked about how I worked on a vaccine fridge monitor that was designed to alert me over Pushover if anything was going on with the fridge. At the end of that post, I mentioned that I had received some kits for some contests – both of which were hefty multi-sensor boards.

Arduino Oplà
While having alerts pushed to the phone and reading the temperature from a dashboard in the cloud could be considered sufficient, I wasn’t satisfied. When I saw the Arduino Oplà, I realized I could probably make it into a IoT display.

After reading about the Arduino Cloud and how easy it was to get a board online, I decided to buy an Arduino Nano 33 IoT to replace my D1 clone [reminder: the D1 served to send temp info over WiFi to a dashboard in the cloud, to save the Particle Boron from using up cellular bandwidth when there was no need to use cellular].

UART my friend
While I was in the process of expanding this monitor, I added an Adafruit SD card reader to log alerts and data. I also realized that there was no reason to have two temperature probes (one for the D1 and one for the Boron), so I decided to connect whatever was the WiFi board to the Boron over UART (which is stooopidly easy – well, mostly because I did such data transfer before).

I mounted everything on a perfboard. The SD card reader and the Nano were powered from the Boron, with the catch that the Nano was powered from the VUSB, meaning it’s off when the power is out (because if the power is out, there isn’t any WiFi anyway).

Additionally, the Nano was connected to the Boron via UART. Periodically, the Boron writes out pertinent data (and alerts if they happen) to the SD card, and then sends the same data to the Nano, which then sends it to Arduino Cloud.

Arduino Cloud
The Boron allows firmware update over the air, but I try not to do that much, as it consumes cellular data. But OTA update was helpful when I was tweaking some things after things were assembled.

On the Arduino Cloud side, provisioning the Oplà and Nano was quite pleasant – select your variables, fill in what happens when they change, upload the sketch. While trying to get the Arduino web editor to work over USB with my Mac was hit or miss, I was quite pleased with how easy it was to do OTA firmware updates over WiFi.* The only unpleasant surprise was I didn’t see that you can’t duplicate sketches in the web editor, almost losing a ton of code (I happened to have copied it out in a previous version).

Once in the Arduino Cloud, I could have the variable linked to another device (in my case the Oplà) that would respond to changes in the variables. And I could make a dashboard, as well.

Tying it all together
I now have a temperature probe connected to a Particle Boron. The Boron is taking readings and writing them to an SD card log. I can query parameters from the Boron through the Particle Console.

The Boron has a battery back up and can also sense power state (USB or Battery) and will alert me of anything by push message to Pushover on my phone.

For the WiFi part, the Boron sends data to the Nano. The Arduino Cloud makes it easy to work with multiple variables, I am able to report temperature, battery level, contacts status, Boron connection to cloud status, and SD card free memory.**

Once the Nano receives the data from the Boron, all it has to do is update its own variables. These variables then change in the Arduino Cloud, and the Oplà, linked to the same variables, updates its own variables, showing them on its display.

What’s more, because this is a critical device connected over cellular and WiFi and logging data, I have put in quite a few checks and module re-initializations, to ensure that all the services and functions I’m using are healthy, robust, and available. Plus I can update the firmware over the air, if needed.

That’s the IoT dream.

Filling slots
Ok, I will admit, part of picking five variables is because the Oplà has five buttons. I programmed the Oplà to always show temperature (see above). But if you press another button, it temporarily shows one of the other readings. Plus, if something goes wrong, the LED goes red and flashes the variable until things get back in range. Like a good display should.

In closing
This has been an interesting project. And there was a significant degree of complexity, made easy by how the vendors themselves (with great communities) make it easy to program and provision their devices. I can see myself tweaking things more, but I think I’ll let this rest a while. Plus, my wife is tired of me talking about it. 😁

 

*Now I understand what Adafruit is doing with Whippersnapper – this is indeed the way IoT needs to go

**The connection to cloud status for the Boron is partly because it could disconnect and I’d never know. I was also concerned that I’d run out of SD memory and not know. But after writing the code to handle all of the SD free memory calculation, I realized that the amount of data I was writing will take forever to fill up the SD.

Innovation

How I’ve built an LTE-based vaccines fridge monitor

Posted on by charlie

Everyone these days knows the importance of keeping vaccines safe and functional. This is the same, of course, with veterinary vaccines.

A local veterinarian I know stores all her vaccines in a special vaccine fridge at her home (she’s a mobile vet, so has no clinic). She asked me to create a monitor that can log the fridge temperature, alert her when the fridge is out of temperature range or out of power, and pass on any alarms from the fridge itself (there are exposed contacts for that).

Brainstorming
I first wanted to see what was on the market.

An online search failed to uncover any fridge monitors that could easily send text message, log data to the cloud, or was easily programmable. For the most part, the fridge monitors I found were geared toward professional environments with a cost and operational profile very different from a home environment: built for local logging, alerts through building Ethernet or WiFi network (not useful if the power is out), and closed (can’t modify the code).

I knew I wanted the solution to be connected to a mobile network, battery-powered, use a temperature probe (there’s a hole in the side of the fridge specifically for that), be connected to the fridge’s alarm contacts (they were designed for someone to interface their own alarm system directly to the fridge), log temperature (locally on SD or over the air to a dB), and be connected to some text message service.

Something to look at
I regularly look for dashboards I can send data to, such as Adafruit.io or Thingspeak. What’s interesting is that most IoT system vendors are focused on device management, not helping someone visualize their data. And IoT tools from folks like AWS and Google just seem too complicated to whip up a dashboard attached to a device. I ended up using Adafruit.io, but Thingspeak was pretty good as well. The rest of the ones I have seen cost more than I was willing to pay. And as I said, almost all IoT services that connect to devices aren’t geared toward visualizations or easily connecting to visualization tools. Really.

The design
The Particle Boron comes with most of what I needed. It’s cellular-connected, so it doesn’t need a WiFi network to send data (Do you realize how many IoT boards are WiFi or Bluetooth only? How useful are those during power outages?). The Boron also has a battery connector and has easy code for you to know when the main power is out and it’s running on battery (bonus: it can tell you the battery level, too). The Feather format of the Boron also means there are a lot of pins for the temperature probe, wires, and SD card reader I was adding.

Therefore, the main use of the Boron is sensing temperature, logging to the SD, and issuing any alerts.

Wait, you may ask, what about sending data to the cloud?

As I was building this, I realized that using cellular to send temperature data or constant status messages was a waste of bandwidth (I must say my old Nokia-days frugal-data mind-set came back in force). So I decided to snag a cheap LOLIN D1 and temperature probe for a cheap, WiFi-based temperature reader, sending data to Adafruit.io. That data is really to just see how things are going. The logging by the Boron is the main data log, because it’ll still be able to do so under battery-only power.

About those alerts
I spent a lot of time thinking of all the ways to get a notification. I thought of an Adafruit.io or IFTT kinda notification. I also looked at Twillio. And there were some hacks one could do to email a text message.

In the end, I stumbled upon Pushover, which integrates really simply (thank you, tutorials here and here) with the Particle system. I set up different levels of alerts, such as critical for power outages, silent for daily proof of life messages. And it works really well to alert me to changes in the system.

Leveling up
I am so used to living in the Arduino and CircuitPython world of ample examples, easy programming tools, great set of libraries.

For the Particle, the libraries are the same or ported from Arduino. So there was familiarity there. But for me to program, I ended up using the VS Code-based SDK. There were some good first-use tutorials that helped me get a clue. But for sure it was all one step removed from my usual maker world. And, overall, developing for the Boron took a bit more effort on my part than my usual boards, partly due to less examples and community resources.

But the Particle system has some cool tricks, like being able to call a variable or function remotely over cellular from the device console in a browser. And there are some system health stats for when I want to know how the system is running. [That’s what most IoT providers offer – device management]

For me, learning a new SDK, doing local and over the air firmware updates, coding the board to return variable or run functions remotely all really leveled up my skills.

Where I’m at and where I’m going
I’ve had the Boron running for a while. It’s been silent, mostly because no alerts are needed. And the D1 is streaming data points to Adafruit.io, so I can see how the fridge is behaving.

Moving forward, I’m not too keen on using two temperature probes. So I am thinking to use the D1 simply as a WiFi bridge, receiving data from the Boron via serial. That way, the Boron does all the work and then tells the D1 to upload the data to Adafruit.io.

Also, right now, while I’ve been prototyping, the whole set up is on a breadboard and in a zip case. I need to permanently bring all the parts together and put it all in a decent enclosure.

Yeah, feature requests never end.

Finally, we’d really like to figure out how to control a power switch to the fridge backup battery to ensure uninterrupted power.

But for now, I’m just excited to have an LTE board sending alerts to my phone to ensure that the fridge is taken care of. Now I really need to clean it all up.

And then something unexpected:
Both Electromaker (with Nordic Semi) and Arduino are running contests around IoT, with free kit. I pitched this project to them, mostly because I didn’t think I would be awarded anything, but BOTH awarded me.

One project sends the Nordic Thingy 91, the other the Olpà IoT Kit. These boards are BEASTS – chock-full of sensors and functions – way overkill for a fridge sensor. And, in any case, they’d still both need a temperature probe for a fridge monitor, as one really wouldn’t place the whole board in the fridge, for various reasons.

While I pitched a fridge monitor, I feel a bit disappointed these guys are actually not well-suited for that. On the plus side, my brain is racing thinking how to use these multi-faceted devices.

One thing these devices taught me, tho, is they are really a multi-faceted dev platform. They have way too much to actually deploy anything with them. But that’s the point. Tho the Boron, also meant to be a ‘dev’ board, is priced and featured right that it can be the core of a deployed solution. As I am doing here.

In any case, look for more adventures in IoT as I figure out what to do with these two devices. 😁

[One more thing: Yes, you did notice that I have NO pics of the setup. Partly, because so much was happening in software and I wasn’t taking many pics. That’s not normal for me. I promise to do better next time.]
Strategy

One big wish for CircuitPython in 2022

Posted on by charlie

I thought I could add my voice to the folks sharing their wishes for CircuitPython in 2022.

Boards I like
I was really pleased with how many boards came out last year that run CicruitPython, particularly those built on ESP32-S2 and RP2040.

For this year, the tease at the start of 2021 for a ESP32-TFT combo has finally turned into reality. Want. No, I have no idea what I am going to do with it. But it’s bonkers. That’s gotta be good, no?

And the recent Adafruit brain wave of different QtPys, especially those built on ESP32 (catching a theme?) have my head abuzz. Especially with the LiPo BFF-Sprinkle-Topping. I like smol, wireless, and battery-powered for lots of the things I mess with. But I’ve been usually going to a Feather S2 or TinyPICO, devices WAY overpowered and expensive for the things I usually do. Usually if I go for those, I want to GO BIG.

In any case, a QTPy ESP32 with LiPo feels like it changes these calculations. Let’s see.

Coding I love
As for CircuitPython itself, I’m impressed with how many new features have showed up in the past year, such as deep sleeping and asyncio (so new!). For sure I will be exploring asyncio, as most of my projects have various things going on in parallel and I have to manually manage all that.

Looking forward
There are a few areas that I struggled with CircuitPython, wanting it to do something and then having to turn to Arduino to do it.

UDP – alas, I had a project that used UDP that I just couldn’t get to work on CircuitPython. UDP is common in connected devices to send data to an endpoint without the chattiness of TCP. Alas, this isn’t a biggie for me in 2022, as I don’t think I’ll have a project with that.

So sleepy – this wish might have already been answered, but I want to see deep sleep spread to all the CircuitPython chips. In the small boards I use, they don’t have deep sleep (last I checked), only the hefty chips do. Tho, with the ESP32 line spreading to other formats, perhaps I won’t care the M0s are left out.

AudioIn – this one is the biggest for me at the moment. I have had many rounds using sound with various CircuitPython boards. Oh, CircuitPython might be great for MIDI, or for generating or mixing waveforms (yay, Winterbloom), or for playing snippets stored in memory or an SD card. But (and maybe it’s me) CircuitPython really isn’t designed for AudioIn, say, for recording someone and then doing something with it. Well, at least I’ve not had any luck trying to do that.

CircuitPython Audio Mixer – with that in mind, I would really be happy if we could design audio systems for CircuitPython like Teensy folks can do with the Audio System Design Tool. I’m trying really hard not to spring for a Teensy. But something like this could be really powerful, even if it were for the RasPi and a voice bonnet.

This AudioIn issue has been plaguing me in general, so it’s not a fault of CircuitPython. But, since we are making wishes, my biggest wish for 2022 is more AudioIN tools for CircuitPython.

Ok, so maybe part of the list above is just indicative of my skillz (or lack thereof). So, do let me know if you agree the list above needs to be added to CircuitPython, or if I just need to up my skills. 😁

Image shamelessly snagged from MasterTheHandpan (don’t judge, it’s the image I was looking for)

Short stories/Snippets

Pocket Universe

Posted on by charlie

This is a chapter from a book I wrote during NanoWriMo 2011. The story was about folks who ‘shepherded’ marine mammals and fish (with the aid of dolphins, hence the dolphin reference below). Interspersed in the story were short chapters, interludes of unspecified origin – dreams? digressions? thoughts? This is one of them, pertinent to a recent, previous, post on technology, hence why I am sharing this now.

Pocket Universe

I was amazed by how fast nothing happened. 

The sun hung for hours in the same spot, smiling from the clear blue sky, causing the raft to hum with vivid orangeness. The water gently lapped and rocked the raft, and the mild breeze took me in a direction I only had a vague idea might have been where I wanted to go. 

I didn’t think of my dolphins, but I did, and wondered where they were. I’d been here so long, I no longer remembered why. All I could remember was that the sun hadn’t moved in a long time and my life vest chafed at my neck. And the overalls were hot too, their dark fabric absorbing the sun’s heat, almost burning. 

I kept counting the seconds to 60 but kept forgetting to count how many times I’d gone around. I think time had run out of minutes, and I was stuck with just seconds. Each time I hit 60, I started back at 1, instead of marching on to 61 or 6001. 

It must have something to do with the sun not wanting to budge from her spot. 

I shifted a bit and I felt something in my pocket. 

A pencil. Yellow. The standard hexagonal American kind with metal collar holding a red rubber eraser. The pencil was nice and factory sharp, with a bit of fine saw dust still around the grey graphite tip. 

It was an amazing graphite tip. 

I could almost see the atoms dancing on the tippy tip. 

A pencil is made of many parts, and each part has its origin story. There’s the paint, print, metal ring, rubber eraser, wood case, and lead. Each one has its origin and use, and this simple yellow pencil is the product of complex material manipulations, chemistry, extrusions, cutting, mixing, rolling, sanding, painting, handling, wrapping, shipping, and moving until it’s an object to be fondled under a stationary sun in the middle of the Pacific. 

ISN’T THAT JUST MIND-BLOWING? Never mind worrying if anyone will find me in the middle of nowhere, I have a PENCIL that is more amazing, Alyosha, than all of your philosophies. It’s the manifestation of the Universe all wrapped up and ready for a wee kid to doodle with. It’s the Universe hidden in the mundane. It’s the bloomin’ magical Universe, styoopid, and it’s right under your fat nose. And no need to invoke any higher power, neither. It’s a pencil. You and I can make one. 

You’ll need a casing – fragrant cedar is my favorite – cut into slats from blocks and blocks of the finest wood, down to a small bed with a groove to intimately sandwich, hold, and enfold the pencil lead like a precious woman in her lover’s arms. And the lovers – casing and lead – are shot through a planning process that adds multiple facets to their relationship, in the case of the yellow object in my hand, six facets (Hm, what might those facets represent? – family, children, society, friends, work, death, money – no, that’s seven, are there seven-sided pencils? I digress.) 

And then the polished and burnished pencil casing is painted and lacquered multiple times (sure would be less times if it weren’t mechanized) for children everywhere to ingest chips of while chewing, holding, handling these blessed, Universe-on-a-Stick, pencils. 

Regarding pencil lead: There’s no lead in pencil lead. Pencil lead is made of graphite, made of the same stuff diamonds are, and fullerene, if you’re particular. Therefore, you didn’t get poisoned in school when you aggravated your friend and she poked you in anger and broke the lead tip in the palm of your hand. (OK, I, I didn’t get poisoned.) 

The folks who are to blame for this misconception were, presumably, pre-Chemistry, when it was thought that graphite chunks looked a lot like lead. Though, I have more respect for ancient chemists than most and am pretty sure they could tell the difference – c’mon, lead is HEAVY.  

But the pencil lead, I mean, pencil graphite is not pure graphite, but mixed with clay for different hardness and darkness. The mixture itself is ground and pressed into long cylinders and then kiln dried, carefully so as not to damage the lead. So next time a svelte boho artiste designer-type asks you if she makes you BBB or HHH, give her a knowing grin. 

But we’re not done, you need to let the world know you made the pencil, and so with the lightest foil and hardest punch, you imprint whatever you darn well please on the side of that pencil, around it if you wish (it is you making the pencil, after all), and then send it off to get it’s crown of rubber and metal. 

I looked up and the sun still had not moved. In protest, I tilted myself, just so that my shadow would take on a different angle. If the sun won’t move my shadow, then I will take full responsibility. 

The sad thing is that this pencil is mass produced. Also, most of us only think of the “How they make it” part. But it’s much deeper than that. 

Graphite is not just some soft carbon material used for steelmaking, brake linings, lubricants, or, of course, pencils. It’s a hexagonal crystal of dihexagonal dipyramidal symmetry. Crystalline symmetry! And it’s the most stable form of carbon, to boot (or is that, “to soot”?) 

If I look closely at the pencil point, I see the mixing of the clay and graphite. Getting closer, I can see the phyllosilicates of the clay next to the dihexagonal dipyramidal of the graphite. And getting closer still I see – well, it’s really interesting what I see. 

We’re so trained in the balls and stick model of atoms and molecules, but when I get down to this level, it’s really not the same. Each atom is a force field, filled with electrons (Carbon has six in three different orbitals – and no, I don’t mean electrons spinning around the nucleus like planets, but electrons spinning about on their axes moving about in a defined area, captured – argh, it’s really hard to explain sub-atomic wonders via macro-atomic imagery; that will make more sense as I push closer) 

As I push farther, into all the shells, the orbitals, I can see the nucleus, a dense knot of protons and neutrons. These two defy explanation, as, to me, they are just bundles of energy. But I am not going to stop there; I’ll plow into a proton where there are even smaller tangles of energy – two up quarks and one down quark. 

At this level, I find it meaningless to talk about elemental particles. They are just fluctuations in the fabric of the Universe, braille bumps that somehow are stable, join up into higher order structures, and higher, and higher – oh, I’m back at my pencil lead tip. 

I look up. The sun still hasn’t moved. I’ve traversed the whole of Creation on a pencil and the sun doesn’t have the courtesy to move. This day will never end. 

I can hear the photons taking their eight and a half minute journey from the surface of the sun, through space, to slam into my face, tripping photo sensors, causing a cascade of genes to produce melanin, making me feel happy, and setting my sleeping clock. 

I can taste the blue of the sky, full of wispy water, neutral nitrogen, obnoxious oxygen, and a smattering of argon and carbon dioxide and a few other gasses. Mmm. 

I am buoyed on the orangeness of my raft, its brightness a hand lifting me up, caressing me, protecting me from the water, gently rocking me to sleep. 

Damn, that sun hasn’t moved. The nothing is happening faster than I can keep up with it. 

Image from Wikipedia

The Narrative

Riffing off a rant about technology

Posted on by charlie

I stumbled upon a brief rant on technology by Ursula LeGuin via The Prepared. Great stuff. Alas, I required a bit more than a tweet for me to riff off of it.

“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”
What I like about this rant is that it echoes my own view of what folks call ‘technology’. I often point out to tech-worshippers that a frakkin’ pencil is ‘technology.’ Indeed, you could write a while book on the pencil and cover so much about science and engineering and, yes, technology (well, I know I could (well, I did, sort of in a NaNoWriMo chapter)).

As LeGuin sorta says, it doesn’t have to be some LIDAR-carrying mobile phone with scratch-proof glass and precision machining and connects to dozen of satellites and can receive push messages from your Roomba when it rolls over your cat.

Clothing, dishes, toothpicks – they are all ‘technology’ – things we make to interact with our physical world.

Humans are inveterate technoweenies
Usually the next thing I say after the pencil comment is, heck, even a chipped flint stone is technology. And humans have been making things (*cough* technology) for evah – IT DEFINES US. I have visions of cavehumans hanging around the fire in a deep discussion on the latest flint techniques and what Harg in the next village over did with that wicked deerhorn to chip the stone just right – just like we all hang around talking about hi-fi (d’oh, dating myself) mobile phones.

To hark back to LeGuin’s rant, it’s stupid to say her stories don’t have technology when technology is everywhere for any civilization (or even non-civilizations – go google about animal tool use).

Technology
Finally, one related secret about my writing: I try not to use the word ‘technology’ at all (ok, so this post is messing up my score). This writing choice was inspired about 15 or more years ago by Ben Hammersly who was taking over some editorial duties at Wired and was going to ban ‘technology’ from everyone’s writing. Well, that’s how I remember it,* and how I was affected by it. And I’ve cut out a gazillion instances of the word ‘technology’ from my writing (and I’ve written a krapload in the past 15+ years).

Rant-triggered rant
So, when I read LeGuin’s rant, I needed to riff off of hers and add mine – she’s so right, a damn pencil is technology; we have always been technoweenies; and don’t don’t don’t ever use THAT WORD again.

I feel better.

*One other item that stands out from that conversation with Ben: matte black magazine covers. I can’t unsee that. Thank you, Ben.

Image from Blick, purveyors of all sorts of fine pencils (and other stuff, too)