Shallow Thoughts : : Jan

PyCon Tutorial: Build your own PiDoorbell - Learn Home Automation with Python

The first batch of hardware has been ordered for Rupa's and my tutorial at PyCon in Montreal this April!

We're presenting Build your own PiDoorbell - Learn Home Automation with Python on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 9.

It'll be a hands-on workshop, where we'll experiment with the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins and learn how to control simple things like an LED. Then we'll hook up sonar rangefinders to the RPis, and build a little device that can be used to monitor visitors at your front door, birds at your feeder, co-workers standing in front of your monitor while you're away, or just about anything else you can think of.

Participants will bring their own Raspberry Pi computers and power supplies -- attendees of last year's PyCon got them there, but a new Model A can be gotten for $30, and a model B for $40.

We'll provide everything else. We worried that requiring participants to bring a long list of esoteric hardware was just asking for trouble, so we worked a deal with PyCon and they're sponsoring hardware for attendees. Thank you, PyCon! CodeChix is fronting the money for the kits and helping with our travel expenses, thanks to donations from some generous sponsors. We'll be passing out hardware kits and SD cards at the beginning of the workshop, which attendees can take home afterward.

We're also looking for volunteer T/As. The key to a good hardware workshop is having lots of helpers who can make sure everybody's keeping up and nobody's getting lost. We have a few top-notch T/As signed up already, but we can always use more. We can't provide hardware for T/As, but most of it's quite inexpensive if you want to buy your own kit to practice on. And we'll teach you everything you need to know about how get your PiDoorbell up and running -- no need to be an expert at hardware or even at Python, as long as you're interested in learning and in helping other people learn.

This should be a really fun workshop! PyCon tutorial sign-ups just opened recently, so sign up for the tutorial (we do need advance registration so we know how many hardware kits to buy). And if you're going to be at PyCon and are interested in being a T/A, drop me or Rupa a line and we'll get you on the list and get you all the information you need.

See you at PyCon!

Our black squirrel: Little Blackie

We've been having occasional visits from black squirrels for maybe five years now, but mostly they're shy and don't stay long.

Black squirrels are interesting. As far as I know, they're a color variation of the usual Eastern grey squirrel we get as our most common yard visitor here in San Jose. (For a while we got a lot of Eastern Fox squirrels, but I guess that population moved away since I haven't seen one in years.) Our native Western greys are larger and more wary, and keep to the hills and forests, never venturing down into the city.

Black squirrels have been common in Palo Alto for many decades, I'm told, but it's only in the last five or ten years that they've started expanding southward. First I would see a few in Sunnyvale and Mountain View, then a couple in Campbell, and then, finally, a few years after that, they made it here to West San Jose. (Campbell is farther south than our house, but the squirrels as they expanded their range probably moved toward the less urban hills and parks.)

This year we had our first friendly, regular black squirrel visitor. I called him Little Blackie after the pony in True Grit. He's by far the most beautiful squirrel we've ever had -- his fur glistens in the sun and looks amazingly soft. Unfortunately he's also difficult to photograph well -- the point-and-shoot tends not to focus on him very well, and he's always underexposed even when I use exposure compensation.

LB was very quick (as squirrels go) to figure out that our fencepost was a good source of walnuts, and even pretty quick to make the association that people near the office door means that another nut may appear soon. (Most squirrels take forever to figure that out, and when you come out to put up another nut, they run away and don't come back for hours.)

After a few months of regular feeding, he was tolerating us only a few feet away as we put nuts on the fencepost, and then it was a few more months before he worked up the courage to take nuts from our hands. He still doesn't linger -- he grabs the nut and runs.

This morning he was quite entertaining, when he decided I was coming out too slowly (I try not to make sudden movements when approaching wild animals) and jumped from the fencepost to run along the gate. I met him halfway, and offered the nut to him as he sat on the gate. He grabbed it, but his nervousness about being in a different place made him too hasty, and he missed his grab and the nut went bouncing down onto the driveway.

He looked at me with a bemused expression, jumped back to the fencepost and ran back along the fence -- but couldn't quite work up the nerve to run down and get the nut off the driveway. So I fetched it for him, and offered it to him up on the fence.

Nothing doing -- that was too weird. So he waited until I went back to the fencepost, whereupon he scampered right over, grabbed the nut and ran off to hang from the tree.

Wacky Blackie! Here are the best photos of him I've been able to get so far: Little Blackie, our black squirrel.

Government accountability

Do you ever get annoyed at how government takes your tax money and tosses it around, without much accountability as to how much money goes where?

Well, in New Mexico they want to make sure you don't get that feeling.

When you drive by a highway construction project, the cost of the project is right there -- down to the nearest dollar. (With no commas, so be careful when counting those digits that you don't run into the car in front of you.)

$7557022.00. Now that's accountability!

(We won't talk about the completion date of fall 2013 and the fact that this photo was taken in early 2014. I hope that doesn't make the costs overrun to $7557022.50 or even $7557023.00.)