yoursunny blog
computer, Internet, and life

Alexa, ask UA Campus Rec when does the gym open?

Junxiao Shi

I built an Alexa Skill, and got it published.

How I Learned Alexa Skill Kit and Why I Picked it Up Again

I learned about Alexa Skill Kit at Hack Arizona 2017, and built an incredibly complicated 520bus skill to query departure times of Sun Tran buses and Sun Link modern streetcar. I didn't win a prize, and quickly forgot about that.

A few months later, a tweet caught my attention: publish a skill, get an Echo Dot & Alexa dev swag. I always wanted to own a hardware device that integrates with Alexa. I considered the "practically free" Dash Wand, but gave up when I found out it is powered by batteries. I couldn't afford to buy an Echo, because I already spent all my money on those ESP8266 toys. However, I'm not going to miss a FREE Echo Dot.

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How I Put a Temperature Sensor on the NDN Testbed

Junxiao Shi

The frontpage of my recently renovated website shows a room temperature reading of my apartment. This is not your average IoT project, but a showcase of how an IoT device can communicate directly over Named Data Networking (NDN). This article explains where does this temperature reading come from, how is it turned into NDN Data packets, how the sensor appears on the NDN testbed, and how the temperature reading shows up on the website.

room temperature display on yoursunny.com frontpage

Sensor Hardware

If you have been reading my posts, you may have guessed that the temperature reading comes from an ESP8266. Of course! It is actually my very first ESP8266, which I received from Losant IoT Inc. It comes with a TMP36 analog temperature sensor, and has been reporting my room temperature to Losant platform since May 2016.

Losant Builder Kit with all the additions

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How HomeCam Registers NDN Prefixes?

Junxiao Shi

HomeCam, a browser-based home surveillance camera, is one of my major side projects during the past few years. My last post gave an overview on the overall architecture and various components of HomeCam. I mentioned that HomeCam delivers pictures via Named Data Networking (NDN), which provides better scalability because the camera only needs to serve each picture once even if there are multiple viewers, and the network takes care of the distribution.

Both HomeCam viewers and cameras connect to the global NDN testbed network via WebSockets. A viewer sends Interests to the network to request a picture from a specific camera identified by part of the Interest name. The network forwards the Interests to the named camera, and the camera responds with Data packets that contain the picture. But how does the network know where the camera is?

The camera must register its prefix onto the NDN testbed network.

For a regular end host running the NDN Forwarding Daemon (NFD), you may let the world reach your NFD via auto prefix propagation. This procedure involves sending a prefix registration command to the network, which causes the router to add a route toward the end host. A requirement is that the prefix registration command must be signed by a key trusted by the network.

HomeCam camera is a browser-based application that directly connects to a testbed router, and there is no NFD running locally to do auto prefix propagation for us. However, HomeCam can still have a route added toward the camera by sending a prefix registration command.

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How to Change the MAC Address of ESP8266?

Junxiao Shi

Each ESP8266, like every other WiFi network interface card, comes with a MAC address that identifies itself to the network. Sometimes you want to change the MAC address of an ESP8266. How to do that?

ESP8266 has the built-in MAC address

ESP8266 Arduino core does not provide an API to change ESP8266's WiFi MAC address. While there is a WiFi.macAddress function, it actually retrieves the current WiFi MAC address, instead of setting it. However, Espressif SDK offers an API to change the WiFi STA MAC address:

bool wifi_set_macaddr(uint8 if_index, uint8 *macaddr);

This API is declared in user_interface.h. To get access in this API, you'll need to include this header.

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Show Temperature and Humidity as WiFi SSID with ESP8266 and HTU21D Sensor

Junxiao Shi

Since I started playing with ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller in 2016, I had a TMP36 temperature sensor. TMP36 is an analog sensor: it uses a voltage between 0.00V and 1.75V to represent a temperature reading between -50℃ and 125℃. The ESP8266 has an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) capable of reading voltages up to 1.00V. To read a temperature from TMP36 into ESP8266, I need to use a pair of resistors as a voltage divider, so that the resulting voltage does not exceed ADC's limit. However, I feel the temperature reading is very inaccurate: is my room really 19℃ when @TheTucsonHeat is in town? I once replaced the carbon resistors with metal film resistors, and the temperature reading instantly changed by as much as 8℃.

I need an upgrade to the temperature sensor! The new sensor must output digital signal, so that my lousy resistors wouldn't affect its accuracy. After comparing DHT11, DHT22, DS18B20, and several others, I eventually chose HTU21D-F because it has an I2C interface, which can be added directly to my LCD kit.

The HTU21D sensor arrives in the mail a few weeks later. It needs a bit of soldering to add the pin headers onto the breakout board; ImmodderNation has a soldering video to get you started. Afterwards, wiring is simple: just add it into the existing I2C bus! As long as you don't short the wires, you won't burn down the office.

HTU21D on I2C bus of ESP8266

A quick test with Adafruit's library confirms the HTU21D sensor is working correctly. Temperature and humidity readings are showing up on the serial console. However, I don't want to tug around the laptop to measure temperature around the house, and don't want to program the LCD or connect to Losant or NDN right away. I thought up a quick and easy way: let's create a Wi-Fi hotspot from the ESP8266, and show temperature and humidity as the WiFi network name (SSID)!

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How to Deduplicate BibTeX Entries?

Junxiao Shi

I'm writing my dissertation recently. My dissertation is a combination of several publications from my PhD career. Therefore, part of my dissertation writing process involves copy-pasting the papers together into a single document.

Like any good academics, I typeset my publications with LaTeX, and use BibTeX to incorporate citations into the documents. My collection of bibliographies is fairly ad hoc: during each writing project, I search for related work to cite in my paper. Unlike most others, I create a separate bib file for each BibTeX entry named after the citation key. For example, I would have bib/ndn-tlv.bib for a BibTeX entry named "ndn-tlv", and bib/Mininet.bib for the "Mininet" entry. This allows me to find available citation keys with a quick glance over the bib/ directory. My build process then concatenates these small bib files into ref.bib as an input to BibTeX.

My dissertation combines all my publications, and thus needs a union of BibTeX entries from those combinations. To make this union, I can copy all these single-entry bib files into the same directory. If two previous papers cited the same reference, their bib files should have the same name, and only one copy would be left in the combined directory.

Except that the above assumption is true only if I cited the same reference with the same citation key. And so I discovered a citation appearing twice in my dissertation:

duplicate references in dissertation

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How HomeCam Works?

Junxiao Shi

HomeCam, a browser-based home surveillance camera, is one of my major side projects during the past few years. HomeCam allows you to capture pictures via the webcam on a laptop or smartphone, and view real-time images from a different device. No specialized hardware or software installation is needed: HomeCam works directly in a web browser. This article gives an overview of the web technologies that enable HomeCam.

If you have not used HomeCam, try it today!

Functionality Review and General Workflow

The HomeCam web app can operate in either viewer or camera mode. To enter either mode, the user is required to specify a "camera name", which serves as an identifier. Each camera should have a distinct camera name. Any number of viewers can be active at the same time, and they will retrieve real-time pictures from the camera with the same camera name.

Under the hood, this works in three steps:

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yoursunny.com is in Git and Completely Rebuilt

Junxiao Shi

I started making websites since 2001. This website, yoursunny.com, started in 2006. In the past 11 years, I've rebuilt the site several times, switched from ASP to PHP, and moved from Windows dedicated hosting to shared hosting and eventually to Linux VPS. So far, every time I want to perform a major edit to the website, I copy original versions of affected files to a backup folder on my computer, and then go ahead to do the edit. After having tested the modification locally, I upload changed files via FTP or SFTP to the server. One constant worry over my head is, what if I lose all the files on my computer, and my hosting provider vanishes so I can't get them back? Another headache is, sometimes I may make an edit incorrectly, but I couldn't revert it back because I didn't copy the original files to the backup folder as I determined the change wasn't "major" enough to warrant a backup.

During my studies at University of Arizona, I learned a useful tool called git. Git is a source control system: it allows developers to create a repository and put source code into the repository, and will automatically keep track of all the edits applied to each file. By putting website source code into a git repository, I can find out what modifications I've performed to each file over time, regardless of whether it is "major" or "minor". Additionally, I can synchronize the git repository with a remote git server, so that the server has a copy of my website, including edit histories as well. This would solve both the worry of losing files, and the headache of not having an earlier version to revert to in case of an incorrect modification.

After delaying this projects several times, I am finally determined to move yoursunny.com into git repositories in Apr 2017. At the same time, to keep the website source code as clean as possible, I decide to try out two new technologies: static site generators and Composer. That is, I would rebuild yoursunny.com, copying page by page, into a new website stored in git repositories.

I spent about 2 months for this rebuild/move, and I'm happy to announce that yoursunny.com is now under source control.

Main Site with Composer

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How to Access Gogo Inflight WiFi on American Airlines for Free?

Junxiao Shi

Gogo offers WiFi Internet access on American Airlines domestic flights within United States. The Internet services are provided through Air-To-Ground (ATG) technology: a cellular radio network of over 200 towers in North America points their antennas to the sky; a Gogo-equipped airliner connects to one of these cellular towers, and provides Internet to passengers via WiFi. Pricing for Internet access via Gogo in-flight WiFi starts at USD 4.95 for 30 minutes.

gogoinflight airborne splash page

American Airlines and Gogo also provide inflight personal device entertainment through the same gogoinflight Wi-Fi signal. This service is free of charge, and allows passengers to watch movies and TV episodes on their own smartphones and tablets. Presumably, contents are pre-downloaded to a server located inside the aircraft, and therefore accessing those contents do not consume radio bandwidth.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story movie provided on gogoinflight

While watching videos are permitted during the flight, Gogo does not want passengers to download these copyrighted movies for watching later at home. Therefore, users must have the Gogo Entertainment app on their mobile devices in order to watch movies. The app is compatible with the Digital Rights Management technology used in the entertainment server, to ensure that the movies can be watched for free, but cannot be (easily) downloaded. But what if the device does not already have the Gogo Entertainment app?

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