Last week found me standing tall upon my shell script soapbox, shouting command line praises to all who would listen.

Thou ought direct thine output aftways, to-wards thine USB port of thee. And that is well and righteous.

Well, that still is the case. My latest project has made it glaringly obvious that sometimes a little Python script will render a whole bunch of shell scripting moot. Namely, parsing HTML. Let’s see a picture…

Lunch hour project: parse the comments from swantron.com; feed said comments to an LCD screen.

I was horsing around with wget from a CLI a few days ago. I found myself trying to smash through the resultant file via pure regular expressions…which is incredibly clumsy. Well, as luck would have it, my go-to after my main go-to is Python, and this type of thing has been issue enough to warrant a library. BeautifulSoup. It acts to parse the HTML info into items, that can be smashed around as I see(med) fit.

My setup was simple: py script to snag my comments and write serial, Arduino sketch to drive a LCD and read/write serial. And a source of shade. And a WiFi signal to snag.

Check, check, check, etc. Video time:

Python parser / serial writer

#!/usr/bin/python
# https://swantron.com
# htlm grab / parse...
# ...write to serial out
# 2011

admin = [ 'Joseph Swanson' ]
total = True

import urllib2, time, serial, sys
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

# disregard spammers | disregard identical posts | create spam zone

spam = []

# initialize serial write to Arduino

ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyUSB0', 9600)

time.sleep(5)

# work section

while True:

  # snag html

  html = urllib2.urlopen("https://swantron.com/comments/feed").read()

  # parse

  soup = BeautifulSoup(html)

  # inspect parsed results

  for item in soup('item'):
      badGuy = item('guid')[0].string.split('comment-')[1]

      if badGuy not in spam:

              # spammer jail

              spam.append(badGuy)

              # time modification

              postTime = item('pubdate')[0].string
              parsedTime = time.strptime(postTime, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S +0000")
              offsetTime = time.mktime(parsedTime) - time.timezone
              localPostTime = time.strftime("%m/%d/%y %H:%M", time.localtime(offsetTime))

              # identify me

              author = item('dc:creator')[0].string
              if author in admin:
                  print "(" + localPostTime + ") I, " + author + ", just posted a comment"
                  print "    " + item('guid')[0].string
                  print "    " + item('description')[0].string
                  ser.write(item('description')[0].string)
              time.sleep(1)
              elif total:
                  print "(" + localPostTime + ") background noise ~~ " + author
                  print "    " + item('guid')[0].string
                  print "    " + item('description')[0].string
                  ser.write(item('description')[0].string)


  time.sleep(10)

Arduino LCD driver

// LCD Driver
// https://swantron.com
// basic serial in > LCD display
// 2011

#include <LiquidCrystal.h>

// **Define pins**
// LCD RS - pin 12
// LCD R/W - pin 11
// LCD ENABLE - pin 10
// LCD BACK+ - pin 13
// LCD DATA4 - pin 5
// LCD DATA5 - pin 4
// LCD DATA6 - pin 3
// LCD DATA7 - pin 2
// LCD VSS, CONTRAST,  BACK- - ground

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2);

int backLight = 13;    // Define pin for backlight

void setup()
{
  pinMode(backLight, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(backLight, HIGH); // Backlight level (LOW / HIGH)
  lcd.begin(20,4);               // (Columns, Rows)
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
  // when characters arrive over the serial port...
  if (Serial.available()) {
    // wait a bit for the entire message to arrive
    delay(100);
    // clear the screen
    lcd.clear();
    // read all the available characters
    while (Serial.available() > 0) {
      // display each character to the LCD
      lcd.write(Serial.read());
    }
  }
}

I’m excited about this project. Even though this deal is in gen 3, I still have some crazy take-off ideas. Create a secure page on swantron to hold a few values…hook up my old notebook as a base station…home automation on the cheap. Replace that LCD with a sketch to search for a particular string, i.e. “open garage door” and boom, there you go. This could be very cool. Introduce twitter to remove my server from the equation…awesome.

Hit the comments with any improvements or project ideas you can conjure. This one has me excited…feel free to challenge me with something cool. As always, thanks for reading, yadda yadda, stay tuned, etc.

After a deal of success with the command line interface-to-Arduino project, I am in the middle of stepping it up a notch. I ended up on a few blogs due to that last effort, which indicates that I am doing something worthy of note. Hats off to me, perhaps. Well, my tool belt is what it is…if I can’t do it via shell scripting, I reach next for Python. In an attempt to parse stuff that I have been ‘getting’ via wget, I found myself trying to do some clunky regex from the command line. Guess what…I can do that without as much heartache via Python via BeautifulSoup… Thus far, I have python doing the website getting and Beautiful Soup doing the parsing of my site…basically just grabbing some info at this point that I can modify. I have my LCD driven via my trusty Arduino, and that is that. Instead of redirecting standard out to serial, I am writing to serial via python. Easy breezy. I have some sloppy sloppy code at this point, and need to add some hardware and stuffs to my prototype. Stay tuned…this could be a good one.

It showed up… I got excited and made an un-boxing vid. Apparently, I get twitchy when I am excited. Probably why I interview like shit. Anyhow… So, my three dollar (eight with shipping) bag of crap yielded: * Passive laptop cooling pad * Refurbished DSL router * Strawberry that unfolds into a bag? * Remote controlled Batman helicopter * Three dog brushes Not bad at all; I’m chalking this up as a win.

Greetings from 4800 feet above sea level…the ever-lovely Bozeman, Montana. Bad news to everyone to the right side of the Rockies: we are sending more water your way. Bozeman Creek is starting to hop some banks. I jumped on the CT-90 after work and headed out to survey the situation. These pics were taken in Bozeman proper…on Church street North of Kagy. There have been some road closures further North, as the stream has been running over a few roadways. Coincidentally, both major breaches have been near culverts…one under Mendenhall and one under Kagy. Poor planning, city engineers. A few hundred yards down the road from the bridge, I popped into my sister’s old condo complex. I have seen some sandbagging there in the past. A for effort, guys. Take the grade into consideration next time. This thing is slated to crest next week….we’ll see what happens. Strange year for extreme weather, to say the least.

For the most part, I have had good luck with Compiz, Unity, and Ubuntu 11.04 in general. I have said it before, but worth a repost…if you do a vanilla install of Ubuntu, the first thing you should do is get the Compiz configuration tool…I’ll even spell it out.

1. Open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+t)
2. Run this command: sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager3) Hit enter…done. Nothing to it. Anyhow, I have seen the following bug a few times…so I finally snagged a screenshot: It appears that the workspace switcher and wobbly windows have some sort of issue with one another. I don’t see this when I use keyboard shortcuts, and I have been employing those nearly extensively to pop around. Super Key+S (Windows key / Apple key) to open the switcher…or bypassed with Ctrl+Alt+left or Ctrl+Alt+up for instance. It works slickly, once you spend some time poking around. I suppose it would be prudent for me to enter this bug into the Ubuntu QA system…I am not in the mood to search for duplicate tickets. I do that crap all day at work…enough is enough. Drop me a comment if you have seen this one in action. Or, if you have any workspace suggestions, send that over too.

Liquid crystal displays are pretty awesome. Command line interfaces are very awesome. Hmm…

I started daydreaming at work about how to go about making hardware interface with an RSS feed. I have seen some projects that use Arduinos with ethernet shields to check Twitter, for example, but they seem unnecessarily bulky. Or clumsy. I spend a lot of time working on the command line, and love to put together dirty little scripts to solve problems. It sort of goes along the lines of ‘when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’…I figured that the same thing could be implemented with a little shell scripting and my trusty Arduino, sans anything complicated.

So far, so good.

I put together a sketch (after the bump) to drive my LCD, writing serial output to the screen. After verifying that the sketch worked via the Arduino IDE’s serial monitor, I popped open a CLI and got to work. FWIW, I am using Ubuntu 11.04 still…ctrl-alt-t pops open a terminal window…unity has me all over shortcuts these days. Anyhow, I was able to verify that I could echo text and direct it to the USB port that the Arduino was mounted to. No sweat.

As a proof of concept, I decided to display the number of times that I had the word “awesome” on swantron.com. Once the LCD was shown to work, the sky is the limit…see some regex, pipes, wget, and so forth in action:

Survey says:

Eleven “awesome"s. Awesome.

So that is that. You could link two of these together for 160 characters…toss together a shell (or Python, etc.) and have a Twitter display, for example. Whatever you want to…gosh.

I did notice an odd “feature” of the Liquid Crystal library I used. For some reason, it wraps lines in an interesting fashion…

command line usage: **

echo “why does this library I am using wrap text wonky as hell?” > /dev/ttyUSB0**

No idea why this is. Sort of confusing. Anyhow, the entire sketch is pretty straight forward. Did somebody say snippet?

// LCD sandbox
// https://swantron.com
// driving LCD from command line
// 2011

#include <LiquidCrystal.h>

// **Define pins**
// LCD RS - pin 12
// LCD R/W - pin 11
// LCD ENABLE - pin 10
// LCD BACK+ - pin 13
// LCD DATA4 - pin 5
// LCD DATA5 - pin 4
// LCD DATA6 - pin 3
// LCD DATA7 - pin 2
// LCD VSS, CONTRAST,  BACK- - ground

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2);

int backLight = 13;    // Define pin for backlight

void setup()
{
  pinMode(backLight, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(backLight, HIGH); // Backlight level (LOW / HIGH)
  lcd.begin(20,4);               // (Columbs, Rows)
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
  // when characters arrive over the serial port...
  if (Serial.available()) {
    // wait a bit for the entire message to arrive
    delay(100);
    // clear the screen
    lcd.clear();
    // read all the available characters
    while (Serial.available() > 0) {
      // display each character to the LCD
      lcd.write(Serial.read());
    }
  }
}

We’ll see where this one ends up. This one might be a launching pad for a bigger and better thing. Stay tuned.

I have always felt a touch of guilt in regards to the amount of coffee I throw down the colloquial hatch on a daily basis. I drink the stuff out of a pickle jar…I kid you not: It cools quicker. Bonus. My guilt was nuked from orbit today. I saw on /. this morning that the Oxford Journals published some National Cancer Institute findings, linking extreme coffee intake with a decreased chance of getting prostate cancer. The non-science-y results are as follow:

Conclusions: We observed a strong inverse association between coffee consumption and risk of lethal prostate cancer. The association appears to be related to non-caffeine components of coffee. Granted, they used caffeine-free coffee for their test…so that may offset some of my apparent benefits. I am still counting this as a huge win. Especially since this was all about the prostrate…I’ll tip a cup to that. Or a jar.

Back in my college days, I did a lot of printing. As a math major, I probably printed a fraction of the amount of pages that most students had to rifle off. Most of our work was done either by hand on paper, or done utilizing math software of some nature (Matlab, Maple, etc.) and submitted directly into a professor’s shared folder. Call it old school or just plain old, but that is the nature of the beast. Even with that on my side, I wound up printing all of the time…between my core course work and math reports (no kidding) I was constantly hitting Ctrl - P. My sample size is sufficiently large to draw a parallel between ‘important printing task’ and ’empty ink cartridge.’ Every…single…time. I don’t know how many times I found myself trying to get to Staples before closing time, in order to buy a replacement cartridge. Too many. To add insult to injury, brick and mortar retail prices are the stuff of nightmares. Those markups still blow my mind. Pretty much outrageous. Like my octopus drawing: Not to date myself, but online shopping was limited in my day. Amazon was around, but primarily for books. Specialty places were popping up…and then subsequently bursting when everything hit the colloquial fan. Comparative online shopping stuck, however. One of the things I am jealous of now are the deal pricing that you can find on ink cartridges. Very jealous…that would have put me in Cup of Noodle instead of Ramen. But, I digress. I have seen some creative stuff out there. You can buy bulk ink…shooting for the DIY fill-it-at-home crowd. Some models have cartridge reset units springing up…allowing the user to gain a few more prints per refill. The two main drawbacks of that are time (time is money) and quality. A lot of the replacements are prone to smudging…may as well pay for the real deal and do it right. At the end of it all, I have had good luck finding ink cartridges for my HP and Kodak printer online. Hit that link to see my go-to site.

I am tired of looking at wobbly windows full of Eclipse. The best and worst part of the IOIO board is the fact that the libraries are Java-centric…unfortunately, I am in the middle of a ‘worst’ phase. I am sort of stalemated. Unfortunately, my issue lies in something that should be trivial, namely naming. Once I can figure out how to orient the crap out of these object-ass pins, I will be good to go. Until then…I am going back to the basics. Processing looks so safe and warm. Coziness, for the win.

How about a 20 by 4 LCD project? Okay.

I have had this sitting on the workbench of bad lab for a while. Time to get after it.

The unit came assembled, minus the jumpers I needed to plug this into my breadboard for prototyping. Coincidentally, my soldering station needed to come out of retirement. Sixteen pins…sounds about perfect.

I snagged the unit from hacktronics.com. Their website has details on the pin-level for the LCD unit. Pretty straight forward…slam it together and feed it a string or four. Wiring as follows:

It has been a while since we have had a snippet. Fair enough; queue the snippet:

// LCD sandbox
// https://swantron.com
// 2011

#include <LiquidCrystal.h>

// **Define pins**
// LCD RS - pin 12
// LCD R/W - pin 11
// LCD ENABLE - pin 10
// LCD BACK+ - pin 13
// LCD DATA4 - pin 5
// LCD DATA5 - pin 4
// LCD DATA6 - pin 3
// LCD DATA7 - pin 2
// LCD VSS, CONTRAST,  BACK- - ground

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2);

int backLight = 13;    // Define pin for backlight

void setup()
{
  pinMode(backLight, OUTPUT);
  digitalWrite(backLight, HIGH); // Backlight level (LOW / HIGH)
  lcd.begin(20,4);               // (Columbs, Rows)
  lcd.clear();                   // Clear screen
  lcd.setCursor(0,0);            // Move cursor, print
  lcd.print("liquid      |   swan");
  lcd.setCursor(0,1);            // Move cursor, print
  lcd.print("crystal     |   tron");
  lcd.setCursor(0,2);            // Move cursor, print
  lcd.print("display     |    dot");
  lcd.setCursor(0,3);            // Move cursor, print
  lcd.print("(FTW)       |    com");
}

void loop()
{
}

That is that. Again, the potentials for this sucker are vast. I would like to to let this rip with my PING sensor, but need to throw some more effort towards the IOIO. Java schmava. Stay tuned for a bad assed project of some nature…even plan B is pretty awesome these days.

Tearing through my server logs, I have encountered the best search term in the world. I sure hope that the searcher found what he or she was looking for. In your butt.