Dash Button Project 1: Anger Study

So I recently purchased an Amazon Dash button and I am using it as a basic Internet connected button to track and do stuff (check this article out). So what are we going to count. I thought a fun first project would be an informal anger study. Starting on 8/23 and ending today at 8/31 we started tracking the anger level of the house.

The basic idea was simple, if you are mad you have to push the angry button (Gatorade Dash Button). The button would record the date and time the button was pushed. We could then track the results to gauge when our family gets angry.

Now remember we have a four year old in the house so that can skew the numbers a bit. Skew both in increased angry moments and increased in angry button overuse (pushing the button when not really angry). But looking at the numbers it appears we have a decent data set to look at.

Date/Time	Measurement
8/23/2015 8:41	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 12:34	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 12:36	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 12:52	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 13:52	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 16:26	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 16:59	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 17:53	Anger Button Pushed
8/23/2015 19:56	Anger Button Pushed
8/24/2015 11:50	Anger Button Pushed
8/24/2015 11:52	Anger Button Pushed
8/24/2015 14:46	Anger Button Pushed
8/24/2015 16:26	Anger Button Pushed
8/24/2015 16:26	Anger Button Pushed
8/24/2015 16:28	Anger Button Pushed
8/24/2015 17:34	Anger Button Pushed
8/25/2015 7:23	Anger Button Pushed
8/25/2015 19:37	Anger Button Pushed
8/25/2015 20:16	Anger Button Pushed
8/26/2015 8:18	Anger Button Pushed
8/26/2015 18:15	Anger Button Pushed
8/27/2015 18:08	Anger Button Pushed
8/27/2015 20:41	Anger Button Pushed
8/30/2015 13:10	Anger Button Pushed
8/30/2015 17:58	Anger Button Pushed
8/31/2015 16:45	Anger Button Pushed
8/31/2015 16:48	Anger Button Pushed
8/31/2015 20:48	Anger Button Pushed

So above is the raw data. A few findings.

• We get mad around meal times
• 5 instances around lunch (11:00-13:00ish)
• 7 instances around dinner time (17:00ish)
• 8/27 - had an anger instance around bed time @ 20:41
• 8/23 - someone got a little mad before church @ 8:41
• 8/23 - recorded the most instances of anger. May have been due to the fact that the anger button was new that day, or maybe cause its Sunday and we spend more time with each other on Sunday.
• 8/25 - got mad early that day @ 7:23AM
• At times the person that was angry got more angry when someone said "go push the mad button"
• At other times people forgot that they were mad when told to push the mad button. Sometimes pushing the button would diffuse the situation.

This of course does not tell you who got angry but does show the instances of anger among the 4 of us living in this house.

Not sure what we will track next but this has been a fun first Amazon Dash Button project.

I also noticed some other ARP probes while trying to capture the Amazon button push. Thought that was pretty interesting. Wonder what these devices are??? I'll see if I can track em down.

Our ARP sniffer gets no love...just a lowly netbook sitting on top of another computer.

Running your name

A while back I thought it would be cool to run my name. So I did. Blog post over...wait no. Back in August 2012 I ran my first name around my then current job at JHA. I went cursive mode and it turned out pretty good IMO.

Fast forward to Friday last week. I got a hankering to run my name again. This time I wanted to run first name and last name (technically shortened version of my first name). Since I am working downtown now there are tons of options for routes and I was quickly able to chart a course. I stepped through the instructions using Route Planner, 53 instructions in all, and decided to go for the run last Friday.

Router Planner estimated about 5.2 miles. I am the lucky owner of two, count em, two cell phones right now. My personal phone is on Sprint and my work phone is on Verizon. I usually track all my runs using RunKeeper on my Sprint phone.

First Attempt

Sprint GPS struggled a bit with the tall buildings downtown. The instructions were on point but the GPS hosed up the t in Story. I know for a fact I ran that portion of the run correctly. I almost hosed up at the e in Joe since you have to cut down an alley. I about went the wrong way but quickly corrected.

Not 100% satisfied with the way the name turned out I decided to have another go today. Today I used my work phone on Verizon. Verizon too struggled with the t but it appeared to keep better track of the run overall. I opened up the activity on RunKeeper and modified the t to more accurately portray the run. Other than that the map is un-edited.

So there we have it. I have now successfully run my name. I have left my digital mark on downtown. I may run it a few more times after vacation and snap a few pics of the route. Here are some more shots of the second run. I used GPS visualizer to build these maps.

Amazon Dash Button Hack

I stumbled on Ted Benson's Amazon Dash Button hack article earlier this week and thought, man I have to try this out. I ordered the Amazon Dash Gatorade button to give it a go.

At first I wanted to try and get this to work on Windows. I am sure it is doable but I hit a snag in one of the Python scripts. Instead of hacking my way through the scripts I decided to punt and try the Linux route.

I had just recently installed CentOS 7 on an old netbook we had laying around.

So I set out to use it as the ARP sniffer. Ted lays out the high level instructions in his article and it was pretty easy to follow along.

I was able to get this working with Python 2.7. Installing Scapy was a pretty easy.



I also had to install the requests module using a similar set of commands. This was a new build so you may already have requests installed. From there I grabbed Ted's sample code and tweaked it.

The count = 10 will set your script to send 10 probes. If you set that to 0 it will probe until you kill it. Here is a Youtube video of the hack in action:


So now you have a low cost Do button that you can use for all sorts of different projects. I will try and keep you posted on some of the stuff I end up doing.

Linux Performance Overview

Quick post to throw some Linux Performance Overivew commands for safe keeping.

top
iostat
vmstat
dstat
iotop
sar
dstat -rpma

How much Memory
dmidecode -t 17 | grep "Size.*MB" | awk '{s+=$2} END {print s / 1024}'


CPU
cat /proc/cpuinfo

core count
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'core id'

lscpu