Month: February 2015

Day #172: UWB Logger format

Posted on by crackingcontraptions_3voi0v
I sent you some log data just before I went to bed last night.   Here’s a fragment:

s=gyr,x=-0.14690529,y=-0.028577317,z=0.09692149,ts=1424988205037,acy=3
s=mag,x=-172.73999,y=-170.28,z=-164.09999,ts=1424988205041,acy=3
s=gyr,x=-0.13305685,y=-0.030707845,z=0.09798675,ts=1424988205042,acy=3
s=uwb,t=tag #1,tu=87289750000000,ts=1424988205044,d=1.3906851,acy=0
s=gyr,x=-0.116012625,y=-0.032838374,z=0.09798675,ts=1424988205045,acy=3
s=gyr,x=-0.100033656,y=-0.03390364,z=0.10011728,ts=1424988205049,acy=3
s=mag,x=-172.68,y=-170.34,z=-164.04,ts=1424988205052,acy=3
s=gyr,x=-0.085119955,y=-0.03390364,z=0.10011728,ts=1424988205054,acy=3
s=acc,x=-0.61291564,y=6.895301,z=7.967903,ts=1424988205055,acy=0
s=gyr,x=-0.07127152,y=-0.03390364,z=0.10011728,ts=1424988205059,acy=3
s=gyr,x=-0.05529255,y=-0.03177311,z=0.09798675,ts=1424988205064,acy=3
s=prs,p=949.69,ts=1424988205065,acy=0
It seems clear that it contains all the components to build an IMU, plus a pressure sensor.  I’ll have a look around for documentation, but it seems mostly obvious.  Here’s my parsing:

record         ::= “s=” <sensorRecord> ” <newline>           // one sensor record per line
sensorRecord   ::= <accRecord> | <gyrRecord> | <magRecord> | 
                           <prsRecord> | <uwbRecord>         // five different sensor record types
timestamp      ::= “ts=” <unixTime>                          // milliseconds since 1/1/1970
accInd         ::= “acy=” (“0” | “3”)

accRecord      ::= “acc,” <xVal> “,” <yVal> “,” <zVal> 
                         “,” <timestamp> “,” <acInd>         // x,y,z, timestamp, accuracy?
gyrRecord      ::= “gyr,” <xVal> “,” <yVal> “,” <zVal> 
                         “,” <timestamp> “,” <acInd>
magRecord      ::= “acc,” <xVal> “,” <yVal> “,” <zVal> 
                          “,” <timestamp> “,” <acInd>
prsRecord      ::= “prs,” <pVal>  
                          “,” <timestamp> “,” <acInd>        // mbar, timestamp, accuracy
uwbRecord      ::= “uwb,” <tagId> “,” <tuVal> “,” <timestamp> 
                     “,d=” <range> “,” <accInd>              // tagName, tuVal? ts, meters, accuracy
tuVal          ::= <64-bit? cardinal>                        // quality assessment?
range          ::= <10.7 floatingPoint>                      // distance in meters

I think accInd may represent the sensor sensitivity (maxG for example).
The tuVal number is a mystery, but I’m wondering if it is some representation of the impulse signal that reveals the quality of the range assessment.

Day #170 – BeSpoon Tests continued

Posted on by crackingcontraptions_3voi0v

The positional accuracy on the BeSpoon didn’t seem so hot.

For our proposed app, where we are looking for patterns, exact location isn’t so critical as repeat-ability.   In other words, even if the data is wrong, if it is wrong the same way each time then we might be able to notice patterns.

I need to find some easy, and obvious representation of the accuracy and repeatably.   It’s a conundrum because really I want to show the range accuracy between ever pair of points in the apartment.  Even if I just constrained it to 10×10 points that still requires (10×10) * (10×10) measurements.  And for each pair of points I need to gather a bunch of samples, and calculate the mean and SD so I can get some feel for the measured location, and the spread.  <μ, σ>.  That’s well beyond my patience

Can I get a feel for the behavior of BeSpoon with just a few samples?

What I did

I picked a point for an anchor.  In the first case I put it atop a picture in my office.   Then I went to six different “settling places” and took a sample.   I worried that in real life I’d settle in a slightly different way each time, and that could be critical to the measurements.  So in fact I did six laps of all of the settling places, sitting down in a slightly different way each time.  

  1. My office chair
  2. The chair by Brenda’s desk
  3. The dining table where I stand  and stare out the bay window
  4. My favorite location on the settee
  5. A spot just by the cupboard in the kitchen
  6. The hallway lavatory – I actually sat on it each time.

Plotting the results was a real pain, and the diagramming isn’t that great.


Notation

The yellow triangle marks the location of the anchor.
The crosshatched areas are where I couldn’t get enough signal to range.
The samples sets are represent by a row of red lines, all of which are assumed to cross the invisible line radiating out from the anchor.
In each data set the blue cross represents the actual location where the samples were taken
The red lines represent each of the six samples.

Conclusion

Not many yet.  I need to gather a little more data I think.

  1. There is a clear tendency to over-estimate when the signal goes through a wall.
  2. The estimates do tend to cluster within about a 1 meter area

————–
David wrote

    Why *wouldn’t* it be repeatable? If it’s not repeatable then you ought to see a lot of jitter (variation in subsequent continuous measurements) while standing at the same spot. If it’s different 5 minutes later, what else has changed? Could there be an environmental factor (nearby cell phone, Wifi density)?  Why is there a single outlier in 3 or 4 locations?

    For your 100 x 100 sample size, you have to multiply that by the number of antenna orientations (16 or 32, but actually infinite) or 1,600,000, 3,200,000, infinity. It might be worthwhile to take one interesting measurement (I think I would choose Breda’s desk chair, but that means you would have to do a lot of walking) and put the tag in each of the 16 on-axis positions and maybe a few diagonal positions, to see the difference. This should probably wait until I could be there to help.
    Mik responds
    I didn’t explain myself well.  I did just track the jitter initially.  Just sitting still produced a fair amount of jitter – around +/- 3 feet on average I think.   I was keen to get a feel for how well we might discriminate between settling places.  If the ranger were perfectly accurate then what kind of positional variation might you expect…  1-2′ perhaps, allowing for small changes in position of a chair, or your pose in it?

    So muddled thinking ensued… I wanted to see if sitting down in a chair in the same place repeatedly might increase the jitter in reported position.  Maybe it did, but it seemed not to add to the overall jitter much if anything.
    If you look at my data it’s pretty obvious that those settling areas are distinct.   Put another way, I’d say that as long as settling areas are 4′ apart then we should be able to distinguish them.  Of course, we also have other parameters like heading, and altitude to aid disambiguation — not to mention all the other sensor data we could gather too.
    One thing that concerns me, is that I don’t actually understand what the ranger is doing.  One of the tools swaps between display the range in green, or in red.  Maybe there is some “confidence” data that I’m not picking up.
    Also, it isn’t clear what math is going on.  It looks like it is reporting some kind of average of many samples, because the range tends to home in on the final answer.  Not knowing how many smaples it has required to generate the range is a pretty important hole in my understanding.

    Continued…

    Today, I took some measurements from another point with a view to seeing how consistent the measurements were.  This was more interesting.
    I made the second set of measurements by putting the anchor in a location that I know is very poor – the bathroom.  When the anchor was in my office, the bathroom, and bedroom were black holes.  When I placed the anchor in the bathroom, my office and part of Brenda’s office area were black holes.  Makes sense!
    I took the same half-dozen measurements at a sequence of settling points.  As before, when I managed to get range data it jittered over about 4 feet. I chose a point that was in range of both anchors and drew donuts to illustrate the limits of the range jitter.   
    The donut intersection was clearly not where the readings were taken, and the distance from X to the center of the donut intersection was almost exactly five feet.
    I was interested to know roughly how many anchors I might need.  From the following diagram it looks like 4/5 carefully positioned anchors might do the trick.

    Revised conclusions

    1. If we used this kind of data to trilaterate a position then it looks like we could have errors of about +/- 5 feet, and when standing on the cross in the kitchen you would appear to standing about 5 feet away — actually on the kitchen counter.  
    2. But the donut intersection area is actually quite small: about 2 sq ft.  The apartment is about 1500 sq ft, so we ought to be able to recognize a few hundred different settling points.
    3. One anchor covers about 2/3 of the area of the apartment.
    4. Battery life flagged after a couple of hours.


      Day #170 – BeSpoon Module (David)

      Posted on by crackingcontraptions_3voi0v

      <Pictures David took of the insides of the tag>



      David writes:
      No-go. The uC in the tag is a Silicon Labs C8051F93x.

      The C8051F93x-C8051F92x family utilizes Silicon Labs’ proprietary CIP-51 microcontroller core. The CIP-
      51 is fully compatible with the MCS-51™ instruction set; standard 803x/805x assemblers and compilers 
      can be used to develop software. The CIP-51 core offers all the peripherals included with a standard 8052.
      I don’t think you’ll be pushing any Cortex M0 code into it, right?
      I dragged out my hot air equipment this morning and removed the lid from a BS module. Photo attached.
      Marking on the module uC is 
      F072CBY
      A30019U
      TW44OY
      This matches with the documents in the SDK release 1.3: RM0091
      Reference manual
      STM32F0x1/STM32F0x2/STM32F0x8
      advanced ARM-based 32-bit MCUs

      Day #169 – BeSpoon arrived. Some tests

      Posted on by crackingcontraptions_3voi0v

      I did a few rough and ready tests around the house.  


      It feels like the coverage is roughly the same as the Nanotron.  I can get from the very back of my office almost to the bedroom area window, a distance on 16m, but it’s a bit spasmodic.  It actually poops out at about 16.53 meters, reporting 16.8 m.  I’d call that respectable.

      Unfortunately it was downhill from there.  

      The bathroom was a black hole with the anchors in the positions I show on this diagram.   Nada!

      This diagram is a bit small, but out of 8 ranges on the above test, two had errors in excess of 50″.

      I placed the anchors in two other locations, and tried again, but the results were pretty poor.

      It was getting tedious, and all the mapping from inches to meters was getting me pissed off.  This is not a good start, so I gave up.

      Tomorrow I’ll see if it is repeatable?

      David responds

      Well, that’s disappointing. 


      My initial thought is that it’s about what one would expect. The antennae are small. The Nanotron had a pretty strong output. Remember that were at opposite ends of the street in Los Altos and it was still working well. But inside/outside the house it wouldn’t get past the big rose bush in front. 2.4 GHz propagation ought to be better than 5 GHz.       

      The DecaWave results were from using the dog ear antenna on the on dev kit. We haven’t tried the chip antenna yet. I’ll bet if we used the dog ear antenna on two BeSpoon units we would get about the same results as the DecaWave, and with two chip antennae DecaWave performance will deteriorate to about what you see with BeSpoon. Perhaps a larger antenna on the anchors is called for, like TS03. 

      It will continue to be a tough challenge. That’s probably why nobody else has come out with a system yet. 

      The comments about the software are more disappointing. I can’t really understand what the weaknesses are since I haven’t looked at it and wouldn’t recognize them even if I did, but I suppose it highlights the difficulty of doing a lot with less resources. At least it works on some level. 

      I never received a response to my email asking about CES from Blinksight. It’s interesting the Guus Frericks, the CMO, doesn’t even mention Blinksight on his CV. However, there are hits for Blinksight on Linkedin so maybe they aren’t completely dead yet. On the other hand when people get laid off they don’t immediately change their LinkedIn profiles.

      Mik Rabbits on…
      I was disappointed too, but it was end of the day.  I am reminded of the f***** homily “every hurdle is an opportunity”, a phrase the gung-ho, ISO-9000, “Quality” acolytes used to roll out.  My old friend David Pendlebury, someone I hope I can introduce you to one day, used to utter the single word “Quality” in the same kind of situations that a lesser soul might say “Bummer”. 

      Anyway, back to the plot… I guess “every hurdle is and opportunity” is kinda correct because if you manage to get over it, then everyone else might have to struggle over it too., and being first to recognize, and define it is an advantage.   But in our game it is easy to miss the path around the side of the hurdle.   
      My old Xeroid colleague Butler Lampson, a man with a very waggely tail, and the ability to think and speak at (for me, intimidating) speed,  and not given to much Cynicism coined the phrase: “insurmountable opportunity”.  Let’s hope this hurdle is worthy, and surmountable.

      Re: Tiny display

      Posted on by crackingcontraptions_3voi0v
      I did a bit more thinking and have reduced the invention down to the essence I think.

      I don't think the display part of it is essential actually.  That could be the subject of another patent if we got a suitable display and showed it worked.
      It would be fun to make a prototype using duct tape. It doesn't have to be low-power to test – just small.  It could even have the IMU on a long thin SPI wire inside a chunk of duct tape wrapped around a finger. Maybe someone makes a tiny breakout board already.  I could join it to a microprocessor strapped to my wrist to do first tests.

      //Mik

      On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:52 AM, David Carkeek <dcarkeek@gmail.com> wrote:

      Bay Area IP Group has three 5-star and one 1-star reviews. The guy who gave one star seems to be at least partially at fault, according to the long response posted by the attorney. However, the attorney wrote "On April 16, 2014 the USPTO mailed their action directly to you at your home: Apt. B, 1737 Sapling Ct., Concord, CA" that seems to show poor judgment, posting the guy's home address in a public forum. Vengeance? 

      Anyway, they seem worth looking into.

      Re: Tiny display

      Posted on by crackingcontraptions_3voi0v
      I thought that was the case, but I thought I'd ask in case you recalled anything.  I had heard a rumor that e-ink displays could be cut down, but I don't see how that is possible, and leave the signal matrix in place.

      Obviously there are displays (FitBit) that are pretty small, but I'm guessing they must be custom.  I'm looking for a flexible display that can be wrapped entirely around the outside of a ring.
      Perhaps way off, but it seems like it might be useful.

      //Mik

      On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 5:30 PM, David Carkeek <dcarkeek@gmail.com> wrote:

      I make a point of asking About small displays whenever I see displays on display. I haven't seen anything appropriate yet, but I was kind of assuming that one of these display manufacturers in China it would make whatever they were asked to do. I think that e-ink displays can be made almost any size but there are no tiny standard products. You have to pay significant NRE for non-standard sizes. The power supply is only 15V I think. E-ink is compelling if it could be made small enough. Think how cool that would be to have an e-ink display in a ring.

      Sent from my iPhone

      > On Feb 22, 2015, at 12:07 PM, Mik Lamming <mik@lamming.com> wrote:
      >
      > I had a possibly patent-able idea for a display to go into a ring.  Have you seen an eInk display that would fit into ring?   I assume that any other display would not be both flexible, and low-enough power?
      >
      > //Mik

      Day #158 Bus Pirate

      Posted on by crackingcontraptions_3voi0v

      The Bus Pirate board allows you to look at I2C/SPI and other signals in a convenient way.

      Connections

      I am connecting an I2C RTC that operates at 5V.
      Here’s a picture of the connector layout
      So I connected as shown in the above diagram
      BUS PIRATE    RTC SLAVE
      MOSI          SDA
      CLOCK         SCL
      GND           GND
      +5V           5V

      Pull-up resistorsI2C is an open-collector bus, it requires pull-up resistors to hold the clock and data lines high and create the data ‘1’. I2C parts don’t output high, they only pull low, without pull-up resistors there can never be a ‘1’. This will cause common errors such as the I2C address scanner reporting a response at every address. Read more about open collector/open drain bus types, and the Bus Pirate’s on-board pull-up resistors.

      The figure outlines the basic parts of the Bus Pirate v2go on-board pull-up resistors. A pull-up (or pull-down) voltage supplied through the Vpullup (Vpu) pin is fed into a CD4066 analog switch (IC3). The 4066 distributes the pull-up voltage to four 10K resistors (R20-23) that connect to the MOSI, CLOCK, MISO, and CS bus pins.
      Continue reading our practical guide to the Bus Pirate v2go’s pull-up resistors after the break.
      I2C>v <<< voltage monitor reportVOLTAGE MONITOR: 5V: 5.0 | 3.3V: 3.3 | VPULLUP: 5.0 |
      I2C>
      You must connect the Vpullup pin to a voltage. The pull-up resistors aren’t hard-wired to a power supply, you can apply any voltage level that’s needed (from ground to +5volts). Type ‘V’ in the Bus Pirate terminal to see the current voltage on the Vpullup pin.                   

      So my connection list got one extra wire connecting the jumping the 5V supply to the VPU pin.
      BUS PIRATE    RTC SLAVE
      MOSI          SDA
      CLOCK         SCL
      GND           GND
      +5V           5V
      +5V <-|
            |
      VPU <-|

      And of course I plugged it into the USB socket on my PC

      Talking to it from Putty

      Once plugged in, the PC loaded FTDI drivers, and I managed to talk to it from Putty at 115200bps/8/N/1
      Once it was woken up, I put it into I2C mode using
      ‘m’   ‘4’   and selected top speed ‘4’
      I turned on the power and set up the pullup resistor using ‘W’ ‘P’
      And finally I searched the bus to see if my device would answer.
      It seems that it did!
      Now for something really challenging.   Write a few bytes of data to the RAM area of the RTC, and read them back.
      Woo hoo.

      Sniffing I2C bus of the TS05b

      So just for grins I connected it to the I2C bus of the TS05b and asked it to probe to see what devices it could find.
      No problem.
      Sniffing is another matter.   It just can’t keep up with the bus traffic.