Waybot Blog

Project blog for the Waybot apps: Three or four little pieces of code and some hardware for streaming bicycle traffic information to the web. github.com/johnelliott

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Pedestrian detection with node.js streams using openCV. I've just been testing this as a method for adding pedestrian counting/tracking to waybot or for another project. Check out the code on Github.

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Services, deployment, UIs, syncing, fun.

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I really wanted to use docker

I decided not to use docker because I'm developing on x86 and deploying to ARM for wb-upload. As far as I looked into it, there would be many containers invloved and I saw the way ahead using ansible.

I really wanted to use Docker, but I was able to automate the code deploys for the web app and edge data source.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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A bit of Docker kool-aid swirling around now... and it works on Raspberry Pi.

USB serial devices like the one forthe counter can work using the --device flag with the docker client:

docker run -t -i --device=/dev/ttyUSB0 ubuntu bash

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Concept of new UI and data flow. Caches will be Arduino EEPROM, couchDB on the Pi, couchDB in the cloud, or pouchDB on a browser.

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I am making updates to re-architect Waybot.

I'm working on updating the arduino code to use a JSON serialization library and cleaning up the code.

I'm also working on a node app to move the data from the Arduino via USB to a HTTP request to a server that doesn't exist yet.

More to come :]

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Tomorrow I'm presenting Waybot at Bike Hack Night III.

Last night I took some time to reboot my project and clear out some cobwebs. A couple npm scripts added and some re-reading later and I'm ready to present tomorrow.

If you're in the DC area and are interested in walking, biking and transit, this meetup has a lot of passionate and interesting people in attendance.

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Issue 14: jasmine etc.

Waybot - A fun way to count bicycle traffic using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and the web

Trouble in Jasmine land

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Refactor day

I did a much-needed refactor over the last few days of the Backbone app inside the Waybot Rails app.

Previously, most of the javascript for the live-updating chart was bouncing around in the javascript global namespace. I wanted to stop polluting the namespace with my app's parts and stop the different parts of the app from sharing one another's responsibilities.

I placed all the backbone app concerns into a namespace and placed come of the internal concerns where they should be (e.g. the collection of data points listens to incoming sockets messages, the view listens for new data being added to the collection of data points).

I feel a lot more comfortable now that my code is tidier and the model, collection, and view responsibilities are more pure.

Check it out: Waybot on github.

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It worked! Full integration test from boot to browser.

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Live data! It's working. Next up: full integration test with arduino, pi, all the way to the browser.

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Node server publishing live data from Arduino -> serial -> node app with sockets pub/sub server -> Node client and Rails browser client.

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A little unsure how best to move the data from the node app to a client view. Here’s a rough visual of the whole process starting with a bike on the far left and going to the user’s phone on the right.

Whether the node app will talk directly to the client and how is TBD.

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Slightly larger victory: most of the parts of the Waybot-node app are in one repo. Now it's time to make all the parts work together. The serial port and Express exploration have paid off.

Right now the missing pieces are websockets and a polling script to hit the Arduino and store some information in Redis.

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Small victory today: A round-trip hello-world from node to an USB-connected arduino and back.

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Slow progress with charts. Fake data makes exploring google charts easier.