As part of the article as well as trying out the Emotive headset* she interviewed Ed Jellard and Kevin Brown from the IBM ETS team based in Hursley.

* This is the same headset used for the Bang Goes The Theory Taxi racing.

This was one of those projects that just sort of “turned up”. About 3 weeks ago one of the managers for the ETS department in Hursley got a call from the team building the new IBM Forum in IBM South Bank. IBM Forums are locations where IBM can showcase technologies and solutions for customers. The team were looking for a way to control a video wall and a projector to make them show specific videos on request. The requests will come from pedestals known as “provokers”, each having a perspex dome holding a thought-provoking item. The initial suggestions had been incredibility expensive and we were asked if we could come up with a solution.

The provokers have access to power and an Ethernet connection. Taking all that into account a few ideas came to mind but the best seamed to be an Arduino board with Ethernet support and a button/sensor to trigger the video. There is a relatively new arduino board available that has a built in Ethernet shield which seemed perfect for this project. Also, since a number of the items in the provokers would be related to IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, it made sense to use MQTT as a messaging layer as this has been used to implement a number of solutions in this space.

Nick O’Leary was enlisted to put together the hardware and also the sketch for the Arduino as he had already written a MQTT client for Arduino in the past.

Each provoker will publish a message containing a playload of “play” to a topic like

provoker/{n}/action

Where ‘{n}’ is the unique number identifying which of the 6 provokers sent the message.

To provide some feedback to the guest that pressed the button, the LED has been made to pulse while one of the provoker-specific videos is playing. This is controlled by each provoker subscribing to the following topic

provoker/{n}/ack

Sending “play” to this topic causes the LED pluse, sending “stop” turns the LED solid again.

The video wall will be driven by software called Scala InfoChannel which has a scripting interface supporting (among other things) Python. So a short script to subscribe to the ‘action’ topics and to publish on on the ‘ack’ got the videos changing on demand.

And sat in the middle is an instance of the Really Small Message Broker to tie everything together.

This was also the perfect place to use some of my new “MQTT Inside” stickers.

This project only used one of the digital channels (for the button) and one of the analogue channels (for the LED) available on the Arduino – which leaves a lot of room for expansion for these type of devices. I can see them being used for future projects.

Parts list

1. Arduino Ethernet
2. Blue LED Illuminated Button
3. A single resistor to protect the LED
4. 9v power supply
5. Sparkfun Case

This morning I went along to listen to what the 16 students in the UK have been doing with their summer. These students were split into four groups of four, working on projects for an improved voting system, a smart cursor, smarter vehicles and FTP discovery.

You know you’re getting old when all the students seem rather young, I think “green” is the term people used to use when I was starting in IBM, they do remind me of my early days at work. However, they all presented themselves beautifully, spoke very well using slick rehearsed presentations they’ve put a lot of effort into, and (barring one or two stutters) seemed entirely confident in what they were doing up at the front of what must seem an intimidating auditorium full of knowledgeable IBM professionals. They handled questions well too, I don’t necessarily have to agree with all the answers, but the way they each went about receiving the questions and providing thoughtful answers was good.

Each team had 7 minutes to present their 12 weeks’ work with every person in the team getting a chance to pitch in at some point, so they didn’t get very long to put their projects across. The audience were asked to keep questions until the end of the pitch, which allowed them to flow easily through their material. The range of presentations was interesting, some chose to manually click through PowerPoint-style, while other groups came up with stories or monologuing through a video they had created. This range kept the audience interested with each style of presentation being effective for its purpose.

It was interesting to see how each of the projects has been clearly influenced by the four members of the team. Each team of four contained one business student and three technical students, and the range of skills came through in the presentations. Some groups had “deep-dived” straight into technical work while others had spent more time thinking about use cases, business cases, how their project might fit in with IBM or be sold. I suspect this has a direct relationship to both how the team was lead by the IBM staff but also by the particular characters of each team and reminded me of Myers-Briggs or Belbin style studies I’ve done in the past.

Now I’ll have a little look at each project in (very) brief… I’ll stress in advance that I’ve heard a small snippet of 12 weeks of hard work and any opinion here is mine alone and based solely on today’s pitches:

Improved voting system
The team gave an introduction to their solution involving a three phase voting system followed by an example of the problem they were trying to solve and how their solution tackled these. The team had been working with a local council to identify requirements for such a system, so were able to work with real-world examples and solicit feedback. Questions followed and feedback from the council seemed to have been good. Some doubts were expressed by the audience about the security of such a system which whilst possibly valid, it seemed to me that these could be addressed should the solution be implemented live. The team presented the solution as having environmental benefits which might seem obvious at first but I thought were rather questionable given the requirement to use computer hardware and power, a further study would be required here to determine whether the current system using sustainably-sourced paper could be bettered on the environmental front. Verification of voters appears to be vastly improved using their system with less room from fraudulent votes with connection to other systems for authentication such as the DVLA. Clearly any such automated voting system would have huge benefits for the speed of counting after voting has completed.

Smart Cursor
A new input device to control an on screen cursor using any sort of body movement aimed at improving human-computer interaction (primarily for disabled people). The system involves a hardware sensor strapped to the part of the body that has movement. Initial calibration for any new part of the body is required which is run once to set up 4 movements (up/down/left/right). Other movements and gestures would also be possible such as a mouse click and the combination of sensors on multiple parts of the body. The hardware technology could be built small enough to be permanently wearable without distress or difficulty to the user. Other uses of the technology appear to be for rehabilitation or monitoring a condition whilst wearing the hardware device. Lots of room for customisation brought out during questioning as well as a few issues about how to set up the device in the first place. However, this seemed like a really worthwhile (if low usage) piece of research that could be immensely useful to its target audience and at low cost too.

Smarter Vehicles
The aim of this project is to personalise the driving experience for car users by attempting to add three things to a car (1) identifying which user is driving, (2) providing the car with knowledge about where it’s going, and (3) permanently connecting the car to a network. The team used a video style presentation and monologue they had story-boarded which was clearly well produced and rehearsed. It was unclear what the project had achieved, however, as no specifics were mentioned on what had been achieved but there were certainly plenty of good ideas as to what could be done in this area. The team do appear to have a demonstration available which I’m looking forward to going to see in Hursley tomorrow and the Extreme Blue demonstration expo after which I’m sure it will be a lot clearer which ideas they’ve followed through into something tangible and which are still in progress. Another great plus for this team was they were aligned with an automotive manufacturer and will be presenting their ideas back to the board at a later date which will be a fabulous experience to get for them all.

FTP Discovery
Tackles the problem of escalating FTP network complexity in enterprises. The project attempts to map FTP files on the network in flight and automatically provides a visualisation of the network in a node graph style format. This network can be annotated manually with things such adding the cost of various transfers and links to allow the users to build up a visual picture and cost to the company of their FTP services. The team advocate the use of managed file transfers (as provided by WMQ File Transfer Edition, for example) but failed to clearly state what the problem with FTP as a service is. That said, they seem to have a very clever way of detecting FTP traffic by sniffing the network and could easily extend their architecture to include all sorts of other protocols. They have also thought carefully about how their work might be used in the future, for example as a tool for IBM pre-sales, a saleable IBM product or (most likely) a component of one or more existing IBM products.

Congratulations to all the teams and people involved. The presentations were great, a very entertaining hour, and it seems like some really useful work has come out of Extreme Blue in the UK again this year. Well done!

This week we’ve had what could be described as a “mini Hackday”, instigated by an idea from Andy Stanford-Clark and organised by Hursley newcomer Vaibhavi Joshi. The idea was to spend a few hours exploring the world of plug computers (in this case, a model called a Guruplug); to brainstorm some ideas around utility computers; and to generally see what we could do with this kind of a form factor.

Some great ideas emerged, and quite a few of us were severely tempted to order our new shiny gadgets on the spot… by the end of the morning the Really Small Message Broker was built and running on the Guruplug and some exciting MQTT-related thoughts were flying around. A nice break from the norm for all of us!

Inspired by some of the “social technologies for internal communications” discussions I’d had with Abi Signorelli at Social Media Week London the previous week – in particular, the ease of capturing a brief audio snippet on any particular topic – I thought I’d ask Vaibhavi what she thought – here’s a quick interview:

Straight after the hacking, it was time to move on to the Open Technologies event that was being run to promote Linux, Firefox and Symphony. I’m a user and a big fan of all of these tools so it was nice to see a local Hursley event as part of IBM’s global awareness month dedicated to helping those within the internal community not yet up-to-speed on what people were using. The best part? Free stickers

The AR.Drone is a quadricopter with 2 video cameras, one mounted in the nose and one downward-facing. The drone that acts as an ad-hock Wi-Fi access point allowing it to be controlled from any device with Wi-Fi. At the moment Parrot are only shipping a client for the iPhone, but there is an API available and there is already footage on the net using an Android Nexus One to control one. It’s loaded with a bunch of other sensors as well, an accelerometer to help keep it stable and a ultrasound altimeter to help it maintain altitude over changing ground.

The iPhone interface for flying the drone uses the accelerometer and is a bit tricky to start with, but I think with a little bit of practice it shouldn’t take too long to get the hang of it. The feed from the video cameras is fed back to the handset allowing you to get a pilot’s eye view. At the moment none of the software allows you to capture this video, but it’s expected to be added soon. You can also use the camera to play AR games or have the it hover and hold station over markers on the floor.

The whole thing runs a embedded Linux build on a ARM chip and you can even telnet into the thing. It comes with 2 chassis, one for outside and one with some protective shrouds for the propellers to use indoors. 

I think some very cool stuff should be possible with a platform like this.

Here are 2 short videos I short of a few of us having a go with it on the lawn in front of Hursley House.

A few weeks ago, the Financial Times Digital Business podcast visited Hursley and checked out some of the innovations that are being worked on. The result is a nice 22 minute episode which tours the lab (including the Retail Lab pictured on the left!) and talks to John McLean, Andy Stanford-Clark, Bharat Bedi and Jamie Caffrey.

If you’re into augmented apps, location awareness, Emotiv headsets (as featured in our last post here, too!), e-paper labels on shop shelves, telemetry, instrumented houses, and Smarter Planet – it’s a great listen.

If you watched this week’s edition of Bang Goes The Theory on BBC1, you will have seen Nick O’Leary and Kevin Brown from IBM Hursley helping Jem and Dallas to drive taxis. That probably wouldn’t have been entirely revolutionary, had it not been done through a combination of an Emotiv brain-signal-reading headset, and some MQTT and Arduino funkiness… no hands on the wheel or feet on the pedals!

Nick has a great write-up of what sounds like a fun (but cold) event. You may still be able to catch the fun on iPlayer, or there are some clips over here.

(Image: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) from knolleary’s photostream, used with permission – full set)

Andy Stanford-Clark hooked up a set of lights to Twitter. As reported in Computer Weekly:

Using some clever IBM middeware, The microcontroller sets the illumination colour based on a signal from the internet or via SMS over a GSM network – so you can tweet “ibmlights” with the word RED, GREEN or BLUE to change their colour.

In fact, the commands got a bit more sophisticated than that, with more colours and lighting patterns. Towards the middle of last week the lights ended up over Laura‘s desk, and a growing band of folks delightedly tweeted the @ibmlights account with instructions to change colour or pattern. She took some pictures for me (and some video as well, but I didn’t have time to edit it…).

Another year of innovation and fun at Hursley! Happy Christmas!

(by the way, well worth taking a look at the rest of the Computer Weekly article I linked above – lots more coolness from Hursley! oh, and I’m not sure how long the lights will be online… it’s just a bit of fun really)

I believe it is important to leave it entirely up to the individual to recognise the positives of IBMers they work with, and go from there – you can’t do any better than this, but, there’s a bonus: sometimes IBM wants to recognise you too!  To make it all look good, to customers, or to make people happy, and to maintain the technical and innovative reputation or brand IBM has, they’ve built title names or award names as follows:

• IBM Fellows
• Corporate and Patent Portfolio Awards
• Distinguished Engineers
• Members of the IBM Academy of Technology
• External Honours
• Major Outstanding Innovation and Major Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards

Lots of different names, but of course IBM is so diverse that it’s difficult to recognise things in a systematic manner. Looking at the titles, I think the key points here are: if you love corporate technology and/or innovation, you can’t go any better!

I did.  As a result, I fell under the External Honours category, primarily for the RADAR Young Person of the Year award that I received last year.  Thereby I got into the book and, more excitedly, to meet other people and learn more about IBM.  What did I learn from the other IBM attendees?

I would firstly ask where do you work?  If it’s GBS [IBM Global Business Services], I would ask if they’ve heard of SWG [IBM Software Group]?  If yes, have they worked with SWG before?  With either answer, I would then ask if they’ve heard of Lab Services [which is where I work].  With these answers, I started coming up with questions I’d love answers to – for example:

• how to improve the awareness of what Lab Services can do, across into GBS?
• does the linkage between Lab Services and GBS have any room for improvement?
• have people from Lab Services moved to GBS?
• is Research well connected with UK?  With Research being in Switzerland?
• is the market for deaf-related and/or blind-related technology too small to be of interest?

I also met with Brendon Riley [the IBM UK General Manager], who I was very keen to talk with, particularly as my wife is also Australian.  I was thrilled when he told me that he was from Perth – where my wife was from! Brendon very kindly took the opportunity to ask me to do something for him – clearly he was keen to demonstrate that the planet was flatter, as he could ask me directly like a colleague sitting at the next desk might, rather than passing the request down through a hierarchical organisation. The fact that he’s from Perth, my wife’s from Perth, the Country General Manager asking me directly to do something for him, as our CEO would say: the world is becoming smaller and flatter!

Ben

I got a new TV around Christmas last year and while unpacking it I noticed along with the HDMI, SCART and other sockets on the back it had a 9-pin socket labelled "RS232C IN CONTROL&SERVICE". I didn’t think that much of it at the time, but I remembered it last week while thinking about a couple of problems that had come up.

The first of these was that I had got home twice recently to find I’d left the TV turned on while I was at work, this was mainly because I use MythTV and I’d left it at the menu screen rather than turning the screen off as well. This had left shadow on the menu on the screen for a day or so afterwards (luckily no permanent damage as would have happened with a plasma or CRT TV).

The other point was from when we all first got hold of our Current Cost meters, there had been a lot of thought about how to work out exactly what appliances were on at any given time. While spotting when things like an electric water heater turned on was relatively easy, it was proving difficult to spot some of the lower power devices.

A plan started to form and I ordered a null modem cable from Amazon (£2.18 with free shipping) and went looking for some documentation on the protocol. The manual that came with the TV while being nearly an inch thick just covers the basics of how to plug it in and turn it on, but there was a CD-ROM with a much more detailed PDF document. The version for my TV is here. While searching round I found manuals for several other LG LCD/plasma TVs and they all seem to use the same basic protocol.

The protocol is relatively simple

[cmd1][cmd2] [setid] [data]

Where the cmd1 & cmd2 are 1 letter code, setid is for if you have multiple TVs connected to the same cable, the default id is 01 but you can change if needed, using 00 will work for all connected TVs. And data is a hex value of the option to pass the command.

The response from the TV looks like this for a success

[cmd2] [setid] OK[data]x

and like this for a failure

[cmd2] [setid] NG[data]x

The command to turn the TV on and off is "ka" so sending

ka 00 1

turns the TV on and sending

ka 00 0

turns it off. Most of the commands will reply with the current status if they are passed ff as the data. So sending

ka 00 ff

gets the following when the TV is off

a 00 OK0x

So now I had a way to turn the TV on and off along with checking its current status. The next step was to surface this some way and given the fascination we all seem to have with messaging, MQTT seemed like a good idea. A little bit of Java and the Java COMM API later and I had 2 topics TV/Commands & TV/Status.

I already have a topic that publishes if my mobile phone is in the flat by pinging it with Bluetooth. Combining this with the two new topics I can ensure that the TV is turned off when I leave. I’m also wondering if I should start to log the amount of time the TV is on, but I think the results may scare me a little…