What I did on my vacation from reality

Yeah, I know, I’m lagging pretty hard. Couldn’t afford to pay the intarweb bill for a while. Hey, my country’s economy sucks, okay?

I don’t know if it’s the router or the rtl8187b card, but connections stall, hang, and generally go to shit every so often. I’ve found that most of the blame goes to NetworkManager (I kill it when I log in and use ifupdown manually).

I’ve found that periodically reassociating with the AP fixes things, so I’m keeping an xterm with watch -n3 iwconfig wlan0 ... running minimized.

AP is a Netgear WGR614 (v7).

I saw this Slashdot comment, which got me to thinking.

When I was a kid, my dad showed me how to hook stuff up to serial ports and parallel ports, so you could actually get some kind of meaningful communication going between a crude hardware device (e.g., a stepper motor, or a motion detector) and a computer.

This was back in the 2.0 kernels, so that should give you an idea.

With my basic knowledge of electronics and serial ports (yes, I said parallel earlier, serial was easier at the time), I went to Radio Shack and picked up a little $20 motion detector. I layed it across the RTS and CTS lines, and wrote a little bash script to monitor it with setserial. The circuit opened (thus clearing CTS) when it detected motion, and eventually I had it ATDT my pager and, later, when I got a USB webcam and USB support actually started working, take pictures, email them offsite, all that fun stuff. I even got creative (this is now paraphrasing my own Slashdot reply to the article) and wired an override switch into it.

Now, this guy’s got a pretty decent idea. Why can’t you take a Picotux, hook it up to wireless (Bluetooth or 802.11, maybe an unlicensed band with your own hardware), and hook it up to everything in sight, then hook everything up to a “brain” server? Maybe even multiple, redundant brain servers? I mean, if the server over the fridge is in charge of calling you in case of emergency, what happens if the fridge catches fire? You should have one in your bedroom closet, too.

Even better, you can start doing X10 stuff and automating the lights, the AC, the TV, all sorts of fun stuff. Hell, you could automate feeding the cats. (I wouldn’t recommend using it to feed goldfish, in case the motor burns out.)

Given proper funding and equipment, I could probably have something really interesting in a week. A custom protocol to say what sort of device it is, how urgent it is, and then broadcast it over UDP — wait a few seconds to see which brains answer, then resend to the ones that didn’t, and warn the others that those seem to be down. The other brains double-check the unresponsive ones… Hey, if the device that went off was the bedroom smoke alarm, and then the brain server in your bedroom closet doesn’t respond, you’ve got problems.

Note: I’m not asking for proper funding, and I’ll probably politely refuse it if offered. I have other things going on right now. Unless you’re really rich.