I received an email out of the blue through my contact form here from a representative over at “Intus Healthcare”. He pointed me in the direction of the Zeo Sleep Manager, with an aim to reviewing it. Sure enough, I was thoroughly interested, and we exchanged a few emails back and forth on it’s serial port, and other such things. Unfortunately at that point, things went dead – I’ve sent him several emails over the past few weeks but haven’t heard anything back. Nonetheless, the product looks really interesting, and hits several of my interests, and so I went ahead and ordered the product. I ordered directly from myzeo.co.uk which seems to be a store front for Intus Healthcare who are apparently Zeo’s UK distributors of the product.

The order process was simple enough, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to receiving the product. I’ll post further updates when it arrives.

*UPDATE 27/01/12* Product arrived!

*UPDATE 28/01/12*

The Zeo Sleep Manager arrived yesterday in record time, less than 24 hours from when it was ordered! Of course, I set it up and used it last night. The band itself was reasonably comfortable, and I didn’t find sleeping in it a problem. The results of this morning seem to match the sleep cycles I’d expect, so that’s also a positive. I’ve been given a ‘sleep score’ of 107 which I understand is supposed to be very good, despite the fact that I didn’t have the greatest night’s sleep. ‘Time to sleep’ is recorded as 9 minutes, when it was at least 30 minutes, and apparently I only woke up once for 1 minute during the night, when I know that I was up twice for at least 30 minutes combined. The second of these periods is listed as ‘light sleep’ – maybe my brain was still in doze mode

In this video I’ll be showing how I used the Emotiv headset to drive the robot. Please excuse the editing, and in fact the video itself. I will perhaps aim for a better one in future. Hopefully the video is sufficiently clear in what’s happening.

Having an interest in Brain Computer Interface (BCI) hardware, and with the release of the Emotiv EPOC headset, I decided to invest in the Research Edition. The research edition comes bundled with the research version of the SDK. The benefit of this version of the SDK is that we also have access to the raw EEG outputs from each channel, as well as a piece of software called TestBench that allow for saving/replaying sessions.

The headset itself comes almost ready to go, just attach the felt pads and wet them with saline. Affixing the headset to the head is a bit difficult the first few times and requires a bit of practice. Once you’ve done it a few times, it becomes a lot easier. The key is getting each of the felt pads absolutely soaking wet with saline before putting it on the head.

I’m going to be using the headset for a number of different purposes. As a BCI, I intend to use it to manipulate the robot, and probably in future other more useful tasks. Separately, I plan to use it to monitor sleep and meditation sessions which are a separate area of interest of mine.

In a previous post, I showed how it was possible to control the robot using voice commands. Here, I’ve modified the voice control script to handle simple keystrokes instead. The Emotiv control panel comes with a tool called ‘Emokey’ that can issue defined keystrokes when certain actions are detected within the control panel. Here’s a video:

The purpose is really to show how simple it is to interface with any regular program/script using EmoKey. There are other more exciting possibilities such as directing music based on the Affectiv suit. The Affectiv suite deals in mind states such as frustration, alertness, meditation, etc.

I’ve set up a new mic and used cvoicecontrol (with some bug fixes) to perform voice control. I’ve integrated cvoicecontrol into my C HAL layer. Each voice model needs training and saving, however once done, they can be reused in the code. For example; if (listen(“yesno”)) { … } is all that’s required to listen for a yes or a no, assuming that “yesno.cvc” has been trained in advance. I’ve also integrated the clap switch across the one of the Phidgets digital inputs. The software requires two toggles within 8 seconds of each other, and the hardware configuration requires two claps to generate one output toggle. This seems the best way to filter out other noise from triggering it. The result is two sets of two claps are required to activate the voice control. Here’s an example:

There are other potential methods of triggering voice control. With a bluetooth enabled phone’s MAC address, it’s possible to l2ping it without any pairing needed. We can then tell it’s signal strength. I’ve already written a sample tool to speak “hello” and “goodbye” as a person['s mobile phone] gets closer or further respectively to the robot. Perhaps slightly too annoying on an ongoing basis, hence the 2 sets of 2 claps.

The Roomba’s a great invention. Who needs one when you’ve got one of these though? </joke> For over 4 times the price and nowhere near the simplicity or ease of use, I present:

Since the robot’s rebuild, I finally tackled the automatic charging situation. There are a number of ways to get the device to autocharge. If it always has line of sight to it’s charger, it can spin until it finds it using infra red, then follow the beam – this however doesn’t work without line of sight. It could use a compass, although there are too many magnetic fields, and this requires advance knowledge of positioning. The simplest method would be to always start on charge, and just store movement history, reversing it when it was necessary to charge. Problem here is that even with good wheel alignment, AND accelerometers, even after few movements, simply reversing them is often not good enough to get it even close to it’s original position.

There are a couple more options. There’s the black tape along the floor that the robot could follow – too simple/boring. I think that the best option would have ideally been to use several radio types and some decent AI programming to get the robot closer and closer accurately. It could have used bluetooth/wifi to get a general idea of the direction of it’s charger, an AM transmitter at the basestation and AM receiver on the robot to position it closer, and then finally line of sight with lasers or IR beams to get right to the base station. The issue here comes down to the software development – how to weight signal strength vs objects in the way. Lets say that our signal is 95% but we’re in the wrong room and separated by a wall, we need to figure out that although our signal strength is 95%, we’re actually not in the right place, and we were closer when our signal strength was 70% and we were at the door. Perhaps with some super intelligent coding, this was an option but I didn’t have the time or the patience.

There are probably a few more options that I didn’t think of, although I decided on a reasonable but quite simple solution. I don’t think that the prerequisites are unreasonable:

1. The robot starts on it’s charging point
2. The following prerequisites are inherited from the automatic moving in general:
   1. The robot is not manually moved or pushed about. It needs to know where it is.
   2. If the robot finds objects it wasn’t expecting, it’s in trouble.
   3. The territory is mapped and functions are provided to navigate it in advance.

Using the automove covered in the previous 2 posts, the robot can move automatically throughout a mapped terrain. It can use any of it’s other sensors and logic to decide which routine (path) to take at the end of any given routine. The only difference here, is that a specific charge function has been written. The last function in the routine below ends the robot about 12 inches from the charging station. The charge function brings it back and closer in smaller increments, lining up using it’s right and back sensors. It then turns it’s charging terminals on, and makes smaller still movements and adjustments until it detects charge.

The robot’s new design also allows for better manual movement – here’s a video of the robot being manually controlled. This is all done via the TCP server and can be hooked to any TCP speaking application.

It had been a while since I’d worked on the robot, and I wanted to work on some movement algorithms. I’ve done some AI work lately on a separate project, and thought that this would help with the automated movement task. Unfortunately, the Robot had a little accident, namely falling out of the loft whilst I was bring it down. It’s been long overdue the removal of some of the excess hardware, and also needed some bugfixes that I now had no choice but to perform.

I’ll bullet point the changes as there are a few:

• Robot now has two charging contacts that need to be specifically enabled via controllable relay
• Excess acrylic was removed
• Robot’s LCD, Speakers, Cam & Battery are also all on relays and can be enabled or disabled via software.
• The Robot has a clap activated switch, and so programs can be triggered via clapping
• The current meter was hooked directly to battery output
• The Robot has additional IR distance sensors. Now 2 front, 2 left, 2 right and 1 back
• Wheels are now much better aligned
• The Robot now has a more compact mic for better voice recognition
• The speaker relay has a capacitor over it to avoid the initial surge when powered on.
• The carnetix voltage regulator had failed and so was replaced.
• The software has been rewritten in C to interface directly with the hardware, and python to provide a TCP server to interface with all necessary functions. I use PHP for the ‘client applications’, to interface with the python interface. Ideally I would use python for the client apps too, but I haven’t got around to learning Python properly, and this wasn’t the time to do it.

The new hardware and software address a lot of the problems that we had before, the platform is also more stable and more reliable. I’ve written a set of functions that allow the robot to move around automatically. I’ve mapped the flat into 5 different areas and written a set of rules for handing each area. Each ruleset gets the robot from the start of one section to the end, ready to hand over to the next ruleset. We only rely on the positioning of the robot vs known objects mapped out. i.e. while right_sensor_1 and right_sensor_2 are both sufficiently close to the wall and the front sensor is sufficiently far from the door, keep moving forward, whilst lining up straight with the right all type logic. The downside with this approach is unexpected objects in the robot’s path, doors left open, etc. This could be overcome with more sophisticated coding.

Here’s a video of the robot navigating automatically from the bedroom through to the lounge:

In the next article, I’ll show how the new hardware and software allows for greater control over movement in general when being controlled manually.

I’ve been considering writing a PayPal desktop application for Windows for some time now. I’ve seen a couple of attempts at this done before, as well as web systems that utilize PayPal’s API. I haven’t seen a definitive piece of software that handles your PayPal account operations from your desktop.

PayPal’s API doesn’t support everything you might want to do, specifically sending payments, so it’s possible that some of the functionality could only be achieved by scraping the site. My main list of features is as follows:

1. Instant popup on payment receipt
2. Fast and powerful reporting, stats and graphs.
3. Quickly and easily in a few clicks send a payment.

Any ideas or interest? Please let me know!

Check out http://www.dealsnear.me a brand new site to find, post and follow local deals in your area. Visit the site, select your market, and find local offers, all for free.

I’ve been using a really clever device for the last few years that a lot of people seem to be unaware exists. It’s an ethernet over powerlines adapter – one such example is the Devolo dLAN. In a nutshell, you plug it into the mains, and connect the Ethernet socket to your network device. You can then plug as many others as you like to various other powerpoints and extend your network wherever the power stretches. Devolo do ones that run up to 200mbit. It’s a theoretical maximum, although I’ve got 177mbit before which is impressive. It has a couple of downsides:

1. It won’t traverse 3 phase power. I’ve tried it, and I’ve ended up with a very weak/nonexistant signal which is probably more inductance than anything else.
2. Obviously it doesn’t handle bad cables well – it doesn’t much like extension cables either.
3. Different circuits work about as well as 3 phase power, the only signal you will get is probably inductance between the two circuits.

Some advantages:
1. It travels pretty far. I’ve had over 150mbit between adapters at opposite ends of the house.
2. No new cabling
3. Fully supports standard Ethernet so all network protocols will work just fine over it.
4. I love it

For anyone running a home or office network and not fortunate to have Ethernet points cabled in, I strongly recommend these devices, you’ll never know the difference.

Yesterday, I offered a free website security scan. Why would you need a scan? I went into a little detail then, but I’d like to expand on what I wrote about, that being my offering my services as a PHP programmer.

If you’re an online merchant, your server needs to be PCI compliant. Otherwise, you not only run the risk of being hacked and losing customer data, but you also run the risk of facing major fines. One fine would be enough to wipe just about any small business out.

New security challenges arise every day. In fact, they arise every hour, it seems. Will your site stand up to the challenge? Will it meet that challenge? Only by regular security scans will you know. Even if you’re not a merchant, you need scans, because I am willing to bet that you don’t want to be hacked. All sorts of unsavory things can occur if that happens.

You could lose your databases. You could lose all data on your server. Your users’ information could be compromised. There are many things that could happen, and none of them are pleasant.

So, contact me for your free security scan today. As I wrote earlier, all I ask in return is that you have a sincere intent of using my services.

As a PHP Programmer with 8+ years experience now, I’ve always specialized in web security, security standards, and secure programming. In the say 300+ websites that I’ve dealt with in the past, at least 200 have been vulnerable to some sort of moderate to high risk attack. By high risk, I mean the steal your database and deface your website type of attack.

Free Website Security Scan? Why? Well, most of the security audits that I conduct will usually begin with a basic audit that ultimately goes uncharged in light of the thorough audit and any repair works that follow. On that basis, I’m happy to offer a basic FREE no obligation security audit to anyone genuinely interested in using my services. I do not require any code or data from you, nor any access to your systems. All I ask is that you have a genuine intention of using my services to thoroughly audit and/or repair any vulnerabilitie in your site that I’m able to identify and demonstrate.

Interested? Contact me now.

If you need a skilled website security consultant or PHP programmer, then consider me. Get in touch with me for a quote, and I’ll be more than happy to discuss what I can do for you.

These days, your site can’t be too secure, and if you’re unsure of how to properly secure your site or your PHP code, As a php website security tester, I stand ready to assist you. I can help you ensure that your server is secure overall, reducing the chances of it being hacked. I can also go over your PHP code and ensure that it too is secure. After all, a secure server really does no good if the PHP code isn’t also secure.

Feel free to browse my site and read my articles. Then, get in touch with me, and let me know the details of your project!

Yesterday, I discussed how you can redirect your HTML files to PHP files. Why is it important to do so?

There are certainly no security concerns involved here, but you probably don’t want to lose your visitors who may bookmark certain pages, nor do you want to lose search engine traffic, because the HTML links will still show up in those engines until they crawl your changes.

That’s where the 301 redirect comes in. This is the best sort of redirect to use, because it is search engine friendly. What it tells search engines is that the page has moved permanently to the forwarding location you provide, which in this case is a PHP file. Essentially, if you do it this way, the search engines won’t skip a beat, and you’ll keep your traffic. The last thing you want to do is let search engines crawl 404 errors.

If you need help with these sorts of things, or if you need a skilled PHP programmer to help you sort out your conversion, I would be more than happy to take a look at your specific needs, and devise a plan for you. This includes making sure that your PHP code and your setup is secure, as PHP is a valuable tool, but a potential security risk if not handled correctly.

My rates are reasonable, and I offer a wealth of experience that can benefit you. Simply get in touch with me for a custom quote!