Exploration Space

Thank you everyone who attended my session at both DevConf Cape Town and Johannesburg
I met so many awesome people during DevConf inside and outside of my session! Thank you for making DevConf 2024 the incredibile conference it was!

I’ve included the slides for those interested in building your own DIY Microscope, or something similar to help you with your own accessibility challenges. If you have an imaging device with some intelligence, there’s so many things you can do!

The project is using a Raspberry Pi 3B (4 and 5 works too). It is build using C# and .NET 8. The user interface is created using AvaloniaUI. There’s nothing better that Avalonia if you need to create small, incredibly fast user interfaces on Linux using .NET. I really recommend trying it out!

The backend is using Azure CosmosDB for storage. The MongoDB VCore Implementation. This is chosen for it’s vector search capabilities. Perfect for a conversational solution using OpenAI.

The slides can be found below

Building-yourself-an-AI-Powered-Microscope-CPT-for-export Download

The whole premise of the talk was to inspire developers to think about using all these tech components in your toolbox. Both AI and IoT bits and use it for good. There’s so many solutions that could be created especially for accessibility, to make people’s life a little easier. This is also exactly why I created this Microscope, to solve my own accessibility problems when building IoT solutions. Think about what you could do!

Recorded Demos

Demo of analysing a Gigatron board

Unicorn HATs and dynamic lighting!

Using a Conversational Interface

Looking a ZX Spectrum RAM Chips

Helios Speaks Afrikaans!

The Microscope Tech Stack

.NET 8 (C#) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotnet-8/overview

Avalonia UI https://avaloniaui.net/

SkiaSharp https://github.com/mono/SkiaSharp

Azure CosmosDB https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/cosmos-db

Azure AI Vision https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/ai-vision

Azure Speech https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/ai-speech

Azure OpenAI https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/ai-services/openai-service

Azure IoT Edge https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/iot-edge

Docker https://www.docker.com/

Mosquito MQTT https://mosquitto.org/

The components used can be found here. You can put this all together yourself!

DevConf 2024

Some photos of the session at DevConf 2024

I hope to see you next time! Happy building and learning with cool tech!!!

DevConf 2024

apead — Sun, 05 May 2024 02:20:55 +0000

Where to buy the parts for Building a Microscope

Camera

Microscope Lense

https://www.pishop.co.za/store/microscope-raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera—012-18x

Unicorn HAT

https://www.pishop.co.za/store/unicorn-hat

Raspberry Pi

https://www.pishop.co.za/store/raspberry-pi-4-model-b-4gb

Microscope Stand

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CBLT82BK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

5″ Display

https://www.pishop.co.za/store/5inch-hdmi-lcd—bi-colour-case-for-raspberry-pi

Tips

SuperVisor

Keeping your .NET Apps Alive with Supervisor

You can find the MicroLights source code here:

https://github.com/apead/DevConf2024

Keeping your .NET Apps Alive with Supervisor

apead — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 07:33:00 +0000

Supervisor as a Background Service Manager

Supervisor is a service which can be used on a Raspberry Pi to ensure processes keep running. If there’s an app that requires execution 24 / 7 then SuperVisor is perfect for this. Perfect for kiosk solutions.

1. Install Supervisor

Log into the Raspberry Pi

At the command prompt type: sudo apt install supervisor -y

2. Start Supervisor the Supervisor Service

At the command prompt type:   sudo service supervisor start

3. Create a Supervisor Process

Use an editor such as nano to create a project file project.supervisor.conf in the /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ folder

Add this to the contents of the file

Create file project.supervisor.conf in etc/supervisor/conf.d/
and put:

[program:microlights]
user=pi
directory=/home/pi/MicroLights
command=sudo dotnet /home/pi/MicroLights/MicroLights.dll

autostart=true
autorestart=true
stdout_logfile=/home/pi/MicroLights/stdout.log
stderr_logfile=/home/pi/MicroLights/stderr.log

4. Request Supervisor to re-read configuration and Update

sudo supervisorctl reread
sudo supervisorctl update

5. Staus of Commands

sudo supervisorctl status microlights
sudo supervisorctl start microlights
sudo supervisorctl stop microlights
sudo supervisorctl restart microlights

Data Saturdays Cape Town 2023

apead — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 09:35:41 +0000

Thank you so much to everyone that attended my session. It was a lot of fun and the audience was great!

Also thank you to the sponsors for making community events like this happen, the organizers and the amazing venue at the University of the Western Cape.

Here’s the slides as promised and also all the links to further learning and also links to our Cape Town MS Developer Community was more tech learning fun.

Data-Platform-Saturdays-Integrating-Azure-OpenAI-into-Your-.NET-Applications Download

Home Agri-IoT experiment Part 2 – Composting

apead — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 10:11:00 +0000

The home farm is working well, but time to try and make some improvements. I’m going to try my hand and “Smart” Composting. Going to start with a Bokashi and also some worms with VermiComposting.

More on the home Smart Farm here. Since this talk at DevConf 2023, I’m so happy and also inspired to see so many new home farm smart farmers!

DevConf 2023 – Create the sustainable home farm of your dreams!

Composting is a given as the soil here in the garden is not great.

Sensors and likely some AI is a given here to mazimize the output of the compost. I’ll post more on how things go and what I’ve learn from the process. It will be a lengthy process to measure the benefits.

Step by step instructions, when I know what I’m doing will follow.

But the progress so far is below in pictures.

Microsoft BUILD After Party 2023

apead — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 08:38:17 +0000

Thank you to everyone for attending the Microsoft BUILD After Party 2023 in Cape Town. It was held in the Cape Town Waterfront at our venue Sponsor Accso.

https://www.meetup.com/cape-town-ms-dev-user-group/events/293247864

It was an amazing evening of community fun and learning.

DevConf 2023 – Create the sustainable home farm of your dreams!

apead — Mon, 29 May 2023 05:38:34 +0000

Thank you everyone who attended my session at both DevConf Cape Town and Pretoria
I met so many amazing people excited about creating a more sustainable future.

This is a quick blog post which includes the presented slide deck. I hope attendees found the talk useful. It’s a very broad topic and fitting months of content into 40 min is a little challengening. So the presentation is a broad overview of the completed farming project project and there’s links to more deeper content within the slides. This includes content and github repositiories with some source code examples. The plan is to also release ALL the content eventually as a full OSS project when I’m happy with it, including the Mobile App and integrations with the cloud components. I’m currently rounding everything off to do this. So expect a few more posts about this and source code.

The slides can be found below

Create-the-sustainable-home-farm-of-your-dreams-export Download

DevConf YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/-74owkJbfEQ?list=PLZgTMWtBnKkopU5DZbP7so-f3z7eMFYqq

There is also Agri hacks planned where we can hack and learn about this topic together over a few sessions where you can learn hands on how to build something like this project. This will be a free to attend event held at @CPTMSDUG in Cape Town. Keep an eye out here: https://www.meetup.com/cape-town-ms-dev-user-group/events/

This hack series be similar in format to our current IoT AI hack series currently running. You can see some of the fun had here at the all day iot hack events: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23iotaihackdays&src=typed_query&f=image

Additional Information

I received so many questions on how to get started. I suggest getting the off the shelf kit I mentioned in the talk that I started with. It contains everything you need to grow your first plants. This is also an indoor grower, so you can start with growing from seeds indoor and not worry about weather and protecting the electronics against sun and water. It will also make your home office a lot prettier.

What’s in the kit

Arduino

4 x Solenoids (for 4 plants)

4 x Relays

4 Moisture Sensors

1 Pump

Silicon Piping

The kit is great to learn with as it’s not a “black box” watering system. It’s an arduino where Elecrow provides the source code to flash onto the arduino. It works out of the box, but it also allows you to learn from it and also make changes.

Please don’t start by hacking it like I did. I decided it should to be connected to Azure IoT. That’s definitely not needed especially when starting out. But the instructions are there if you want to do that too.

For the beginner this is great and as you could see in the talk, once plants start multiplying, you are forced to scale from there.

Link to github repository:

https://github.com/apead/SmartWateringKit

Link to blog post on the kit: