X200 Laptop from IBM On Demand Community

IBM set up the On Demand Community programme some years ago, which provides money or IBM products to eligible community organisations and schools where IBM employees and retirees are actively volunteering (measured by recording hours in an online recording system), and in support of specific projects.

Four years ago, the 1st Chandler's Ford BB DofE Group applied for some funding for training, and received over £500. Training does not come cheap, with some Walking Group Leader courses running at around £400 per person, and the Assessment at a similar cost. Our First Aid courses are run by St. Johns Ambulance in Eastleigh, who help us by letting us donate a relatively small amount for a 2 day course. Leaders generally have to pay for this themselves, so it was good that, thanks to the contribution from IBM, the group could subsidise some of this training.

At the end of 2008 we applied for an IBM technology grant, and were very happy to be awarded a new X200 laptop. Using this, we will be able to maintain records of participants, leaders, training materials, and other resources needed to run the group - as well as using it for route planning using MemoryMap and helping young people access the DofE website if they need to get advice on completing their Skills, Volunteering and Physical sections of the Award.

We run the Award by charging participants as little as possible in order to prevent young people from missing out on opportunities due to the cost. This means however, we are completely reliant on donations to "enhance" the group in ways that this donation from IBM has, and will do. The BB owns one laptop which we can borrow for route planning, but with 6 groups attempting to route plan using the same computer, it makes a big difference to have our own! So a public thanks again to IBM for this donation.

Using Brain Computer Interfaces for something useful

There are now a whole collection of Brain Computer Interfaces around... and this latest one from the games company Mattel uses the power of concentration to make a ping pong ball hover. The technology is supplied by NeuroSky, who have also provided the technology for a Star Wars game - $50-$100 for the fun of using "brain waves to allow players to manipulate a sphere within a clear 10-inch-tall training tower..." - something I could imagine myself doing just the once. Never-the-less it's quite good to see the technology coming down in price.

What fascinates me however is how we might be able to use brain waves for real personal benefit and integrate it more with our every day computer interaction experience. People who have severe motor difficulties could use it as a rehabilitative aid. Performing product research, it can be used for detecting when people are excited or not when they experience a particular product or website. When we are browsing on-line, we could combine it with eye tracking to provide feedback on what really interests us, and then tailor our online experience accordingly. When we go to the shops... the cinema... driving in the car... feedback can be provided to enterprise systems in all sorts of situations, which in turn can affect the environment around us. I'm really looking forward to talking with a number of customers about how they can integrate this and other interface technology in their own innovative projects in 2009!

Calculating energy usage is harder than it seems

In my last post, I said a Christmas project was to monitor my usage - but I confess I've got a problem of how to measure my energy usage which is so far unsolved.

As I said, I have a currentcost meter (m1) which reads the current going into and out of the house. Of course, it cannot determine which way current flows, so it reads 50W regardless of whether the 50W is imported to, or exported from, my house. Therefore, I put a second meter (m2) round the wire from the solar panel, which told me how much the panel was generating and was thinking that if the value on m2 > m1 I must be exporting, otherwise I would be importing. However this thinking is flawed:

If I am generating 100W, (m2=100) and I am using 50W, then I will export 50W (so m1=50).
If I am generating 100W, (m2=100) but I am using 150W, then I will import 50W (so m1=50).

So from my two readings, I cannot conclusively say whether I am importing or exporting electricity, unless I am missing something obvious? The bright green import/export meter which Southern Electric fitted manages to work out what is being imported and what is being exported - but there doesn't seem to be a nice little serial port anywhere obvious! The other option is to buy a wireless unit as an addition to the inverter but this costs £120 and doesn't appear to give me open access to the data.

BTW - in 20 days we've generated 16.2 kWh and exported 9 of them. A grey day typically generates 200Wh the whole day - a sunny winter's day like today seems to generate about 2kWh.

The solar works

In the loft
The solar panels are connected to an inverter (right - click photos to enlarge) , which converts the DC generated current into AC, using the "only clever bit" of the entire installation, according to the installer. This is mounted just inside the entrance to the loft. The interesting thing about the blue box is the "knock interface"... to switch on the unit and light up the screen you have to knock on the grey area. The screen tells you how many watts the panels are generating, and how much have been produced during the day, and how much in total.

In the kitchen
Downstairs, next to the consumer unit is a fantastic red knob, which isolates the panels. Above it is a meter which also shows how much electricity has been generated by the panels in total. During the first day of operation, the unit generated a total of 700W - disappointing considering it was bright sunshine outside all day, and the unit is spec'd at 1000W per hour. The installation engineer reassured me that as the sun got higher during the summer months the unit would generate much more - we shall see! During the second day of operation, when it was cloudy, the unit generated a total of just 200W during the day. Not good.

Metering
The electricity meter has been switched to an import / export meter. The meter gives the amount exported to the National Grid (ie total produced by the solar panel minus total consumed at the time in the house), and also the amount imported from the Grid. You can see the current cost clamp in the picture. This is interesting, because the current cost meter measures the flow of electricity regardless of which way it flows... so it reads 100W when the house consumes 100W, and it reads 100W when the house exports 100W. It was highly confusing turning on a light to see the amount on the meter decrease! So one of my Christmas projects is to connect another meter to the solar panel cable, and add the two readings together in order to get a sensible output... more on that later.

Solar Panel installation

Here's a photo of the solar panels which were fitted to our roof today by Rayotec. They should provide us with 1kW electricity per hour in peak sunshine, but just around 100W per hour in horrible foggy weather like today. Tomorrow morning they will be grid connected, so any extra electricity we don't use will go back into the grid. With Southern Electricity giving us slightly more per unit than we pay for our electricity, there's still an incentive to use as little as we can. We expect the unit to just about cover our usage, over a yearly period. It cost around the same as having all our doors and windows replaced a few years ago and we're promised a similar length of service. So, we're just looking forward to the grand switching-on ceremony tomorrow morning!

Mind reading headsets

So far, the mind reading headset market aimed at the regular consumer is quite small... I've come across the well advertised Emotiv headset, to be released early next year, and OCZ's "Neural Impulse Activator", shown right.

Unlike the Emotiv headset, with 16 different sensors placed on different parts of the head, this unit only has 3, all placed across the forehead, inevitably giving slightly less function.

In the first several hours of playing with the device, I managed to work out what successful calibration "looked like": - when the muscle signal graph didn't vary away from the "desired baseline". Sometimes this was very easy to achieve, and other times, just didn't happen. I discovered it worked better on one side of the lounge at home, than on the other. I also concluded that wetting the 3 sensors with water helped to a degree. Unfortunately the device needs to be calibrated every time it is used, which makes demonstrations rather hit-and-miss.

My first successful experience came shortly after calibrating the device. I was able to play the game of pong, using my eyebrows. By wiggling them fractionally upwards, the bat went up, and wiggling them downwards, the bat went down. And whilst I didn't ever manage to win a whole game, I did hit the ball enough times to win a few points, so it was not all chance.

My other successful experience was linking the muscle movements to keypresses, so I could use my eyebrows to navigate around Google maps. An eyebrow up-wiggle mapped to Page Up, and sent the map flying in one direction, a down-wiggle mapped to Page Down, and sent it flying in the other. Unfortunately zooming in and out was a bit beyond me, as the '+' key was unmappable.

So what about the mind-reading? Well, unlike the Emotiv device, it is not possible to "train" the device to recognise when you are thinking of stroking a cat for example. As found in this review, it should be able to detect general mood - OCZ's VP Dr. Schuette, says he can think of an expletive to make his Alpha 2 increase enough to trigger a "jump" action in his computer game. However I suspect this takes many hours of practice!

So for now, I shall continue playing pong with my keyboard, and wait for a few weeks when I hope to be able to get my hands on an Emotiv headset!

How to communicate if you can barely move

My wife works with people who have had head injuries or strokes, who cannot move from the neck down and sometimes cannot talk; some are mentally active, which must be even more frustrating. Even in this day of great technology, letters are drawn on paper, and letter by letter the person moves their head from one side to the other side to indicate if this is the next letter in the sentence. As you can imagine, this takes a very long time, and it cannot be used to initiate a conversation.

Recently, I've been playing with a very good piece of software aimed at eye tracking called Dasher. This allows letters, which move in from the right of the screen, to be selected one by one by moving the mouse up and down and gradually forming a sentance. It is also predictive, so if for example you have selected H and then e, llo would be close together. It runs on multiple operating systems.

Secondly, my colleage Dave CJ has created a fantastic python script to control the mouse pointer on a Ubuntu PC using the accelerometer on the Nokia N95 via bluetooth.

So... by combining the two, I can tilt the N95 from side to side, to move the mouse on the PC and select letters in a sentence. OK, so balancing a phone on your head to do this looks slightly stupid, but if it helps open up a means of communication without any specialist equipment, or the help of someone else, it surely must be a good thing!