Monday, November 14, 2016

Magic Mirror

I just implemented a MagicMirror for our home. Video footage of it working.

Basically I used the open source I had to do a few changes. I added a hideall module  so that everything is hidden and comes visible on detecting motion. My sources are at

This is the first prototype working on desk monitor with a 1mm two-way mirror held in front of it.


It was evident that the thin 1mm acrylic mirror is no good, because it bent easily giving weird distorted images. I moved to a 3mm 36” by 18” mirror and started working on a good sturdy frame.



I used 3x1 wood for the size which is actually 2.5 x 0.75 inches. On that I placed a face-frame.

I had a smaller 27” old monitor and decided to just use that. I mounted and braced the monitor with L shaped brackets. So it is easy to take out as well as hold the monitor firmly in place.


Final pictures


Thursday, June 23, 2016

Caribbean Vacation planning in Summer


I just came back from a vacation in Aruba. A friend asked me why Aruba as he thought is was an unusual choice.


I was trying to explain how my choice had a large data driven approach. Then I thought I’d share how I do it.

Why Now

First of lets get the constraints out of the way. Because choosing between “where to go at this time” vs “when to go to place X” needs different data crunching. I had to go now, the time is not a choice and is governed by the fact that I had manageable work load, it is summer and school vacations are on(I cannot go when it is not), I cannot go later during summer because of other engagements. Also I wanted to go relax in a Caribbean destination. So the question came down to where in the Caribbean and I used historical data to make the choice. And boy did that work out!!

Weather Data

First of it is hurricane season in the Caribbean so my first quest was to find a place where I am least likely to be hit by one. For that I headed onto the NOAA site which maps all hurricanes at a given place for the last 100 or more years. Choosing Bahamas and then all hurricanes only (not even storms) for June/July shows me the following. So you can make it out that it is a super bad idea.


I did the same search for other popular destinations in that area. E.g. Aruba for the last 100 years, shows not a single one hit this island.


Now that we know a hurricane doesn’t generally hit this place, lets see precipitation data.


So it’s very unlikely to rain either. Wow I am sold already.

Other Data

Obviously weather is not the only criteria. I did similar search with crime rates, prevalence of diseases etc. And then when I narrowed down to the area around the ABC islands (Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire), I finally made my choice on Aruba based on the kind of prices I got on hotels.

Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Customizing Windows Command Shell For Git session


Old habits die hard. From my very first days as developer in .NET and Visual Studio , I am used to have my windows cmd shell title always show the branch I am working on and have a different color for each branch. That way when I have 15 different command window open, I always know which is open where. Unfortunately when I recently moved to GIT, I forgot to customize that and made the mistake of making changes and checking in code into the wrong branch. So I whipped up a simple batch script to fix that.

git checkout %1
for /f "delims=" %%i in ('git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD') do set BRANCH=%%i

title %BRANCH%

REM Aqua for branch Foo
if "%BRANCH%" == "Foo" color 3F 

REM Red for branch bar
if "%BRANCH%" == "Bar" color 4F

REM Blue
if "%BRANCH%" == "dev" color 1F

I saved the above as co.bat (short for checkout) and now I switch branches using the co <branch-name>.

You can see all the color options by running color /? in your command window.




Monday, February 22, 2016

Identifying your Arduino board from code

For my IoT project I needed to write code slightly differently for specific Arduino boards. E.g. for Arduino UNO I wanted to use Serial to talk to ESP8266 and for Arduino Mega wanted to use Serial1. So basically I wanted to use Board specific #defines

#ifdef MEGA
    #define SERIAL Serial1
#elif UNO
    #define SERIAL Serial


For that I needed to get board specific #defines for each of the board options in the Arduino IDE, so that as I change the board type in the IDE, I automatically build code for that specific board.


That information is actually available in a file called board.txt inside your arduino install folder. For me it is G:\arduino-1.6.5\arduino-1.6.5-r5\hardware\arduino\avr\boards.txt. For each board there is a section inside that file and the relevant entries look something as follows



The .board entry when prefixed by ARDUINO_ becomes the #define. I wrote a quick PowerShell routine to get all such entires. The code for it is in GitHub at

$f = Get-ChildItem -Path $args[0] -Filter "boards.txt" -Recurse
foreach($file in $f)
    Write-Host "For file" $file.FullName
    foreach ($l in get-content $file.FullName) {
        if($l.Contains(".name")) {
            $b = $l.Split('=')[1];

        if($l.Contains(".board")) {
            $s = [string]::Format("{0,-40}ARDUINO_{1}", $b, ($l.Split('=')[1]));
            Write-Host $s


Given the argument of root folder or Arduino install, you get the following.

PS C:\Users\abhinaba> D:\SkyDrive\bin\ListBoard.ps1 G:\arduino-1.6.5\
For file G:\arduino-1.6.5\arduino-1.6.5-r5\hardware\arduino\avr\boards.txt
Arduino YÃºn                            ARDUINO_AVR_YUN
Arduino/Genuino Uno                     ARDUINO_AVR_UNO
Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila        ARDUINO_AVR_DUEMILANOVE
Arduino Nano                            ARDUINO_AVR_NANO
Arduino/Genuino Mega or Mega 2560       ARDUINO_AVR_MEGA2560
Arduino Mega ADK                        ARDUINO_AVR_ADK
Arduino Leonardo                        ARDUINO_AVR_LEONARDO
Arduino/Genuino Micro                   ARDUINO_AVR_MICRO
Arduino Esplora                         ARDUINO_AVR_ESPLORA
Arduino Mini                            ARDUINO_AVR_MINI
Arduino Ethernet                        ARDUINO_AVR_ETHERNET
Arduino Fio                             ARDUINO_AVR_FIO
Arduino BT                              ARDUINO_AVR_BT
LilyPad Arduino USB                     ARDUINO_AVR_LILYPAD_USB
LilyPad Arduino                         ARDUINO_AVR_LILYPAD
Arduino Pro or Pro Mini                 ARDUINO_AVR_PRO
Arduino NG or older                     ARDUINO_AVR_NG
Arduino Robot Control                   ARDUINO_AVR_ROBOT_CONTROL
Arduino Robot Motor                     ARDUINO_AVR_ROBOT_MOTOR
Arduino Gemma                           ARDUINO_AVR_GEMMA

So now I can use

#ifdef  ARDUINO_AVR_MEGA2560
    // Serial 1: 19 (RX) 18 (TX);
    #define SERIAL Serial1
    #define SERIAL Serial
#endif // ARDUINO_MEGA

Sunday, January 24, 2016

ESP8266 Wifi With Arduino Uno and Nano

If you are trying to add Wifi connectivity to an existing Arduino project or have serious aspirations for developing a Internet of Things (IoT) solution, Arduino + ESP8266 wifi module is one  of the top choices. Especially the Nano because it is super cheap (<$3) and is very small in size. Using some sort of web-server directly on ESP8266 (e.g. via Lua) doesn't cut it due to the lack of IO pins on ESP8266. You can get a full IoT node out at under $12 with a few sensors, Arduino Nano and a ESP9266 module (excluding the power supply).

Inspite of a plethora of posts online it turned out to be very hard for me to get this to combination to work. I spent atleast 3-4 days until I actually got this right. The main problem I see is that a lot of the solutions online are actually down-right incorrect, not-recommended or for other similar boards (e.g. Arduino Mega). Also there are a few gotchas that were not commonly called out. Before I start let me get all of those out of the way

  1. Arduino Uno/Nano is very different from say Mega which can supply more current and have different number of UART. The steps to make a Uno and Nano work is different from them.
  2. Power Supply
    1. ESP8266 is powered by 3.3V and NOT 5V. So you cannot have a common power supply between Arduino and ESP8266
    2. ESP8266 draws way more current (200mA) then it can be supplied by the 3.3v pin on the Uno/Nano. Don’t even try them, I don't buy anyone who claims to have done this. Maybe they have some other high power variant of Arduino (Mega??) that can do this.
    3. So you either use a 3.3v 1A power supply to ESP8266 with common ground with the 5V powering Arduino, or you use a step down 5v to 3.3v (e.g. like here).
  3. Arduino <-> ESP8266
    1. All the ESP8266 I bought  came with the UART serial IO speed (BAUD) set to 115200. Now the problem is that Uno/Nano has only one HW serial, which is set to be used for communicating with the PC over USB with which you are debugging. You can use any other two IO pins to talk to the ESP8266 using SoftwareSerial, but it does not support that high a BAUD speed. If you try 115200 to communicate with Arduino <-> ESP8266 you will get garbage. A lot of articles online show a setup with Arduino Mega which does have two HW serial IO using which you can easily get 115200 and more. So you need to dial the ESP8266 settings to move the communication speed to a more manageable BAUD of 9600
    2. Arduino IO pins have 5V and ESP8266 accepts 3.3 v (max 3.6). I have seen people directly connect the pins but you are over driving the ESP8266. If it doesn’t burn out immediately (the cheaper ones does), it will burn out soon. I suggest you use a voltage divider using simple resistor to have Arduino transmission (TX) drive ESP8266 receive (RX)
    3. For some strange reason D2/D3 pins on Arduino Nano didn’t work for me for the communicating with ESP8266. I have no explanation for this and it happened on two separate Nano. The Arduino would just read a whole bunch of garbage character. So I had to move to the pins 8/9.
    4. In spite of whatever I did, garbage characters would still come in sometimes. So I wrote a small filter code to ignore them


Things you need

  1. ESP8266
  2. Arduino Nano
  3. Power supply 5v and 3.3v
  4. Resistors 1K, 2.2K, 10K
  5. FTDI USB to serial TTL adapter. Link (optional, see below)

Setting up ESP8266

imageAs mentioned above I first set the ESP8266 BAUD rate to 9600. If yours is already 9600 then nothing to be done, if not you need to make the following connection

PC (USB) <-> FTDI <-> ESP8266

Then using specific AT commands from the PC set the 9600 BAUD rate on the ESP8266. I used the following circuit. Where the connections are as follows

FTDI TX –> Via voltage divider (to move 5v to ~3.3v) to ESP8266 RX (blue wire)
FTDI RX –> Directly to ESP8266 TX (green wire). A 3.3v on Nano I/0 pin will be considered as 1.
FTDI GND to common ground (black)

ESP8266 GND to common GND (black)
ESP8266 VCC to 3.3v (red)
ESP8266 CH_PD to 3.3v via a 10K  resistor (red)

Power supply GND to common GND


One that is set bring up Arduino IDE and do the following using the menu

  1. Tools –> Port –>COM{n}. For me it was COM6
  2. Then Tools –> Serial monitor

In the serial monitor ensure you have the following set correctly. The BAUD should match the preset BAUD of your ESP8266. If you are not sure, use 115200 and type the command AT. If should return OK, if not try changing the BAUD, until you get that.


Then change the BAUD rate by using the following command, and you should get OK back


After that immediately change the BAUD rate in the serial monitor to be 9600 baud as well and issue a AT command. You should see OK. You are all set for the ESP8266.

Setting up Arduino Nano + ESP8266

This step should work for Uno as well. Essentially make the same circuit as above, but now instead of FTDI use an Arduino. I used pins 8 and 9 on Arduino for the RX and TX respectively.



Debugging and Setup WIFI

Even though I could easily run AT commands with the PC <->FTDI <-> ESP8266, I ran into various issues while doing the same programmatically in PC <->Arduino <-> ESP8266 setup. So I wrote the following very simple code to pass on commands I typed in the PC via the Arduino to the ESP8266 and reverse for outputs.

The code is at GitHub as

#include <SoftwareSerial.h>

void setup() 
  uint32_t baud = 9600;
  Serial.print("SETUP!! @");

void loop() 
    while(softSerial.available() > 0) 
      char a =;
      if(a == '\0')
      if(a != '\r' && a != '\n' && (a < 32))
    while(Serial.available() > 0)
      char a =;

With this code built and uploaded to Arduino I launched the Serial monitor on my PC. After that I could type commands in my Serial Monitor and have the Arduino pass that only ESP8266 and read back the response. I can still see some junk chars coming back (in RED). All commands are in Green and could easily enumerate all Wifi in range using AT+CWLAP and even connect to my Wifi.