Month: March 2019

We have learned how to use the ESP8266 with the Adafruit IO MQTT broker to send and receive messages. Additionally, we have learned about IFTTT (IF This Then That) which provides us an easy way to connect Adafruit IO to other devices such as twitter, your cell phone, and literally hundreds of more services. It’s actually quite unbelievable how easy it is to connect different services together with this deceptively simple web site.

I personally think the most useful feature of IFTTT is the ability to connect it to your phone with text messages and phone calls. Our phones are our main internet connection during all times of the day. Connecting our phones to the devices we built is a very logical next step.

This technology gives me the ability to build the No Snoop. Essentially the device is meant to alert the owner whenever someone opens their desk drawer or other enclosed area via text message. All the device consists of is a photocell resistor, 10K resistor, and the ESP8266.

If the photocell registers enough light, as in someone opening up your closet or desk drawer or something else, the ESP8266 will send an elevated value to the Adafruit IO server. I have also created an IFTTT applet to watch this feed and text me that someone was snooping on my stuff if elevated light levels are detected. Here is the simple device:

And here is a video of me snooping on myself. There is a slight delay between the light being registered and the text message but this is just because of the communication chain not being terribly direct. As long as the drawer gets opened for a second or two the elevated levels will be detected and text message will be received.

While the delay between the text and drawer opening may not be best for film, in a real life use case this is still precise enough for someone to know exactly when someone is snooping through your stuff!

This CitiBike Rental Dock uses several different sensors and switches to operate. You are able to rent a bike with your credit card, and once processed the bike is released. The internet interaction is between the machine, and the respective bike dock that releases the bike. When the bike is returned, the dock sensor sees that the bike is returns and the timer stops and the total charge is calculated. All of this is powered by the solar panel on the top of this dock.

This room call device is part directory (on the right) which is no technology, but then when you press a button for the room you are trying to call, a sound and light goes of in the room and that person hits a button which unlocks the door downstairs so that you can come up. There is a timer that only keeps the door unlocked for a brief amount of time, before re-locking the front door, to protect the building.

This door switch is similar to the one that Max and I used in our fortune cookie experiment. It sends a signal to the alarm system, that will not let you set the alarm unless the switch is closed. These are on all of the doors to make sure that the alarm cannot be bypassed.

I found this in the Fulton St Subway station attached on an entrance terminal.

I believe it’s an NFC reader so that you’d be able to use the metro card right from your phone. I think it exists for ease of our use from our phones that we’re addicted to, so now instead of fumbling through our pocket to swipe and missing the swipe the first couple of times, you could just tap your phone and keep walking, the other reason is it’s one less thing that we’d waste. It’s digital so they’d be able to print a lot less metro cards so that’s great. 

This was a vending machine in one of the school buildings. On its keypad it had “waiting for cell connection” and that had tempted me to look into it more. I think I found a cell antenna on top of it that’s used for the payment connection. I was actually really surprised that it said cell connection and not connected to a local WiFi network. That may be because of the security concerns? I believe this exists so we can start moving to be cardess, as carrying cash isn’t as big of a thing as it used to be. I think there’d be better less wasteful ways to achieve this and I’m not convinced we actually need it.

The last one I found was in my friends apartment it was their keypad to ring me up. It sent a live video feed of me up and then they could let me into the apartment without coming down. I thought this was interesting internet connected device because most apartments don’t have that. It exists to make us even more lazy to let the food delivery person in or our friends. 

1.) LaGuardia Southwest Check-In

First, the LaGuardia renovation is all that you hoped for and more – no more “bodega with planes” vibe. But onto devices!

Security at airports bears the brunt of travel-tech criticism, for good reason – the TSA is horrifically inefficient and ineffective, and just the term “millimeter wave scanner” alone sounds like it was the brainchild of some TV-Trope mad scientist trying to come up with the most physics-sounding jumble of words possible.

But let’s talk about the second most source of travel ire: boarding.

First, you have the actual herding-cattle exercise that is lining up to board, which, depending on your airline, can be meh or hell. Southwest’s is the most-least-illogical I’ve seen so far, grouping you into A’s and B’s and C’s and then having you arrange yourselves according to your boarding number in neat segments of fives –

Overall, the boarding process was probably the result of some multi-million dollar consultancy with a lot of random bits of phycology thrown in their for good measure.

But it’s all for naught if the lynchpin network device fails. The humble barcode scanner:

Again, as with the boarding processes I discussed above, shit works. I don’t want to undersell what was and is a Herculean effort on the part of the Southwest engineers who have to maintain the airline’s legacy systems, likely written in some godawful legacy language like FORTRAN in the 80’s.

 But that’s table stakes, not medal-worthy. Let’s talk about the experience a bit: what message are you communicating when, at a checkout, you scan not your products, but your customers? Hopefully in the near future Amazon will bring their checkout-less technology to airports and we can just waltz on planes like humans instead of cattle.

2.) 33 Thomas Street

This is a little meta, but consider the strange, windowless building in lower Manhattan:

It seems (if you look at actual pics and not my shitty drawing) to be the opposite of a “networked” building – no windows, and the Brutalist architecture makes it seem less like a building where things happen and more like a 29-story rock that just landed there.

But, more than any one place in the city, I think it has the title of “most networky” place in Manhattan.

The building handles routing for AT&T’s long-distance phone network, and manages a lot of other communications data. A power failure in the building in 1991 interrupted nearly 10 million phone calls and pretty much all air traffic control at 400 of America’s airports. The NSA allegedly (thanks Snowden) monitors the communications of the UN, the World Bank, and forty or fifty countries from this building. It’s amazing to me, considering the building’s architecture, how self-effacing it is about it’s purpose: What is physically the most closed-off building in the city is in fact the most networked.

3.) Rebecca Minkoff Dressing-Room “Smart Mirrors”

Think about the experience of trying clothes on in a dressing room at a store (us gals may find this more of a problem then men, judging by the studies on gender and fashion retail but w/e). You’re trying on what looks like a perfect pair of pants…but they’re too big. In a normal shopping experience, you’d have to take those off, put your clothes back on, and scramble around the store looking for a sales associate to help you find a different size.

Not here. Rebecca Minkoff’s stores are outfitted with smart touchscreen mirrors in their dressing rooms.

Need another size? Order it via the screen, and they’ll appear outside your fitting-room door in a few minutes. Want accessory recommendations for the outfits you have with you? The system can do that too. When it’s time to check out, you can use the interface too, thanks to RFID chips in the clothes.

The numbers show this is working economically: customers who use the experience purchase 30-40% more than the average customer. And it’s hard to understate another point about this: they beat Amazon to self-checkout. In the fashion industry, which is about as legacy and non-innovative on the whole as airlines are (when it comes to customer-centric approaches, at least).

Metrocard: The MTA now offers MetroCards that are linked to your bank account. They do not need to be refilled. In order to do this, the scanners would have to be connected to the internet

Vending Machine: Vending machines and ATM machines use the internet to process payments from debit and credit cards.

LinkNYC station: This is a LinkNYC station. It provides an interactive map (like Google Maps), free Wi-Fi, and device charging, among other things. It also provides trivia, such as famous events that have happened on this date. To do all these things, this LinkNYC definitely uses the Internet.

 

When I tried to find Internet infrastructure on the street, I looked for something that connected to the internet. The first thing I noticed is a machine to call the police and fire. It has many paints and ads on it. The second is the car parking payment machine. The third is the box on the traffic light. I think it is to control the traffic light.

When I was asked to wander around to look for internet infrastructure, one of the first things I came across was the Metro card refill station, where I had to refill my metro card with my credit card. In these stations that are located in almost every subway station across the city, uses the EMV chip of the credit card to make transactions. Therefore, the machine needs to remain online to send a cryptogram to the card provider, who authorizes and authenticates the card or denies the transaction according to the bank account information of the user.

One other pretty large thing I noticed was the billboard that is located (for aesthetic purposes) at Times Square (but in reality, everywhere). These large LEDs are connected and wired to the internet. Even if they could not be hacked, their images are programmed online and then set. The picture below is one of the billboards I saw in Times Square.

Another device that can be connected to the internet is the thermostat. Below is a picture of our dorm thermostat. Some smart thermostats can be controlled with apps and are therefore connected to the internet as a device. Our model is, sadly, not a smart thermostat, but there were talks amongst the RAs and building administrators to connect it to our phones since our current thermostat keeps on malfunctioning.

The first picture I found in the NYU Bobst Library. It was planted on the ceiling and there were multiple of them throughout the entire library. I am pretty sure that they are WiFi amplifiers of some sorts. They are placed everywhere so that there will be WiFi available throughout the entire library and that the strength of the WiFi remains consistent throughout.

I found this outside one of the school buildings. I am unsure as to what this object does but I am certain it has something to do with the electricity in the vicinity. I was thinking it could be a circuit breaker in regards to the electricity in the public as well. There was a screen tightly locked onto the left side so that no one would be able to tamper with the box.

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I found this in a public park where there were many lights and other electrical objects. I couldn’t locate the object it was powering due to the fact that there were many other wires around. Due to the very obvious “On/Off” switch, I could only imagine that it was powering an electrical device that was in the park. It was connected to the outlet as well so that only further proves my hypothesis.