Author: Alex

Here’s my final project. I hooked up the adafruit neopixel lights to my share music graphics app that’s on the App Store. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/share-music-graphics/id1446148157?mt=8   

The app would ping the Apple Music API for their colors that they associate most with the album cover, and then sets the background color of the app. As soon as the background color is set, then the app sends a post request to Adafruit Data Broker service creating a string of the background color’s RGB and then the Arduino would take that string and then parse it, turn it into and integer and then set the RGB values accordingly. It was a little tricky getting the Arduino with the string to do these which is why I had to add X’s into the string when a value was missing because of how strings are char [] arrays on the Arduino board. 

Here’s the link to the code that I wrote: https://gist.github.com/Alexs2424/f9ac29a5af45a0bb8a99bea4a9c9179b 

Here’s the swift version: https://gist.github.com/Alexs2424/d583552f8664c0d82d6932fe1df918e0

Then if you hit the change color button on the app like it is on the ui, whatever the background color is, it changes to the light strip. I really liked this because this was really interesting to do more of an installation piece, where the Arduino does something in real time. I loved figuring it out and seeing how fast the data broker can be sometimes, it’s super fast for all the multitude of services, requests, that the device goes through, it’s pretty mind-boggling that everything can work that fast. 

It didn’t work in class because two of the wires were confused and switched around, which was completely my fault. And to learn to have the demo hooked up before you go on stage, and also when you get it to work to take. Video of it. 

Here’s the link to a video of all of it going on, in the app and the lights changing in real-time.

https://youtu.be/9jGVdbKXK_o 

For my final project I thought it would be interesting to represent the music data that is dynamically posted through my app in something this WWDC app wall. The app wall was a live representation of the apps that were currently being downloaded in the world on the App Store, and would appear and flow down into this piece that you could look at.

The idea around this is that you could see in real time the apps and data that people were posting into an object. They were sorted by color and you could really understand certain trends that were happening through certain periods of the day.

My idea would be to take the data I get from music because I have the color, time of day the piece of music, and details about the piece of music was posted and where, it’d be interesting to build an installation piece that takes inspiration from the app wall. I’d want people to see and understand what music people currently are listening to. It’d take some tweaking and not be on this sort of scale but I think some way of representing data to people could be intriguing and show trends in the same way. You can learn and infer a lot of points about data when you see it in this format. This is a screenshot of our dashboard with some of the real time statistics that we have now and might be incorporated in some form of the final project.

I thought it’d be neat if on my desk I’d have my arduino light up an LED every time we get a new subscriber on our startup website for our newsletter. I thought it’d be really cool to light up for a couple of seconds every time this happens. I used the mailchimp IFTTT widget and synced it up to main field on our website. There’s only a slight delay when the widget runs because the update can take up to an hour. Sign up on our website at http://noisehub.co.

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. 

From last week I learned that I needed to use a CDN in order to get the webpage to load properly on my computer’s browser, so I started with getting that to work. I was surprised to learn that apple already has a CDN for Apple Music so I started implementing that into my website. https://js-cdn.music.apple.com/musickit/v1/musickit.js You can use the JS api through this version and made things a lot easier because I could then reference those from declarative mark up elements where all the hard work was already completed for us. The markup elements do some of the tricky parts especially with interacting with the microcontroller in a webpage setting because it already starts to look like some sort of player but more barebones. This demo player was good but it had more information than was really needed and could’ve been clearer to the user on what it should be.

From here I refined it from just picking a random apple playlist to one of mine and getting it to correctly work. I found the playlist identifiers and chose a specific one to try out with this player. I styled it and added other pieces, and just as importantly removed things that weren’t as important to 1. keep it a lightweight player, and 2. not distract you from the point in the first place which is, it’s suppose to be in the background.

This is what it turned out to be. I had issues getting the authorization through apple’s services to work on the microcontroller because if I set the controller to refresh, it would immediately unauthorize, drop the queue of the songs and start again. Even if you started playing after awhile. So then I started looking into keep-alive connections because the microcontroller was purposely dropping a connection after 5 seconds even after I didn’t tell the client to close. It became harder and harder to get the microcontroller to register the button clicks to skip because it would do it only after the connection was dropped. I looked into other web libraries for the esp8266 on github but after trying it out and looking with the other issues people had, the controller always overrode and closed the connection after a couple of seconds. I really want to be able to build this the proper way and get it working but in order to do so I have to do it somewhere else. However I was very proud that I was able to get a player to properly play my personal playlist from apple music and host it on the microcontroller.

So, there are two things about my midterm project. First the product that I ended up with isn’t as great and wasn’t what I pictured to be making. It was a result of the web architecture that I couldn’t do what I was trying to do, in the ways that I tried and wanted.

I wanted to make a skip & never play button for Apple Music. When playing music from my phone, I’d press the button, it’d skip what’s playing and then flag it so it wouldn’t play in my background music playlist. I’ve already worked with the apple music api so that wasn’t the main trouble. How the board serves up the websites, can’t serve up all the JS needed (at least not properly enough to run it on my machine) as it was a lot. Because the JS route didn’t work, I have a database for another app that’s setup with Parse Platform’s APIs. They had an Arduino SDK and I hooked up to send a request to the server and in the iOS app whenever there was a new object created, I was going to have it skip and flag the song. Sadly I couldn’t complete this because the Parse Arduino SDK doesn’t support the ESP8266 architecture out of the box, I was trying to modify but couldn’t really get anywhere because I need a more developed understanding of web requests and what goes into them.  

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/musickitjs 

https://github.com/parse-community/parse-embedded-sdks 

https://github.com/parse-community/parse-embedded-sdks/issues/5 

https://github.com/jcard0na/parse-sdk-for-esp8266 

What I ended up making was a “doorbell” that’s connected and tells you when someone’s at the door and presses the button. I wanted it to work and got the JS to ring but didn’t know how/where to host the mp3 file so that the JS audio player could actually play the sound when someone played the song. 

Web Setup with Arduino is not my strong suit in programming because the requests don’t follow the same pattern of events that I’m used to, and if you know a bit more and are able to take a look at the web player and finding another way to host the file with a lot of JS I’d really appreciate it and could get it to work. 

If this continues as a doorbell, I want to add other peripherals, possibly a camera, but other features such as an audible trigger so that you have that kind of feedback along with a nicer clearer way with the electronics hidden to interface with the button. A picture would be sent of the person so that you could see who’s at the door, to add more context if it’s just someone dropping off a package or actually there to visit you.