This post is about my open source remote bandwidth usage stats logger project.

I’ve been wanting to log the internet bandwidth usage at my home for quite some time since I don’t really find the stats put out by my ISP to be completely accurate. But I have multiple devices at home that access the internet so it is not feasible to install a bandwidth monitor individually on all these devices as I’d still need to add up all logs and many of such devices don’t even have a way to install a monitoring software installed (e.g. my PS3, my TV, my media players, etc). So, I thought of monitoring the usage at my router. It is a smart one (Asus wl-500w) and I can install various linux software on it but then it requires a hard disk to run most of them which I don’t turn on all the time. Moreover, even if I could run the software directly from router flash, it doesn’t have enough space to store the logs (neither is it a good idea to keep writing to the flash often).

Hence I came up with the idea of a light weight remote bandwidth usage logger where in the router has to do the bare minimum possible (here, it just has to make a GET call to a webpage with current status of received and transmitted bytes, accomplished by a single line of wget command). The system is completely open source and is intelligent enough to keep track of things even if router reboots or the bytes count wraps around the 4 GB limit (because of 32 bit data structures used). The logging and parsing is all done on server side and provides various useful things.

Few of the features of the system:

• Very lightweight in CPU/RAM resource usage on host as well as server
• Outputs easy to browse html and graphs
• User defined directory structure to decide the granularity that is wanted
• yearly, monthly, daily stats and graphs
• Provides quick access to extra stats like last time the host connected, last known host IP etc
• Provides total download/upload numbers as well as detailed
• Estimates uptime of remote host
• Can use a DNS name or IP to avoid (or call out) spurious amounts of usage logged by a spurious IP

Remote Bandwidth Stats Yearly Stats

Remote Bandwidth Stats Monthly Stats

Remote Bandwidth Stats Daily Stats

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Remote Bandwidth Stats, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

My project Kinect on PS3 got featured in this month’s Chip magazine . They have a special gaming edition of Chip Insider which featured the project along with a 2 page interview of mine. If you buy chip, do look out for it on pages 46 and 47. I also have a scanned image of the pages below.

Interview Page 1

Interview Page 1

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Featured in Chip India August 2011 Edition, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

This post describes my first attempt at making Kinect work with a PS3. Microsoft’s new XBOX 360 accessory, kinect has made a powerful entry into the market, becoming the fastest selling gadget of all time. Looks like their “You are the controller” tagline is working. Of course, Sony’s “similar” accessory Move is selling well too but is far behind kinect adoption probably because nothing beats the lure of making something work with just “The Force” .

Now, of course, kinect doesn’t work with PS3 obviously but then if we can’t break the rules, we can at least bend them a little towards our way. I’ve  created a mashup that allows you to use kinect as an input controller for the PS3.

Please note that this is pre-alpha quality software currently. I haven’t updated to a lot of recent code for the below libraries and also haven’t done most of the performance/feature improvements yet. The axis performance specially needs lot of tweaking and it works well only while sitting. Putting this out purely as a proof of concept. For the things that I plan to add soon, please see the Todo section below. Follow me at @shantanugoel for latest updates.

VIDEO IN ACTION

The program makes use of several other programs in order to provide this functionality. To compile/use it, you also need the following programs:

1. OpenNI Libraries – To get data from kinect

2. NITE Libraries (Choose “Middleware” on the page) – Builds on top of OpenNI to provide gesture detection etc

3. PrimeSense Libraries for kinect – Kinect drivers to get raw data

4. DIYPS3Controller – The main component for PS3 connection and also known as sixaxis emulator. This emulates a DS3 on the PC and send the inputs to PS3 through bluetooth.

Installation/Compilation/Usage

1. Make sure that the above 4 things are installed on your machine and working fine.

2. Download the source of this project to the NITE Samples directory. You can even place it anywhere else but you would need to tweak the makefile to account for the changed paths.

3. Make any changes to the source that you need.

4. Change the included ps3 controller config xml file and place it in one of the locations where diyps3controller can find it.

5. Run make -f kinect-ps3.mak

6. The executable will be available in Samples/Bin directory of NITE.

7. Run kinect-ps3 (without any arguments)

8. Run emuclient (from ps3 controller software) and choose the new xml config file

9. “Become the controller”
Default Config:

Menu Profile – This is the default profile that kinect-ps3 starts with and allows to operate the PS3 menus. Moving hand in any direction will move the ps3 menus as if you were using the DPAD with those directions keys pressed. If you run out of the kinect’s watched space, then just do a backward push with your hand, bring your hand to center and then again do the backward push and continue scrolling. This is like you lift your finger up and then start dragging from edges of a laptop’s touchpad.For selecting any item, make two successive push movements with your hand without changing any x-y direction.
Game Profile – This profile can be switched to by doing 3 successive backward movements of the hand while in Menu profile. Right now I’ve implemented only directional controls in game profile because I’m still struggling with multiple hands detections and skeletal tracking. A full profile will be activated soon enough. Currently, the your hand’s x/y movements and directly translated to right stick x/y movements (e.g. this is looking in different directions in various FPS games). Moving the hand towards or away from kinect (z-axis) translate to left stick y movements (e.g. this is moving fowards or backwards in most FPS games).
Issues/Queries/Suggestions

Please direct them to me by commenting here or emailing me at shantanu AT shantanugoel DOT com

Coming Soon/ToDo

-Full Menu and Game profiles

- Skeletal tracking for better game profiles

- Switching back to menu profiles from game profiles

- Easier way to specify user custom profiles instead of changing code for the same

- Performance improvement for game profiles

Full source code of the project has been released at https://github.com/shantanugoel/Kinect-PS3 under GNU GPL v2.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Making Kinect Work With PS3, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I need a bit of your help in filling out a short survey that I need for a small project of mine that I’m doing with a friend. It will take maximum of only 2-3 minutes of your time. Please fill it out below. If you are reading this in an RSS reader and not able to see the form, please click here to go to the original post to see and fill the form. If you are facing any problems with the survey or have any queries/suggestions etc, please use this contact form to send them to us.

Much Thanks!!

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled A short Tablet/Smartphone survey for a project, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I pushed out a couple of updates to my android app Wi-Fi Keep alive a few weeks ago (mainly related to fixing the resolution and colors of the widget icons) taking the latest version to 1.4.4. This is just to let you know that it will take a while (a few weeks) more to get the pending updates and requests in to the program. I have been pretty ill for the last few weeks and have only just got back up out of the bed and now my development machine has also gone for a toss. I’ve bought a new machine a couple of days ago but still have to recover my data from old machine and set it up on the new one along with linux and my standard development environment. Please do continue to report bugs and ask for requests though and I’ll make sure to keep track of them. Meanwhile, you can find more details about the app and updates at this page: Wi-Fi Keep Alive

PS: A tiny thing for celebration is that the app crossed 10,000 downloads mark recently within 2 months of its first appearance on the market and right now stands arounds 12k mark. Let’s see when I get to 50k

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Android App: Wi-Fi Keep Alive updates, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Update: Made a minor update for a small bug that can make wi-fi keep reconnecting in quick succession.

Pushed out a new update to my Android App Wi-Fi Keep Alive today. This update brings in another work around for the issue where the wi-fi is alive on the phone and it is also connected to the network but is somehow unable to send/receive any packets to the network. The new work around will automatically re-associate your phone with the wi-fi router if it detects such a situation. This seems to make it work properly again for sometime. When it fails again, the workaround kicks in automatically again. This is not an ideal “fix” as such because streaming apps like Pandora radio etc might have a hiccup because of this but it is unavoidable as of now and atleast the notifications for mails and other things etc will work fine because this state stops even the mobile data network from taking over since the phone perceives that wi-fi is connected but is not working actually.

The other things include support for small screen devices like Xperia X10 mini, some optimizations for size and speed, some icon sizes and UI tweaks for compatibility with different screen sizes and android versions. Please try it out from the market as usual and let me know how it goes. You can find the details and QR code for downloading etc here: Wi-Fi Keep Alive

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Android App Wi-Fi Keep Alive updated to 1.4.1, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

Just finished uploading the new version 1.2.0 of my android app Wi-Fi Keep Alive to the Android market. This version has a lot of optimizations and also a few workarounds to overcome the issues few guys were facing with Android’s in-built handling of wi-fi sleep policies. Please check out the Wi-Fi Keep Alive Home Page for more details and download links etc.

Changes done in this version:

* Added workarounds to take care of sleep policies not working on some phones

* Optimized the code a bit for faster operations

* Added Configuration screens to widgets (pops up whenever widget is added)

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Android App: Wi-Fi Keep Alive Updated to 1.2.0, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I just wrote my second Android App. This again was to scratch an itch of mine but it seems to have become a bit popular already (My first app “Quick Sync Settings” did around 400 downloads in 20 days but this one has already surpassed that in less than one day). This app basically allows you to change the wi-fi sleep policy on android so that you can keep your wi-fi connected even if the phone goes to sleep (i.e. screen turns off). What’s more is that I’ve added a widget to it so you don’t even have to go into the app. Just tap on the widget to cycle through the settings. Please try it out here: Android Wi-Fi Keep Alive and let me know if you like it

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Android App: Wi-Fi Keep Alive, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

I wrote this script a few days ago to plot real-time / streaming data with gnuplot. The motivation was that I needed to test a piece of code for a touchscreen driver that I had written at work. The issue was that the UI wasn’t quite ready yet, so I wanted to test just the driver to be working fine. Now, the very first thought for the software to use that came to me was “gnuplot” but I found that it can’t really do this in an easy way. A colleague suggested me to use “replot” command with gnuplot. I whipped out my perl hat and a few hours later, voila!! my very own real time data plotter was ready. Now, I can stream data from any program to this script or provide the data on STDIN and can see the data being plotted continuously. BTW, it was awesome to see all the shapes that I drew on my target board’s  LCD touchscreen to come alive on my PC monitor almost instantaneously.

I call it “rtgnuplotter”. A weird name I know , but I just wanted to refer to it as a real time data plotter based on gnuplot. Please check it out at Home Page of RTGNUPlotter.

I’d love to hear from you if you found it useful. Please send in your bug reports and feature requests and I’d be glad if you could spread a word about it amongst your data-loving friends

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Real Time Data Plotting with GNUPlot, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings

FireFly is a nice DAAP based media server that allows you to listen to your music collection anywhere using any DAAP based client like iTunes, with other players (like Winamp, Rhythmbox, VLC, etc) using plugins, or it even has its own dedicated php/flash/java based clients that can be fired up on any platform any computer giving you instant nirvana.

Many people, like me, use it on their Routers or NAS boxes to access their music anywhere without having to keep their home PC running or lugging around external drives. However, development on this gem stopped some time ago. The last stable build released (2.4.2) was good but it doesn’t have a lot of features provided by the nightly builds in svn (subversion). And the last nightly build released (svn-1696) had a lot of broken things. It was rebuilding the database everytime, crashed around quite a bit, had a lot of security holes. So, I decided to get the latest version (trunk) of the FireFly code, as it had a lot of fixes for above issues, put in whatever was missing, and try to build it for my use.

After a day’s worth of efforts, here it is. This latest build is the most rich in features as compared to the stable one, and is just as stable as the 2.4.2 release if not better, and also fixes all the issues shown by the svn-1696 build. The downloadable source and complete install package are attached with this post. But I’m also listing down the steps that I took to achieve this so that if anyone wants to recompile it with their own options (e.g. I haven’t included ogg/flac support in my build), they are able to do so. You can find the steps below. Please let me know if you have any queries. Also, if you want to submit any patches, I’ll be happy to incorporate them and recompile. I’m also trying to get this source and package into the unslung/optware repositories for wider distribution.

Note: Although I’ve compiled this for Asus WL-500W, it should work for most devices with a mipsel architecture (which includes all the Asus routers in this family). Also, the compilation process should work for most other architectures barring one or two steps. I’d be happy to help if you want to do so and face any issues.

Changes and Build Steps:

• ipkg install optware-devel
• ipkg install buildroot
• Edit /opt/share/aclocal/audiofile.m4 and change AC_DEFUN(AM_PATH_AUDIOFILE, to AC_DEFUN([AM_PATH_AUDIOFILE],
• ipkg install gettext (for some missing m4 macros, libr_rpath etc)
• Comment out AC_USE_SYSTEM_EXTENSIONS in configure.in (using dnl)
• aclocal -I <path of mt-daapd’s local m4 dir>
• run “autoheader” to generate config.h.in
• touch config.rpath (somehow this file is not provided with gettext for us)
• change configure.in line 95, remove the ; at the end
• remove -g flag and add -O2 in configure.in for optimization purpose
• run “automake –add-missing”
• run “autoconf” – to generate configure
• ipkg install grep (for egrep)
• change /bin/sh to /opt/bin/bash in configure and install-sh
• run “./configure –enable-sqlite3 –prefix=/opt CPFLAGS=”-D_LIBC” ” (You can also use –enable-oggvorbis and/or –enableflac)
• After this step, I had to make numerous changes to the source code to put in the missing functionality for database handling, removing some compilation errors, etc. You can diff the svn 1715 code with mine to see the changes.
• run “make”
• run “make install”

And you are done. The modified source and compiled bianries can be downloaded from below.

DOWNLOAD: Updated MT-DAAPD for Asus WL-500W router

Let me know if you have any queries or face any issues.

© Shantanu Goel | This article, titled Compiling Latest FireFly (mt-daapd) for ASUS WL-500W, was originally published on Shantanu's Technophilic Musings