GitHub Repository
Click here to view my GitHub Repository for this course.
Click here to view the JJM&S Project Site.
Weekly Reports
02/01/2021
Installed WSL2 along with Ubuntu on windows 10 Laptop. Was able to install and boot into Raspberry Pi OS over the weekend.
02/08/2021
Completed lab 1. Settings and configurations are as described in the lab. The strartup_mailer.py script is working properly. I receive an email with my personalized message on boot. SSH and VNC viewer are working properly.
I set up a public/private RSA key pair to avoid the need to enter a password when I SSH into the PI from my laptop. To do this, I ran ssh-keygen on my Windows laptop. I then copied the contents of the file id_rsa.pub into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the PI.
I successfully installed Docker, and the Thonny IDE came preinstalled with Python.
02/22/2021
I started lab 2. I was able to get Minicom installed and running. However, I do not have jumper wires, breadboard, or the other components utilized in the lab. Consequently, I was unable to complete parts B through G. A screenshot of Minicom running on the pi is on the GitHub repo in the folder for lab 2. I think, in the future, it would make sense to recommend a specific kit containing all of the wires, LEDs, resistors, etc. that are used in these labs for the students to purchase. Alternatively, some bash scripting assignments would be an interesting way to get students to engage more with the Raspberry Pi.
Currently, my team and I are working on our project proposal and preparing another Google site which we will all have edit access to.
03/07/2021
I finished all parts of lab 3 besides B and D which required additional components. However I did send and receive the test email from part B. All of the python scripts were running correctly. I was able to run the socket server and client scripts properly all on the Pi. Remote GPIO was also working correctly. When benchmarking the python environments, standard python turned out to be the fastest, followed closely by python3 which is less 'lightweight' of an environment. PyPy turned out to be the slowest. Lastly, I worked through the Doxygen mini-tutorial successfully.
For the group project, we have started a group site available here. Our plan is to construct a 'magic mirror', which is essentially a monitor with a mirror on top of it that allows light to pass through from the display. The Magic Mirror API is open source and allows developers to build their own modules. Our goal is to build a personalized feed for the user by integrating their favorite media platforms.
03/08/2021
I completed lab 4 in its entirety excluding the Django projects that require sensors. The Stevens weather was working properly except for the live map. I generated and used a Google API key but for some unknown reason this didn't fix the map issue. Other than that, the site was working and I could access it from another computer on my network. The same goes for the myraspi Django REST site. I also got the Alexa Skill Kit to work properly. The Apache server was also running properly. I did run into some issues while generating the Wordpress configuration and running the installation, but I think it was working properly in the end. Screenshots as well as project files (excluding ones with any sensitive information of mine) are available in the GitHub repo.
03/15/2021
I just finished all of lab 5. I got the crossbar.io site up and running fine. Additionally the publish and subscript clients were working fine on the Pi. Eclipse Mosquitto and Eclipse Paho were also working properly. The messages were sent successfully and showed in the terminal, as shown in the screenshots. My team and I will be updating our group site soon with new information.
03/22/2021
The lab 6 directory contains just screenshots. All parts of the lab were completed successfully. Node-RED was working and I could access the 'Hello World' page from another laptop on my network. Pystache was also working, and it correctly updated every time I refreshed the page. I set up a Particle Cloud Account and was able to communicate between the mobile app and the pi.
03/29/2021
I finished lab 7. Thingspeak was working fine. I choose not to save the API key on disk for future use because I didn't want it in the GitHub repo anyway. For the Google Cloud Platform components, everything was working. The Google Sheets document was being updated. One thing I noticed is that my JSON API key didn't begin with 'rpidata-", but rather 'main-' which seemed strange considering I named the project rpidata. Nonetheless, the API key worked properly.
04/07/2021
Part A of lab 8 went smoothly. The figures took a while to appear sometimes, since they were being displayed through SSH and Xming. I've used matplotlib in the past so much of the package's functionality was familiar to me. For part B, I realized that I needed more data from last weeks lab. So I reran the scripts from the end of lab 7 for about 2.5 hours before terminating them. This provided me with more than enough data for the figures in lab 8 part B. As per usual, screenshots are in the GitHub repo.
04/14/2021
This week I completed lab 9. I successfully generated the intrusion detection uml file using pyang and I generated the figure using PlantUML. I was able to display the figure using both gimp and pinta. For part B, I believe everything worked properly. However, I did get a lot of warning messages in the console which said 'Depreciated in NumPy 1.20'. Perhaps I installed too new of a version of one of the components.
04/19/2021
This week I completed the final lab, lab 10. The hashing portion was pretty intuitive. Next, it was really cool to be able to build my own blockchain. Additionally, everything went smoothly with the seconds half of the lab. I made the required edits in the .js files and was able to run the publish and receive scripts in coordination with each other. Unfortunately, I don't have a breadboard so I couldn't integrate any sensor data.
5/06/2021
Completed the last of the group exercises for the proposal. The JJM&S Smart Mirror site is available here.