The Bicycle Barometer

http://blog.oftcc.net/post/39219681688/the-bicycle-barometer-takes-data-about-the

by gmac • 13 years ago

235 40 13 years ago

blog.oftcc.net

Sumaso• 13 years ago

Awesome idea to aggregate information. I wonder how many daily activities could be automated in a similar fashion?

Perhaps a calorie counter suggesting meals for dinner (keeping a balanced diet and all that jazz)? Outfit suggestions based upon the weather?

ghc4• 13 years ago

I often feel like this is where web analytics needs to go. Ultimately, no matter how many pretty charts your product displays and fancy map reduce jobs transform the data into "intelligence", unless someone can immediately take action based on what decision the analytics tells them they need to make, it's not really "intelligence" in the thinking sense, but "intelligence" in the military sense.

In my day job, I develop software to fit a big data + intelligence niche market. No matter how many pretty charts I've been forced to make (to better sell the software to CEOs), the people who make the decisions based on the data we provide don't care about visualizations AT ALL. They want our software to tell them what to do. Period. And if the software tells them to make a bad decision that costs them money it's our fault (unless they can't execute the decision due to safety laws, which happens), no matter how many charts they could have double checked to see if the decision was sane.

Dashboards and charts are all well and good, but ultimately a simple display that unambiguously tells you what to do (like the bicycle barometer) is much more powerful.

deafbybeheading2• 13 years ago

Then you can skip the middleman and just automate the taking-action part.

ghc4• 13 years ago

That would be ideal, but often decision making follows a pattern similar to computational complexity theory. Even if the computer tells you what action you need to take, actually executing can be monumentally more complex for a computer. Automating lights is easy: just flip a switch. But how would you automate the bicycle barometer action? The computer can't put you on a bike! The field of "big data" is filled with applications where execution of decisions is monumentally more complex than decision making. But even if we can't automate decisions, telling people what to do is still way better than giving them a bunch of real time plots and leaving it up to them to use that data to make good decisions.

lloeki• 13 years ago

Every odd day I redesign my car's "automatic" aircon logic (i.e feedback loop on a cabin temp sensor, and a user set reference temperature) to behave in some smarter manner, based on the following premises:

- if it's 35°C outside, I sure as hell don't want a/c to loop on 20°C

- if it's -15°C outside, I sure as hell don't want a/c to loop on 20°C

So basically what I want is:

- 16°C minimum (below produces too much condensation on the windshield, and is not comfortable on long-ish commutes ) - from 16°C at -10°C to 20°C at 20°C, maybe linear, maybe log, I don't know.

- and cap at 20°C max inside...

- ...but have a maximum negative delta of -5°C with the outside temperature (i.e 29°C outside means 24°C inside)

- yet with a true absolute maximum of 28°C inside

It's really not that hard and I could probably come up with a hack (has anyone plugged an Arduino into a CAN bus?) reading the inside and outside sensors, and controlling the temperature knob while reading its current setting from what the display shows, but damn, where is my car's SDK! Oh, the first world problems I have.

unwind• 13 years ago

Here's SparkFun's CAN bus shield: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10039.

It's not cheap, but it's from SparkFun so it's at least pretty in red. :) And, to be fair, it has a few nice features besides the CAN interface itself (SD card holder, LCD interface, on-board joystick).

The product comments mention this library for the software side: http://code.google.com/p/canduino/.

swanson• 13 years ago

I love, love, love this.

I've been quite interested in figuring out how to turn multiple/complex input into a single, actionable value (it is pretty damn hard!) - and this project is a great example.

loceng• 13 years ago

Agree, this is great. This is the kind of daily-use information you want access to without having to turn on a computer.

taeric2• 13 years ago

Oddly, I feel this needs some basic machine learning thrown in. If every day you rated how good commute (and what type) was for you, it could start making the prediction based on your preferences. Possibly even with more information such as when you are looking. (e.g. Some people are ok with colder weather, or if you are running late, the option that is consistently faster will be the better choice.)

rflrob• 13 years ago

The problem there is that you don't know how bad the other option would have been.

azundo• 13 years ago

The tube experience is probably fairly consistent, just that it costs more (except in the cases of delays and closures) so rating the bicycle trip is really the most important thing here. Perhaps "flip a coin" with probabilities proportional to the needle's position when it's on the side of the tube and take the bicycle a bit more often to see how terrible it actually is.

taeric2• 13 years ago

I suppose. I'd be fine with it just biasing towards things I enjoyed. Doesn't matter if I would have enjoyed something else more. (Clearly it could, but I'm thinking this is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.)

samt• 13 years ago

Usually you would throw in some radomization, ie, 5% of the time the barometer would tell you the opposite of what it really thinks you should do.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

As much as I tend to dislike social, this is a case where a distributed barometer app would be useful. Read indicators, make recommendation, track time-to-work, evaluate results.

This also calls for some value-assignment to transport methods. E.g.: cycling is preferable to tube, but more than light rain benefits tube, but more than an X minute / X% delay swings benefit to cycling. The real variable here is how long a commute takes -- so, is/was there a tangle in the tube when that was the recommendation.

Closing the loop on predictions/recommendations is a common problem in any monitoring/alerting application. For all the ballyhoo on the online dating problem, I'd warrant that getting closure on the dating experience is where most sites fall flat.

URSpider94• 13 years ago

Ambient Devices, an MIT Media Lab start-up, had a beautiful product concept built around analogue gauges like this, with replaceable backplanes to show different information. Their original business model was all around representing complex information in an unobtrusive way -- an umbrella with a pommel that flashes if its going to rain today, so you notice it on the way out of the house. Sadly, they pivoted into making ugly weather boards for Brookstone ...

telecuda• 13 years ago

I have their Ambient Orb (http://bit.ly/XFemSb) on my desk. It starts at red in the morning then fades to yellow to green as we get more registrations throughout the day.

Also, pre-Arduino we used a WebSwitch $199 (http://www.controlbyweb.com/webswitch/) to turn on/off a police siren when a certain goal was reached.

TylerE• 13 years ago

Screw replaceable, just throw an e-ink screen in there. Seems like an ideal application for e-ink - super-long "refresh" interval, no need for color, and ambient light.

Swizec3• 13 years ago

I did something similar for my money a while ago. Takes all the data and simply tells me "You will have X amount of money in 2 weeks."

Can't live without it anymore. Just wish there was a practical way to give something like this to everyone.

SoftwareMaven• 13 years ago

Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

grimgrin• 13 years ago

Seems to me that you'd have to follow a budget for this to even be possible, and if you're following a budget you could have a spreadsheet give you the same kind of results.

I'm probably overlooking something, though.

crntaylor• 13 years ago

Sounds interesting. Can you give any more detail? What data sources are you using? I know that trying to get data from my bank is like getting blood from a stone!

Swizec3• 13 years ago

I'm using two data sources. Toshl for knowing how much I'm spending (and for certain types of income), Toggl for tracking my freelancing with an attached hourly rate.

The fact that I can see my income as a daily thing and not something that happens every X weeks is really what makes this thing useful and cool because it can essentially turn each day of the month into a simple number saying whether it's a positive or negative day (and by how much).

Then it's just some playing around with rolling averages and some other stuff to get a prediction that is surprisingly good.

icebraining• 13 years ago

Is it difficult to scrape? I log my balance daily with a simple Python script that logs in and scrapes the value.

mikey_p• 13 years ago

Check out https://www.wisecashhq.com. It's basically a burn down for personal finance, and it answers the question of "How much money will I have in two weeks?"

stevekemp• 13 years ago

Sounds like my little running-total calculator:

   http://static.steve.org.uk/expenses/

jonknee• 13 years ago

I want one of these sort of things for my bathroom mirror. I stayed in a hotel once which was close, it had a small LCD screen behind the glass that showed the current forecast (this was the elevator lobby mirror though, not in every room). Very handy.

josscrowcroft• 13 years ago

I want one of these telling me when to check my email, with a heavy bias for checking as rarely as possible...

vincefutr23• 13 years ago

thought you were talking about the tubes in the tires

maxerickson• 13 years ago

I wonder how an actual barometer does in comparison.

richardjpope• 13 years ago

I've put the (very quick and hacky) code up here: https://github.com/memespring/bicycle-barometer

The Bicycle Barometer

Related Stories