EjectABed Version 2 – Now Using the Raspberry Pi (Part 1)
September 8, 2015 1 Comment
I recently entered a hackster.io competition that centered around using Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi. I entered the ejectabed and it was accepted to the semi-final round. My thought was to take the existing ejectabed controller from a Netduino and move it to a Raspberry Pi. While doing that, I could open the ejectabed from my local area network to the internet so anyone could eject Sloan.
My 1st step was hook my Raspberry Pi up to my home network and deploy from Visual Studio to it. Turns out, it was pretty straightforward.
I took a old Asus Portable Wireless Router and plugged it into my home workstation. I then configured the router to act as an Access Point so that it would pass though all traffic from the router to which my developer workstation is attached. I then attached the router to the PI and powered it though the PI’s USB port. I then plugged the PI’s HDMI out to a spare monitor of mine.
With all of the hardware plugged in, I headed over to Windows On Devices and followed the instructions on how to set up a Raspberry PI. After installing the correct software on my developer workstation, flashing the SD card with win10, plugging the SD card into the PI, turning the PI on, and then remoting into the PI via powershell, I could see the PI on my local workstation via the Windows IoT Core Watcher and the PI showing its friendly welcome screen via HDMI.
I then headed over to Visual Studio and copy/pasted the equisite “Hello IoT World” Blinky project to the Pi and watched the light go on and off.
With that out of the way, I decided to look at controlling the light via Twitter and Azure. The thought was to have the PI monitor a message queue on Azure and whenever there was a message, blink on or off (simulating the ejectabed being activated). To that end, I went into Azure and created a basic storage account. One of the nice things about Azure is that you get a queue out of the box when you create a storage account:
One of the not so nice things about Azure is that there is no way to control said Queue via their UI. You have to create, push, and pull from the queue in code. I went back to visual studio and added in the Azure Storage Nuget package
I then created a method to monitor the queue
1 internal async Task<Boolean> IsMessageOnQueue() 2 { 3 var storageConnectionString = "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=ejectabed;AccountKey=xxx"; 4 var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(storageConnectionString); 5 var client = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient(); 6 var queue = client.GetQueueReference("sloan"); 7 var queueExists = await queue.ExistsAsync(); 8 if (!queueExists) 9 { 10 GpioStatus.Text = "Queue does not exist or is unreachable."; 11 return false; 12 } 13 var message = await queue.GetMessageAsync(); 14 if (message != null) 15 { 16 await queue.DeleteMessageAsync(message); 17 return true; 18 } 19 GpioStatus.Text = "No message for the EjectABed."; 20 return false; 21 } 22
Then if there is a message, the PI would run the ejection sequence (in this case blink the light)
1 internal void RunEjectionSequence() 2 { 3 bedCommand.Eject(); 4 bedTimer = new DispatcherTimer(); 5 bedTimer.Interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(ejectionLength); 6 bedTimer.Tick += LightTimer_Tick; 7 bedTimer.Start(); 8 }
I deployed the code to the PI without a problem. I then created a Basic console application to push messages to the queue that the PI could drain
1 class Program 2 { 3 static String storageConnectionString = "DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=ejectabed;AccountKey=xxx"; 4 5 static void Main(string[] args) 6 { 7 Console.WriteLine("Start"); 8 Console.WriteLine("Press The 'E' Key To Eject. Press 'Q' to quit..."); 9 10 var keyInfo = ConsoleKey.S; 11 do 12 { 13 keyInfo = Console.ReadKey().Key; 14 if (keyInfo == ConsoleKey.E) 15 { 16 CreateQueue(); 17 WriteToQueue(); 18 //ReadFromQueue(); 19 } 20 21 } while (keyInfo != ConsoleKey.Q); 22 23 Console.WriteLine("End"); 24 Console.ReadKey(); 25 } 26 27 private static void CreateQueue() 28 { 29 var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(storageConnectionString); 30 var client = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient(); 31 var queue = client.GetQueueReference("sloan"); 32 queue.CreateIfNotExists(); 33 Console.WriteLine("Created Queue"); 34 } 35 36 private static void WriteToQueue() 37 { 38 var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(storageConnectionString); 39 var client = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient(); 40 var queue = client.GetQueueReference("sloan"); 41 var message = new CloudQueueMessage("Eject!"); 42 queue.AddMessage(message); 43 Console.WriteLine("Wrote To Queue"); 44 } 45 46 47 private static void ReadFromQueue() 48 { 49 var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(storageConnectionString); 50 var client = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient(); 51 var queue = client.GetQueueReference("sloan"); 52 var queueExists = queue.Exists(); 53 if (!queueExists) 54 Console.WriteLine("Queue does not exist"); 55 var message = queue.GetMessage(); 56 if (message != null) 57 { 58 queue.DeleteMessage(message); 59 Console.WriteLine("Message Found and Deleted"); 60 } 61 else 62 { 63 Console.WriteLine("No messages"); 64 } 65 } 66
I could then Write to the queue and the PI would read and react. You can see it in action here:
With the queue up and running, I was ready to add in the ability for someone to Tweet to the queue. I created a cloud service project and pointed to a new project that will monitor Twitter and then push to the queue:
The Twitter project uses the TweetInvi nuget package and is a worker project. It makes a call to Twitter every 15 seconds and if there is a tweet to “ejectabed” with a person’s name, it will write to the queue (right now, only Sloan’s name is available)
1 type TwitterWorker() = 2 inherit RoleEntryPoint() 3 4 let storageConnectionString = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("storageConnectionString") 5 6 let createQueue(queueName) = 7 let storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(storageConnectionString) 8 let client = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient() 9 let queue = client.GetQueueReference(queueName); 10 queue.CreateIfNotExists() |> ignore 11 12 let writeToQueue(queueName) = 13 let storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(storageConnectionString) 14 let client = storageAccount.CreateCloudQueueClient() 15 let queue = client.GetQueueReference(queueName) 16 let message = new CloudQueueMessage("Eject!") 17 queue.AddMessage(message) |> ignore 18 19 let writeTweetToQueue(queueName) = 20 createQueue(queueName) 21 writeToQueue(queueName) 22 23 let getKeywordFromTweet(tweet: ITweet) = 24 let keyword = "sloan" 25 let hasKeyword = tweet.Text.Contains(keyword) 26 let isFavourited = tweet.FavouriteCount > 0 27 match hasKeyword, isFavourited with 28 | true,false -> Some (keyword,tweet) 29 | _,_ -> None 30 31 32 override this.Run() = 33 while(true) do 34 let consumerKey = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("consumerKey") 35 let consumerSecret = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("consumerSecret") 36 let accessToken = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("accessToken") 37 let accessTokenSecret = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("accessTokenSecret") 38 39 let creds = Credentials.TwitterCredentials(consumerKey, consumerSecret, accessToken, accessTokenSecret) 40 Tweetinvi.Auth.SetCredentials(creds) 41 let matchingTweets = Tweetinvi.Search.SearchTweets("@ejectabed") 42 let matchingTweets' = matchingTweets |> Seq.map(fun t -> getKeywordFromTweet(t)) 43 |> Seq.filter(fun t -> t.IsSome) 44 |> Seq.map (fun t -> t.Value) 45 matchingTweets' |> Seq.iter(fun (k,t) -> writeTweetToQueue(k)) 46 matchingTweets' |> Seq.iter(fun (k,t) -> t.Favourite()) 47 48 Thread.Sleep(15000) 49 50 override this.OnStart() = 51 ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit <- 12 52 base.OnStart()
Jamie Dixon's Home 
I do agree with all the ideas you’ve presented in your post. They’re really convincing and will definitely work. Still, the posts are too short for beginners. Could you please extend them a bit from next time? Thanks for the post.