Tinker Niche

Photo by Dhiva Krishna on Unsplash It is both fun and pain to have an independent house. As much as there is freedom from a few things like nagging floor mates or just too many people around, there is also a pain to watch out for ourselves all around the house/neighbourhood. Houses used to be independent ones in the "golden" days where people would still live like Kings.  One such problem of such a house is parking space around the house and more so if the house is adorned by many open road corners which means more places to watch out for. People generally just thrust their responsibility on others and suddenly there is a new car in one of the empty places around. If the parking is transitory then it is kinda OK, say park for a short while and then move on. But nothing is known of such cars, they could be stolen, there could be people staying in them, any other activities, etc. So it is a headache if such a thing happens. One can call the police to solve the problem but i...

Leg Brake on a Bicycle  Growing up, there was a need to learn how to drive a geared motor cycle and also get a driver's license. There are two categories of two wheeler licenses: one for geared vehicles usually with leg brakes and one for auto/non-geared vehicles where the braking happens by hand and are simpler to operate. Driving license had already been acquired for the non-geared vehicle but due to lack of availability of a geared vehicle for practice, the acquiring of this license was taking quite some time. The main problem was adapting to braking a vehicle using the leg where one to respond differently and the conditioning takes some time. Unfortunately could not manage to get anybody/s vehicle for learning after many attempts. And at that time (1995 or so) bicycles were rather common and used for transport. So an idea was: why not add such a feature to a bicycle. A Hercules Town and Trek was also available. After some visits to the local bicycle shop and a used vehicle part...

A quick Proof-of-concept was needed to demonstrate web based Locomotive Fuel monitoring capability . Diesel based fuel sensor was a SICK sensor and hardware interface to it was built by third party. There was a need to build an internet gateway device to upload and display the fuel readings along with the GPS coordinates, speed, etc and the associated book keeping, etc. As this was a PoC, an Off-the-Shelf SBC with a 2G modem was chosen and quickly integrated to provide internet communication, reading from fuel sensor hardware, interfacing with GPS device and web server integration service to push all the relevant data. An nginx php web server was run on an AWS instance after the DNS procurement etc.   Openstreet maps  was used as it is free and simpler to use than others. An access token to access the OSM tiles/etc was obtained and  Leaflet  was used to customise and show the maps/tiles, customize markers, etc. As this was installed on only one locomotive, the pictur...

There is an unused Medical Advertisement system in a pharmacy nearby.  This system would show many medical ads on local medical services; hospitals, medicines etc. Since a long time now it has been switched off and unused "perfectly working" things cause a lot of botheration. Got the Mukesh Medicals Pharmacy owner interested in reviving it so that it could be repurposed to show other things: custom ads, local information, products on offer etc. The hardware turned out to be an MP4 player with a VGA out connection. Good deal of time was spent in experimenting in encoding a suitable video that could be run on the System as it was 10+ years old and many codecs and features have evolved and cannot be run on older systems. Also the file structure on the storage device also played a part in the video operation. The earlier system keeps a record of how long and how often a particular ad has been played for payment purposes and this feature couldn't be changed. There was a need t...

There was a need for an Organisation to build a phone network for use by their employees. Unlike the yester-years where telephony was analog and it required switching exchanges to route calls. The Govt or large corporations would set up Private Branch Exchanges (PBX) for this function. Now a days calls can be made digitally on the internet itself given that a server can appropriately route them to their chosen destinations. Voice over IP is used to digitally transmit packets over IP on the network to enable calling. There is a need for a VOIP server and clients that can talk to each other just like the old phone network. This can be easily achieved using robust opensource tools. Asterisk is an opensource PBX that has been around for a long period of time. Asterisk is an open source framework for building communications applications. Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server. Asterisk powers IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers and other custom soluti...

  A portable camera was needed. This was before the time of the Raspberry Pi, commonly available mobile phone extensible apps. The following would be nice to have Very tiny form factor Low cost Open Source software to enable extension Support standard computer interfaces Maybe run on battery too As other extensible platforms were not too common, it was standard practice to use existing low cost Access point. A few notable mentions would be the Linksys WRT54G, which has many mods and hacks like WIFI car, etc and others. A suitable candidate was the TPLINK MR3020 Pocket router.  TPLINK MR3020 POCKET ROUTER It has a USB Port so its extensible. Has Ethernet too. Has an OpenWRT port so any new software/configuration/mod can be written. It can be battery powered. It is super cheap less than 1000 INR. Downloaded or generated (it was too long ago) a ROM for this router and added USB support in the kernel for various USB devices including UVC Cameras. It has an mjpeg video/camera strea...

Handwritten Like Calendar  Intent: To make a unique calendar of my own. Handwritten Calendars look arty and it was chosen as a good calendar format. There was access to a CNC machine. A template file was created in Inkscape, the Vector Drawing tool and the month files generated. Had to add support for other fonts and the files generated were then converted to a format suitable for printing. Had to experiment with various fonts and styles and sizes to make it look good. A batch of 15 calendars were produced and physically processed by a Calendar maker. A Limited number of  copies of the 2023 calendar were generated It was made in two colors: ivory and card board style. It was well received by interested parties and all the calendars were sold out. Satisfying ! Next steps for new calendar might be: To automate calendar generation via an extension for Inkscape. Allow users to specify important dates and custom images Auto generate calendar for printing. The 2  types in ivory...