Data visualization – The Louie

During this latest DreamHack event here in Jönköping (DHW23) I did some small updates to the Alertsquarer previously featured here. SG had bought some new hardware so instead of three 32x32 panels there was now two 64x32 panels. So while fixing support for this, and doing some minor adjustments I also added support for loading and displaying PNG-images. Like the DreamHack logo in this image. New Alertsquarer with PNG support You can find the code here: https://github.com/dhtech/alertsquarer [...]

Quite a while ago I bought an IKEA Vindriktning air quality thingie on sale with the intention to connect it to my Home Assistant setup. It’s a quite simple affair, there is a RS232 TX pin on the Vindriktning board that spews out values, so just connect a ESP32 to that and push the values to MQTT. There's quite a lot of guides online that are easy to find, Fabisoft, Oversubstance, Instructables, Turanis, if you want some inspiration. Instead of writing my own software there are plenty open-source [...]

A friend who works at Dreamhack asked me if I had any 24 led Neopixel-rings in my large store of good-to-have stuff. Unfortunately I didn't, I could only find 12 led ones. In the crew area for the tech/network crew at Dreamhack in Jönköping they have had a display that show the number of active alerts per team. So anyone easily could see if any area had problems, or if everything was green. The display consisted of four 24-led Neopixel rings that either was green for no active alerts, or show [...]

A couple of years ago I saw that a store sold Kobo eInk readers relativly cheap and a quick google showed that it was possible to root them and do what you wanted, so I bought one, and rooted it. Unfortunately there were no ready made scripts or programs to display weather information on the screen so I made my own. The first version At this time I used Domoticz to control lights and collect sensor data from my house so the solution was to write a python-script that would use the API from yr.no [...]

During the summers of 2013-2014 i played around with a raspberry pi and a 1-wire sensor placed near the beach Rocksjön in central Jönköping. Thanks to the kind people at Hasse på Sjökanten which is a Hotel and Resturant just by the beach I got to use their Wifi and power for the Raspberry Pi. I had 50 meter of outdoor cat-5e that I wired up to a DS18B20 in a aluminium tube filled with silicone. It was cold. The data was uploaded to a public website that the Hotel and Resturant used to include [...]

After having used the old dashboard a couple of events Telia contacted me if I could create a new one, and that I could. This time I got my friend from previous adventures on this blog, Mr Hannes. His master knowlege about design and UX combined with my backend expertese led us to a novel setup. Test setup at home Insted of only using one screen we wanted to give the dashboard more impact and show more stuff larger. After coming up with a couple of new ideas we finally went with splitting the [...]

The Telia Dashboard for Dreamhack started to feel a bit dated so Hannes and I started thinking of doing a new dashboard, but in a different way. We brainstormed all the possible metrics at DH that we could visualize, everything from traffic in the network to how many cans of soda had been sold and the distribution between sexes regarding shower-count. Since we din't have a lot of time we had to cut down on what data we were to collect, we ended up with seven (expanded to eight during the [...]

I did get the opportunity to play with data from the PacketLogic machines that was deployed at DreamHack summer 2011. Basically we parsed a log containing a subset of all connections, extracted the outside IP (independent from if it was source or destination) and ran that through MaxMinds GeoIP API to get lon/lat. The data was mangled a bit and then fed to a website with an WebGL globe that showed the amount of connections as bars on the globe. You can see the globe "in action" in this [...]

While I lived in an apartment and was stuck with getting internet via some one DOCSIS5 connection over damp cottonthread I grew more and more irritated that I didn't get the bandwidth i payed for. But, DATA > DOGMA, so created an experiment to collaborate my feelings. I started to ping the first router outside my own network every 30 seconds and record the RTT min, avg and max. At the same time I recorded the inbound and outbound bandwidth usage. To visualize the problem I started with filtering [...]

After a discussion with a friend about how accurate yr.no was, compared to smhi.se, i set out to test it. DATA > DOGMA! I wrote a small perl-script that scraped the temperature predictions from yr.no and every hour and saved all the values. To have something to compare to I recorded the temperature outside my appartment window as well as scraped another temperature measured about 10km away from from temperatur.nu. Since yr.nu updates their forecasts several times a day i wanted also wanted to [...]