Musings from IndiaOS

Folks from Zerodha and ERPNext organized the conference IndiaOS (india open source) conference in Bangalore. IndiaOS brought together the open source projects originating in India and also the supporters of these projects. Here’s a quick summary of what I saw and what I hope to see in the coming editions of IndiaOS.

  1. The frappe framework is an open source framework used by ERPNext and Zerodha. ERPNext which is also an open source ERP built using Frappe framework. I was not aware of this framework until this event. I will certainly use this framework for my future projects knowing that the community is right here.
  2. Dr. Kailash of Zerodha also spoke about their usage of FOSS. It was impressive to see their commitment to FOSS. Here is a tweet with information about their tech stack.

  3. Handwriting recognition for Malayalam: This is a project by Indic Project. They have built handwriting recognition software for the Malayalam language. They are looking for contributors to extend this to more Indian languages.
  4. The story of how volunteers used open source software during the Kerala floods to coordinate the rescue efforts. The entire backstory is available here.
  5. The last talk of the day was by Apar Gupta who opened up the definition of open to include internet freedom. This entire post was inspired by his talk. He spoke about the work of the internet freedom foundation. He wanted us to look at the issue of internet blockages in India and how it affects democracy.
  6. A Malayalam newspaper which publishes their paper completely using open source software. They have made a lot of open source contributions themselves. Here is a tweet that shows their before and after tech stack.

After listening to the talks and the energy in the room, I felt that this event was a huge success. The folks who attended the event were also folks who are doers and optimists who want to make a difference. In this spirit, I feel that the next event should include talks from these folks (or folks who can cover these topics):

  1. Open Hardware: There was a talk about open hardware at IndiaOS. Next time, we should have some workshops covering the open hardware movement with hands on sessions.
  2. Open Communications: This was covered well by Apar in his presentation. We should include work around amateur radio and mesh networks which can help continue communications during times of internet blockade. This is also very much in tune with the times since internet blockade seems to be everywhere.  Workshops on Ham Radio and mesh networks will help people to communicate at times of internet shutdowns.
  3. Freedom and Society: This is a broad topic but I feel we should include folks like Meera working on good local journalism at Citizenmatters. Then there is the Citizens for Bengaluru, which is getting folks involved with working with government at the local level. Also should include folks like Capt. Manivannan who is working to get the government to be open in their communication and work with the public.
  4. Open Data: Here we can do these kinds of talks:
    1. Folks like Thejesh and Datameet are working towards open data. I feel we should include them to get conversations and workshops around getting our data out from the clutches of government and commercial entities.
    2. Folks who have done good work on identifying data surveillance and also on how to protect yourself. For eg., Abhay Rana (aka CaptNemo), who has written extensively on how to protect yourself from the extensive surveillance. His blogpost alone is can be a half day workshop!
    3. Folks who are working on freeing content from DRM. The lead developer for the open source ebook library Calibre is from Mumbai. It will be interesting to hear about his journey.

Tale of an ambitious space odyssey

As a child, I had always dreamt of going to space. Reading about the space race, the Apollo and Soyuz missions, the International Space Station and finally Rakesh Kumar going to space, I was always of dreaming of reaching space one day. The main way I kept myself dreaming about space was by watching movies (Apolllo 13, October Sky etc) and reading books (Rocket Boys).

And of course, life happens while you are dreaming. Then suddenly I graduated from college, got a job, got married and fast forward couple of decades and I was still looking back at my dream. Thankfully, there were still a couple of ways to achieve this dream.

One way was when the Raspberry pi came out, it was billed as a platform for kids to learn programing. But it was also a way for makers to see what they can do with it. While I was reading about interesting things to do with my Raspberry Pi, I came across Dave Akerman and his exploits in high altitude balloons which reach space and have Raspberry Pi as the onboard computer. As I read more about this project, I realized that this was my space dream and so much more. Imagine building your own transmitter and receiver, your own on board computer and launch vehicle? I wanted to do it immediately! But it took me a while (almost 18 months) working on this as my main hobby.

Here is a quick post on how I did it. I hope to augment this post with the details in the days to follow. In this post, I will cover what the payload consisted of and some pictures from space.

Electronics:

The heart was a Raspberry A+. Chose A+ since it uses power sparingly. It was running the Raspbian distro but I removed all the add-ons which come pre-installed but not needed for my project. Most of the scripts were built with Python.

Sensors:

Temperature Sensor DS18B20

Pressure Sensor BMP085

Accelerometer (BerryIMU was one nice package that had all of the above + gyroscope)

Cameras:

Raspberry Pi camera: to capture still images every 30 seconds (though I used the V1 of the camera).

Xiaomi Yi: to record video of the entire flight. This had issues which I will cover in a later post.

Power:

Two Battery Packs of 2300 mAH (chosen since they did not come with an on/off switch). I needed a battery pack which did not have a power switch since the Raspberry pi and the peripherals needed to be powered constantly during the flight even if they rebooted. This was a good choice since the process did get rebooted at least twice due to couple of issues.

GPS: uBlox Max 8Q

Transmitter: NTX2

Software:

Python scripts measured and logged the following parameters: Temperature, Pressure, 3 dimensional acceleration from the gyroscope and also take pictures using the Raspberry pi camera module.

Python scripts also transmitted the location on 434.6 MHz frequency and talked to the GPS to get the location coordinates.

Payload:

Made from extruded polystyrene. I followed the instructions from the UKHAS wiki. Here is how it looked like after we built it. It is sitting in our balcony for testing the transmission.

IMG_6519

The guts of the payload looked like this:

Payload insides

 

Finally here is a slideshow of some of pictures from the Pi camera:

More posts to come on what went into building the payload, test and learnings etc.

This launch was not done entirely by me. I stood on the shoulders of the giants at UKHAS. They were immensely helpful with their Wiki and being available on the IRC channel. I was also helped immensely by Yannick, who did the first amateur launch in France and knew all about the regulations. His house was also the site of the launch! Without Yannick looking over my shoulders, I would not have succeeded.