6 ms·

The Bicycle Barometer

235 points by gmac 14y ago

Sumaso 14y 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?
ghc 14y 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.
- deafbybeheading 14y ago
  Then you can skip the middleman and just automate the taking-action part.
  - ghc 14y 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.
    - deafbybeheading 14y ago
      Sure, I was being facetious. Even with actions that are simple to execute, I'm somewhat skeptical that a black box with a single recommendation is the best answer. I think that presenting the analysis as "do this, and here is why" would be a nice alternative for more complex systems--frequently dashboards and such throw data at you and completely punt on helping you interpret it.
      - ghc 14y ago
        Your suggestion is one often made to me so I didn't realize it was facetious. The truth is that many of the big data systems we build are starting to make complex decisions based on subtleties in data a non-expert human can't understand. We of course try to give reasoning along with the decisions, but it's often easier and cheaper to get decisions from a computer and then hire a domain expert as a consultant to write down the reasoning for the client in a monthly report. As long as the actions your software tells your clients to take will save them money they don't really care about seeing the reasoning beforehand. And if they choose not to take action, you can tell them how much money they lost by not implementing the advice of the computer. It's a surprisingly effective way to do business.
    - dkarl 14y ago
      You're really stretching the meaning of, "They want our software to tell them what to do. Period." In the real world, as you mention, it makes sense to tell people what to do, because humans usually make better and cheaper robots than robots do, but in computing you only need humans for two things: physically interacting with hardware, and human judgment. In my admittedly limited experience in this domain, what people wanted was alerts that indicated that human investigation and judgment were needed. The systems I worked on only ever told humans to do one thing: "Look! Look at this!" If the system knew more, it did it. (A nice feature of one system I worked with was that it automated the routine aspects of investigation, so when an alert was generated, relevant information for the type of alert such as traceroute output and previous alerts related to a host was gathered and attached.) Bottom line: you never intentionally waste a human's time on things that don't require human judgment, and when human judgment comes into play, people want context. Good software helps people establish context for the decisions they make. The bike barometer, for example, doesn't actually tell you whether to bike or not. It just lets you know how a couple of factors balance against each other. The person reading the barometer will factor in other context such as how they feel that morning, whether they want some exercise that morning or would rather read a book on the tube, whether the bike is in good working condition, and so on. Granted, the systems I worked with were mostly used by full-time operations personnel. If you're talking about a system for non-specialists who may need prompting and guidance along the lines of, "It looks like you're trying to handle more load than usual. Would you like to spin up a few more servers?" then I guess I can see people wanting the software to give them explicit orders.
lloeki 14y 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 14y ago
  Here's SparkFun's CAN bus shield: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10039 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/ http://code.google.com/p/canduino/.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
swanson 14y 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 14y ago
  Agree, this is great. This is the kind of daily-use information you want access to without having to turn on a computer.
taeric 14y 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 14y ago
  The problem there is that you don't know how bad the other option would have been.
  - azundo 14y 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.
    - pyoung 14y ago
      This is based on my experience in SF (i.e. muni/bart), but the public transit experience is pretty variable. Crowds, homeless people, traffic conditions, timely connections. The tube is probably a little better/consistent, but rating the experience would be a good feature to add in SF.
    - Someone 14y ago
      I would expect some correlation with the weather: nicer weather means nicer tube trips because, with worse weather, more people take the tube, and they will wear thicker, wetter clothes. Also, if it is extremely hot, the tube can be relatively cool (depends heavily on the tube in question) The tube also can be extremely busy (sometimes with very noisy passengers) due to sales in shopping centers or due to sporting matches, exhibitions, etc.
  - 14y ago
URSpider94 14y 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 14y ago
  I have their Ambient Orb (http://bit.ly/XFemSb 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/ http://www.controlbyweb.com/webswitch/) to turn on/off a police siren when a certain goal was reached.
- TylerE 14y 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.
Swizec 14y 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 14y ago
  Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
  - grimgrin 14y 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.
    - Swizec 14y ago
      A spreadsheet is a far cry from a warm email every 3 days saying either "Whoa, you need to save more!" or "Woohoo, good job! \o/"
- crntaylor 14y 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!
  - Swizec 14y 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.
jonknee 14y 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 14y ago
I want one of these telling me when to check my email, with a heavy bias for checking as rarely as possible...
vincefutr23 14y ago
thought you were talking about the tubes in the tires
maxerickson 14y ago
I wonder how an actual barometer does in comparison.
richardjpope 14y ago
I've put the (very quick and hacky) code up here: https://github.com/memespring/bicycle-barometer https://github.com/memespring/bicycle-barometer

235 points by gmac 14y 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?

ghc 14y 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.

deafbybeheading 14y ago
Then you can skip the middleman and just automate the taking-action part.
- ghc 14y 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.
  - deafbybeheading 14y ago
    Sure, I was being facetious. Even with actions that are simple to execute, I'm somewhat skeptical that a black box with a single recommendation is the best answer. I think that presenting the analysis as "do this, and here is why" would be a nice alternative for more complex systems--frequently dashboards and such throw data at you and completely punt on helping you interpret it.
    - ghc 14y ago
      Your suggestion is one often made to me so I didn't realize it was facetious. The truth is that many of the big data systems we build are starting to make complex decisions based on subtleties in data a non-expert human can't understand. We of course try to give reasoning along with the decisions, but it's often easier and cheaper to get decisions from a computer and then hire a domain expert as a consultant to write down the reasoning for the client in a monthly report. As long as the actions your software tells your clients to take will save them money they don't really care about seeing the reasoning beforehand. And if they choose not to take action, you can tell them how much money they lost by not implementing the advice of the computer. It's a surprisingly effective way to do business.
  - dkarl 14y ago
    You're really stretching the meaning of, "They want our software to tell them what to do. Period." In the real world, as you mention, it makes sense to tell people what to do, because humans usually make better and cheaper robots than robots do, but in computing you only need humans for two things: physically interacting with hardware, and human judgment. In my admittedly limited experience in this domain, what people wanted was alerts that indicated that human investigation and judgment were needed. The systems I worked on only ever told humans to do one thing: "Look! Look at this!" If the system knew more, it did it. (A nice feature of one system I worked with was that it automated the routine aspects of investigation, so when an alert was generated, relevant information for the type of alert such as traceroute output and previous alerts related to a host was gathered and attached.) Bottom line: you never intentionally waste a human's time on things that don't require human judgment, and when human judgment comes into play, people want context. Good software helps people establish context for the decisions they make. The bike barometer, for example, doesn't actually tell you whether to bike or not. It just lets you know how a couple of factors balance against each other. The person reading the barometer will factor in other context such as how they feel that morning, whether they want some exercise that morning or would rather read a book on the tube, whether the bike is in good working condition, and so on. Granted, the systems I worked with were mostly used by full-time operations personnel. If you're talking about a system for non-specialists who may need prompting and guidance along the lines of, "It looks like you're trying to handle more load than usual. Would you like to spin up a few more servers?" then I guess I can see people wanting the software to give them explicit orders.

lloeki 14y 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 14y ago
Here's SparkFun's CAN bus shield: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10039 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/ http://code.google.com/p/canduino/.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

swanson 14y 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 14y ago
Agree, this is great. This is the kind of daily-use information you want access to without having to turn on a computer.

taeric 14y 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 14y ago
The problem there is that you don't know how bad the other option would have been.
- azundo 14y 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.
  - pyoung 14y ago
    This is based on my experience in SF (i.e. muni/bart), but the public transit experience is pretty variable. Crowds, homeless people, traffic conditions, timely connections. The tube is probably a little better/consistent, but rating the experience would be a good feature to add in SF.
  - Someone 14y ago
    I would expect some correlation with the weather: nicer weather means nicer tube trips because, with worse weather, more people take the tube, and they will wear thicker, wetter clothes. Also, if it is extremely hot, the tube can be relatively cool (depends heavily on the tube in question) The tube also can be extremely busy (sometimes with very noisy passengers) due to sales in shopping centers or due to sporting matches, exhibitions, etc.
- 14y ago

URSpider94 14y 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 14y ago
I have their Ambient Orb (http://bit.ly/XFemSb 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/ http://www.controlbyweb.com/webswitch/) to turn on/off a police siren when a certain goal was reached.
TylerE 14y 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.

Swizec 14y 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 14y ago
Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
- grimgrin 14y 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.
  - Swizec 14y ago
    A spreadsheet is a far cry from a warm email every 3 days saying either "Whoa, you need to save more!" or "Woohoo, good job! \o/"
crntaylor 14y 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!
- Swizec 14y 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.

jonknee 14y 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 14y ago

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

vincefutr23 14y ago

thought you were talking about the tubes in the tires

maxerickson 14y ago

I wonder how an actual barometer does in comparison.

richardjpope 14y ago

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