[From nobody Mon Jan 23 07:36:54 2006
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Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:40:06 -0500
From: "Michael Graham" <magog@the-wire.com>
To: "Toronto Perl Mongers" <tpm@to.pm.org>
Subject: [tpm] January Meeting - Thu 26 Jan 2006, 6:45pm - Blinkenlites
	with Perl : A case study in driving custom home-made hardware with Perl
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Here are the details for the January TPM meeting (next Thursday)

These details are also on the TPM web site: http://to.pm.org/

  Date:     Thursday 26 Jan 2006

  Time:     6:45pm (talk starts)

  Where:    2 Bloor Street West (NW corner of Yonge/Bloor, skyscraper
            with the CIBC logo on top) - room TBA

  ===================================================================
  Speaker:  Steve McNabb

Title:  Blinkenlites with Perl : A case study in driving custom
home-made hardware with Perl

 Duration:  60 minutes

 Synopsis:
            A demo of a monitoring panel project I use to monitor all my
            Internet goodies with Perl.  The hardware is home-made, and
            quite simple. Basic soldering is all that's really needed.

Background:
            Like many of you, I'm "responsible" for a number of
            different services on different boxen all around the 'net -
            and getting angry "Our Thingy is Broken!!!" emails is no
            fun.

            Having to check your monitoring software to see if
            everything is O.K. when you're on the couch hacking Perl and
            eating pretzels isn't great either.  Laziness tells me I
            should be able to know what's going on by just glancing at
            something that isn't a computer screen.  I need
            blinkenlites!

            So I built a little Parallel Port-driven (and powered!)
            monitoring panel and wrote a driver for it in Perl.
            I use it to monitor web services, make sure important
            machines are still online (with ping), and verify that all
            of our Icecast audio streams are still pumping weird music
            to the masses.

            I also added a cool ultra-bright blue vanity LED to tell me
            when people are listening to my radio projects.

            The driver uses the Device::ParallelPort module, and would
            be super-easy to extend to other monitoring/novelty tasks -
            like checking for new mail, verifying that last night's
            subversion smoke tests all passed or have it blink when your
            favourite web comic strip has posted a new edition. Anything
            that returns true can be used to set/flip the lights on and
            off.  I use WWW::Mechanize and Net::Ping for the actual
            testing.

            I've had enormous fun with this project so far, and even the
            most electronically-challenged can build the hardware. It's
            all low-amperage 5 volt, so you should be able handle the
            bare sockets safely under power presuming you are neither
            pregnant nor wearing a pacemaker ;-)

            A little soldering is all the electronics know-how required.
            A Multimeter would be a good idea too (or at least a
            continuity tester) to test for shorts before plugging it
            into your computer)

 Links:

            My Radio Free Peterborough Blog entry on the project:
            http://radiofreepeterborough.ca/blinkenlites

            (As of this writing, this article is *still* the #1 Google hit
            for "Blinkenlites"!)


            A schematic (see how easy it is?!):
            http://radiofreepeterborough.ca/files/blinkenlites_schematic.gif


            The Perl driver:
            http://radiofreepeterborough.ca/files/rfp-heartbeat.perl


            A "Monitor Lizard" I built for a good friend & Client out of
            a rubber dinosaur from Toys-R-Us:

            http://stv.radiofreepeterborough.ca/photos/blinkenlites/monitor-lizard.jpg

            get it?  Monitor Lizard?  hyuck hyuck.


  ===================================================================

  Note:

            The elevators in the building are "locked down" after 5:30pm
            to people without building access cards.  Leading up to the
            meeting someone will come down to the main floor lobby every
            few minutes to ferry people upstairs.  There will be a
            number of scheduled trips:

                17:30
                18:00
                18:30
                18:45
                19:00

            After 19:00, you can reach the access-card-carrying guy via
            a cell phone number that we'll leave with security in the
            front lobby.  The room and floor numbers will be left with
            security too.

            If any latecomers call up there will be a final group
            elevator run at 19:10.  After that, access will be ad-hoc;
            call up from security and somebody will try to come down and
            let you up.



---
Michael Graham <magog@the-wire.com>

--- 
Michael Graham <magog@the-wire.com>


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