Im Hearing

Contents

1. Introduction
2. How to Install & Use
3. Overall Architecture
4. How to Contribute
5. References

Introduction

This is a personal project, in which I put in practice things like:

• Usage of Posix Threads
• Keep tracking of data stored in Cloud using local DB
• Usage of ORM

Also, Im using my RaspberryPi and a Mic to store environment sounds. The thing is my Raspberry doesnt have so much storage available and, of course, I didn't want to loose my records due to storage problems. So, my idea was to after a given number of records (or after a given amount of storage usage), the script must archive the records and upload it to the Cloud (some cheap object store).

Of course, this idea had some problems, for example, my main concerns:

• If I want a record from a specific day of the last month, how do I get it?
• During the upload to the cloud, supposing it takes several minutes, how do I keep recording?

For the first question, I created a database using SQLite using Pony ORM to keep tracking of the records. So, you can just query for a specific day and it will return the archive URL path to download. The second question I used Posix Threads with QUEUE (producer-consumer strategy). So when I reach the given amount of storage or a number of records a task is added to a queue and a thread consumes it (archive and upload).

Well, again, this is just a personal project that I created to use some hardware that I wasn't using (actually, the Raspiberry I was using, just the USB mic was idle). So, it is not my intention to create anything professional here or commercial, this is just fun.

How to Install and Use

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NOTE

Before installing, make sure ALSA is properly configured and working. For more details, please refer to item 1 in References.

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Before installing, be aware that Im using Python 3.7 for developing. For now, I don't think it is a problem, since this project is not using any asyncio new features, but in future versions, my intention is to use it. Let's start:

Installing the script is easy, the first step is to clone (or download) it from the Git:

git clone https://github.com/abaruchi/ImHearing

After that, install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Create the config.ini file using the configuration template:

cp -p config_example.ini config.ini

Change the parameters according to your needs. Note that this file contains a configuration to AWS, so make sure you configured AWS Cli (refer to item 2 in References).

After the installation and configuration, you can start the script running the runner script. There are two versions of it, a sequential version (runner.py) and a version which is using threads (async_runner.py). You can run it as follow:

Thread Version:

python async_runner.py

Sequential Version:

python runner.py

The script will log finished records and when it starts to archive and upload.

tail -f /var/log/Imhearing.log

Overall Architecture

The overall architecture is presented in Figure bellow. Basically the Raspberry records and send a set of records (in a ZIP Archive) to the cloud. This can be accessed to other clients (or devices) later using some API. My initial idea is to allow queries and get the S3 remote path using Ably API (item 4 in References).

For more details about how it is implemented (mainly ORM and Multithreading) I created specific documentations (ORM and Multithreading).

How to Contribute

As any Open Source project, you can contribute solving issues, reporting bugs and improvements. Just clone the repo and submit your pull request to me. Since it is a project that Im coding in my free time, this will not be as fast as I wish.

Also, I usually add some issues to keep tracking of things that I would like to implement or improve. Feel free to get this issues and implement. The idea of this project is just practice coding skills, system designs and other subjects that you have learned.

References

1. Configuring MIC in RaspiberryPI
2. Configuring AWS CLI in Linux
3. Pony ORM
4. Ably API