Feb 23Mastodon usage — counting toots with Kafka, DuckDB & Seaborn 🐘🦆📊Mastodon is a decentralized social networking platform. Users are members of a specific Mastodon instance, and servers are capable of joining other servers to form a federated social network. I wanted to start exploring Mastodon usage; and perform exploratory data analysis of user activity, server popularity and language usage. I…Mastodon9 min readMastodon9 min read
Jan 20Real-Time Wildlife Monitoring with Apache KafkaWildlife monitoring is critical for keeping track of population changes of vulnerable animals. As part of the Confluent Hackathon ʼ22, I was inspired to investigate if a streaming platform could help with tracking animal movement patterns. The challenge was to examine trends in identified species and demonstrate how animal movement…Machine Vision7 min readMachine Vision7 min read
Published in Towards Data Science·Jul 2, 2022Can ML predict where my cat is now?A cat prediction model using past behaviour and weather observations — With months of historic location and temperature data captured, this blog covers how to train a machine learning (ML) model to predict where my cat would go throughout her day. For the impatient, you can skip directly to the prediction web-app here. Does past cat behaviour predict future sleeping location? With some inexpensive hardware (and a cat ambivalent…Machine Learning7 min readMachine Learning7 min read
Feb 3, 2022Can ML predict where my cat is now — part 1It’s 9am on a rainy Tuesday morning — can a simple ML model predict where my cat will be sleeping? How I used a bluetooth tracker, a dozen microcontrollers plus a bit of Python to predict where Snowy the cat would be napping in the next hour. Summary With some inexpensive…IoT5 min readIoT5 min read
Jul 25, 2021Cleaning messy sensor data in Kafka with ksqlDBCollecting streaming data is easy — but understanding it is much harder! With months of 🐱 weight data captured I discovered sensor data can be very messy⚡. …Event Stream Processing7 min readEvent Stream Processing7 min read
Jul 10, 2021Snowy’s eating — tweeting my cats weight & dining habits with a Raspberry PiOur cat Snowy 😸 has been enjoying her meals over winter. I wanted to start collecting data on her eating habits, and analyse her weight over time. This data is collected with food and cat weight measurements; alongside phots taken by two cameras. Data is collected and images processed locally…Raspberry Pi5 min readRaspberry Pi5 min read
Feb 19, 2021Oracle to Kafka — Playing with Confluent’s new Oracle CDC Source Connector in DockerIt’s really exciting to have a new option for streaming Oracle data into Kafka. With Confluent releasing their “Oracle CDC Source Premium Connector” there’s a new way to capture data that has been added to, updated, or deleted from Oracle RDBMS with Change Data Capture (CDC). …Oracle Database6 min readOracle Database6 min read
Feb 4, 2021Cat tracking with Amazon Web Services— AWS IoT, DynamoDB and SageMakerIf you read 1 Cat, 3 Clouds — Where is Snowy sleeping (Part 1) you’ll know I’m trying to build a real-time location tracker for my cat. Following on from that initial blog (which described the hardware and networking), this “Part 2” article describes data processing with Amazon Web Services…IoT8 min readIoT8 min read
Jan 10, 20211 Cat, 3 Clouds — Where is Snowy sleeping?Our cat Snowy is an outdoor cat — but we are beginning to wonder where she travels once she’s left the house. Let me share how I built a low cost pet tracking device to show Snowy’s location in real-time. Plus, what’s it like to build the same IoT data…IoT7 min readIoT7 min read
Sep 21, 2020Pi Peripheral — Computer control with a $10 Raspberry PiLanding gear down and strobe lights active. How to add physical buttons, switches and dials to control computer actions with a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero. Why would you want to do this? Well you might want to add some additional buttons or switches to your favorite game. Or maybe you…Raspberry Pi4 min readRaspberry Pi4 min read
