workmon

In the beginning of the pandemic, the company offices went closed rather quickly and I found myself working with my laptop placed on a piano. The initial shock held for a long time, I spent couple of months working like that. This was not good for my posture (mental and physical) at all.

Later on, I built a very nice setup around motorized standing desk with all the bells and whistles - quite meticulous cable management, custom oak wooden top (expensive), BenQ LED light placed on external display, IKEA pegboard on the wall next to the table to hold the essentials (like noise cancelling headphones, pens, SPARC assembly cheat-sheet, etc.), Varmilo keyboard Keychron keyboard, Grovemade desk pad, WiFi extender AP mounted underneath the desk, professionally framed pictures/drawings on the wall, a small plant, etc.

Using this setup allowed me to be very productive, possibly more productive than in the office, to the point when I wanted to know more about how I work to make the increased productivity levels sustainable.

When shopping around for parts of another project on Adafruit, I remembered an interesting presentation from GrafanaCon 2021 called WFH habits during lockdown told by Grafana where the presenter used sensor paired with Grafana to monitor her WFH behavior w.r.t. breaks etc. This made me throw some more stuff to the Adafruit order, scavenge some parts laying around and make my own version of work habits monitoring setup.

My goal is to provide the following functionality:

• determine the hours I work (per day/week)
  • turn on a warning that I should wrap for the day
  • send an alert if I have been working for too long in a given week (via Grafana + PagerDuty)
• warn if I spend too much configuous time sitting/standing
  • similarly warn if I work for too long without a break
• monitor the working environment, esp. CO2 concentration, and alert if above given threshold

Hardware

• ReverseTFT Feather
• TP-link P110 smart WiFi plug
  • my primary display is connected to this plug
  • this is used to detect my presence in front of the computer. This works with sufficient degree of precision because my display has the saver set just to 3 minutes.
    • while the presence could be detected in software, I wanted to avoid any changes whatsoever to the software of my company provided laptop. Other metrics such as light emitted by the display would not be as reliable.
• US-100 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor connected directly (soldered) to the Feather
  • to determine if the table is up/down
• iPhone headphones transparent plastic box used as a housing for the distance sensor
  • to be mounted underneath the table at the back in order not to cause measurement interference with my legs/chair etc.
• 4-strand phone cable to connect the distance sensor to the Feather
  • originally I wanted the cable to be split and outfitted with RJ11 connectors and connected using a connecting piece so that the sensor can be easily disconnected, however this connection turned out to be flaky so in the end I soldered it.
• QtPy with temperature/humidity and CO2 sensors
  • running the code from my shield project
  • publishing messages with the metrics to a MQTT topic. The Feather will subscribe to the topic and handle the values.
• 3D printed stand

This is the 2nd version. See below for older versions.

Features

• by default a set of metrics is displayed: CO2, tmperature, humidity and the duration of the current table position. Also, image is displayed if available.
• The CO2 metric displayed will turn red if the value is greater than a configured threshold.
  • also, the Neopixel on the back side will start blinking red
• If the table is in the same position for too long (configurable) while the monitored power is on, the image will be changed and the neopixel on the back side will start blinking blue.
  • the table state tracking depends on the monitored power to be above certain threshold (i.e. computer display being on)
• If the monitored power is on longer than configured threshold, the neopixel will start blinking green.
• the display is on only during certain hours (configurable)
• if the display is off, pushing any D0/D1/D2 button will turn it on for a minute.

The blinking of the neopixel is prioritized so that it will blink with the color corresponding to the highest priority alert.

History

Originally, this was based on a Raspberry Pi with a directly attached USB hub to connect the distance reader and a light bulb with 3 lights which was used to do the alerting. The ultrasonic distance sensor was placed in original iPhone plastic box (the one with the transparent cover) with two holes for the sensor. The Rpi died suddenly and I found more fun "architecture" based on microcontrollers.

Also, I believe the placement of the distance sensor was causing value flapping. It was attached with double sticky tape the white cable holder underneath the table on the right side and was not fully in horizontal position which is possibly made it to get erroneous readings. Another possibility is some interaction with the Linux running on the Raspberry Pi.

Setup

NTP server

The code assumes there is NTP server running and responding on the default IPv4 gateway.

TP-link P110

Install the Tapo app on a mobile phone. Register new account, remember the user ID and password as these will be necessary. Allow third-party API access within the app. This is necessary to get the current power reading via API working.

Setup the plug so that it connects to dedicated (IoT) WiFi network with IP address staticly assigned via DHCP. This is needed to be able to read the power consumption values using the same host/IP hard-coded in the configuration.

Set up and configure https://github.com/vladak/plug2mqtt/ somewhere on the IoT network (say on a Raspberry Pi) to publish the state of the plug, notably the power consumption.

Feather

Solder the US-100 (in UART mode) per the US-100 guide.

Metrics (prerequisites)

• The code assumes that environmental metrics are published to a certain MQTT topic.
  • For that I use https://github.com/vladak/shield with a QtPy.
• The code takes the power consumption value from MQTT.
  • https://github.com/vladak/plug2mqtt/ is used

Prometheus

The Prometheus configuration needs to have the bits for the above mentioned pre-requisites. For the table distance the MQTT exporter configuration in /etc/prometheus/mqtt-exporter.yaml needs to be augmented with this section:

metrics:
  -
    # The name of the metric in prometheus
    prom_name: distance
    # The name of the metric in a MQTT JSON message
    mqtt_name: distance
    # The prometheus help text for this metric
    help: distance
    # The prometheus type for this metric. Valid values are: "gauge" and "counter"
    type: gauge

Grafana

Assumes the Prometheus data source is already set up.

Perform the following setup on the Grafana server:

• Use dashboard provisioning with work-dashboard.json
• Set up the service to publish annotations using the instructions on https://github.com/vladak/mq2anno

Configure

Here is list of tunables. Most of these are mandatory.

Example secrets.py configuration:

secrets = {
    "SSID": "FOO",
    "password": "XYZ",
    "broker": "172.40.0.3",
    "broker_port": 1883,
    "log_level": "info",
    "mqtt_topic_env": "devices/pracovna/qtpy",
    "mqtt_topic_power": "devices/plug/pracovna",
    "mqtt_topic": "devices/pracovna/featherTFT",
    "distance_threshold": 90,
    "power_threshold_watts": 35,
    "co2_threshold": 1000,
    "last_update_threshold": 60,
    "break_threshold_seconds": 2700,
    "icon_paths": [
        "/images/icons8-totoro-120.bmp",
        "/images/icons8-totoro-120-umbrella.bmp",
    ],
    "table_state_dur_threshold": 1800,
    "start_hr": 8,
    "end_hr": 23,
    "font_file_name": "fonts/Inter-Regular-25.pcf",
}

Install

It assumes there are 2 120x96 images in the images directory. It will do fine without them, however the table position alerting will resort just to blinking the diode.

With circup installed and the Feather connected over USB (assuming Linux distro):

circup install -r requirements.txt
cp -R images/ fonts/ *.py settings.toml /media/$USER/CIRCUITPY/

Generating bitmap font

Using bitmap fonts makes the display more readable and nicer. Also, some of the glyps like the circle in °C can be actually displayed. The font however has to be converted to fit onto the flash and then it has to be used in a special way for quick display.

1. grab the fonts from https://rsms.me/inter/
2. convert the extras/ttf/Inter-Regular.ttf into BDF (use 25 pixels size) using https://fontforge.github.io/
3. convert the BDF into PCF for smaller size using https://adafruit.github.io/web-bdftopcf/
4. copy the resulting file to the CIRCUITPY directory

Guides:

• US-100: https://learn.adafruit.com/ultrasonic-sonar-distance-sensors/python-circuitpython
• fonts: https://learn.adafruit.com/custom-fonts-for-pyportal-circuitpython-display/

Lessons learned

• monitoring work hours is dicey. It might feel good to put in the expected amount of work hours, however I was often tremendously productive (esp. in terms of quality of the output) when I worked less hours and made quality breaks.
• so far, with the state of CircruitPython at least, microcontroller based projects are all about tight loops, e.g. in order to sample button pressed events.
  • There are some actions that might shed some time from that loop that are not so obvious, e.g. the US-100 distance reading might require up to 0.4 seconds
• due to the very dynamic nature of the microcontroller ecosystem, the workarounds for various issues are omnipresent
  • I dislike having workarounds in place because such bloat accumulates over time and leads to non seamless upgrades, so I try to contribute to upstream.
  • On the other hand, chasing bugs in the underlying ROTS operating system costs lots of time and effort so sometimes it is wise to just reset the microcontroller via safemode.py and drive on, esp. for these non-critical projects.
• like with any Python code, scrubbing the code with tools (black/pylint/flake8/isort) prevents some issues during the runtime, but here it is even more important because runtime troubleshooting might involve tinkering with the hardware which costs extra time
  • some level of testing, where possible, is also handy, for the same reason.
• it is nice to have a friend with a Dremel
  • or a shared area with such tools
• it is nice to be able to 3-D print stuff on demand
  • totally possible thanks to Prusa community