Our solution is to ground him from video games and TV if he's behind in school... and to specify that he isn't allowed to do any of that stuff after school until he's done his homework, but it's pretty hard for us to enforce that, since we don't have up-to-date information on what he's assigned and what he's turned in. We can find out if he's behind or his grades are slipping, though, by looking at the school's on-line gradebook. So, the rule is that if that shows he's behind, or his grades are too low, then he's grounded.
But even that is something of a pain, because it requires us (well, Kristanne) to regularly check the web site, which is often down and almost always slow. And if she's not home when he gets home from school he doesn't know if he's currently behind.
I decided that this problem can be solved with technology. There are several ways I could go about it. I could write a phone app, or put something on the kids' computer. I decided to go with something less subtle: A multi-color LED in the kitchen that shows his current status at all times. If his grades are good, it's green. If they begin to fall, it shades towards yellow and then red. If he's missing assignments, it flashes a count of the missing assignments in blue.
The result is a crude, hack-and-slash assembly of some pretty cool technology. I threw it together in an evening, including learning how to install and configure all the components and write all the code. The components are:
- A Raspberry Pi 2, (RP2) a small quad-core 700 Mhz ARM computer with 1 GiB of ram and a 32 GiB SD card. It runs Debian Linux.
- A Spark core, which is an Arduino board with built-in Wifi and an interesting development toolset.
- A red-green-blue LED.
- Some resistors to avoid blowing up the LED. I used 330 ohm resistors, which are too big, which means the LED is dimmer than it could be. Oh, well.
My original plan was not to use the Spark, but to wire the LED directly to the GPIO pins on the RP2. But the GPIO headers were male, which means I need a ribbon cable or something else to make it easier to wire them (or I could have soldered wires to them, but that sounded too much like work). So instead I connected the LED to the Spark and I'm using the RP2 to control it.
Here's what the RP2 looks like, in the nifty black case I got for it:
The dongle hanging out the right end is USB Wifi adapter. It's also got an Ethernet jack, if I want to put it where it can be wired.
And here's the LED connected to the Spark core, on a breadboard, with the all-important grade status LED:
For now I just set the whole thing on top of the printer. I'll think about doing something nicer later.
How does it work? The RP2 has a cron job that runs a small script. The script uses curl to download the web page with the grade and assignment information, then pipes it to a Python program that parses the HTML and extracts and summarizes the grade and missing assignment info. The output from the Python program is then used for two more curl invocations, which post the computed values to a server run by Particle. They make the Spark core.
The Particle server routes the data to the Spark, which is running a trivial Arduino program. Normally you compile Arduino code on your computer and download it to the device via USB. You can do that with the Spark, but for small stuff it's easier to use their web-based tools. They provide a web-based editor into which you type your code, then you click a button and they compile the code to a binary and send it over the Internet to the Spark, which flashes it and reboots.
All very hack and slash... but it works and it was really easy. The Sparks are pretty cheap, too ($12, IIRC). I have another I'm going to wire into my garage door controller to do some automation on it (because the kids keep leaving the garage open).
