AWS

20 Articles

IoT Potty Training

March 10, 2018 by 22 Comments

If you have not had children, stop reading now, we implore you. Because before you’ve had kids, you can’t know how supremely important it is that they take care of going to the bathroom by themselves. [David Gouldin] knows how it is. But unlike most of us, he resorted to using an Amazon IoT button and Twilio. No, we are not kidding.

The problem he was trying to solve is when his younger child would need to use the potty in the middle of the night, calling out for assistance would wake the older child. [David] said it best himself:

Behind the smiling emoji facade is an Amazon IoT button, a variant of Amazon’s dash button. When my kid presses this button, it triggers an AWS Lambda function that uses Twilio’s Python Helper Library to call my iPhone from a Twilio number. The Twilio number is stored in my contacts with “emergency bypass” turned on, so even when it’s 2am and I’m on “do not disturb” I still get the call.

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Haunting A Smart Mirror With Hue And Alexa

October 28, 2017 by 1 Comment

So, your smart mirror has been running for a while, but Halloween is coming up and you want to come up with some cool Halloween stuff to display on the mirror. If you’re looking for ideas, check out [Ben Eagan]’s cool Haunted Smart Mirror which connects the mirror via a Raspberry Pi with Amazon Alexa and Phillips Hue lighting.

[Ben] points to another of his blog pages for those readers interested in the nuances of setting up Alexa with a smart mirror, while concentrating on communication with the Hue bridge and creating the setup for a new Alexa command in this post. Dealing with the Phillips Hue API seems fairly straightforward: Get the IP address of your Hue bridge from your router and the ID of your lights from the Hue app and you’re set to send commands via HTTP. [Ben] includes a Python script to make the lights flicker, which you can modify for your own lights as you wish. Once that’s done, you’ll need to set up the intent that Alexa listens for, and then modify the AWS lambda function that sends commands to the Pi. When the command shows up in the queue on the Pi, any commands [Ben] wants to play are fired off – in this case, a video is played and the Hue lights start to flicker.

There’s no mention of security in the article, so that may be worth a little attention with Alexa and the Hue, but with Halloween coming up fast even if you haven’t built a magic mirror yet, if you’ve got Hue lights, this would be a great, quick, Halloween idea. Especially if you could combine it with your outside lights so that Trick-or-Treaters can join in on the fun. Maybe you’d prefer looking up passing planes using Alexa? Or how about getting your fish to talk?

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6502 Retrocomputing Goes To The Cloud

July 8, 2017 by 40 Comments

In what may be the strangest retrocomputing project we’ve seen lately, you can now access a virtual 6502 via Amazon’s Lambda computing service. We don’t mean there’s a web page with a simulated CPU on it. That’s old hat. This is a web service that takes a block of memory, executes 6502 code that it finds in it, and then returns a block of memory after a BRK opcode or a time out.

You format your request as a JSON-formatted POST request, so anything that can do an HTTP post can probably access it. If you aren’t feeling like writing your own client, the main page has a form you can fill out with some sample values. Just be aware that the memory going in and out is base 64 encoded, so you aren’t going to see instantly gratifying results.

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Amazon S3: Out Like A Light; On Like A Bathtub

March 3, 2017 by 9 Comments

You no doubt heard about the Amazon S3 outage that happened earlier this week. It was reported far and wide by media outlets who normally don’t delve into details of the technology supporting our connected world. It is an interesting thing to think that most people have heard about The Cloud but never AWS and certainly not S3.

We didn’t report on the outage, but we ate up the details of the aftermath. It’s an excellent look under the hood. We say kudos to Amazon for adding to the growing trend of companies sharing the gory details surrounding events like this so that we can all understand what caused this and how they plan to avoid it in the future.

Turns out the S3 team was working on a problem with some part of the billing system and to do so, needed to take a few servers down. An incorrect command used when taking those machines down ended up affecting a larger block than expected. So they went out like a light switch — but turning that switch back on wasn’t nearly as easy.

The servers that went down run various commands in the S3 API. With the explosive growth of the Simple Storage Service, this “reboot” hadn’t been tried in several years and took far longer than expected. Compounding this was a backlog of tasks that built up while they were bringing the API servers back online. Working through that backlog took time as well. The process was like waiting for a bathtub to fill up with water. It must have been an agonizing process for those involved, but certainly not as bad as the folks who had to restore GitLab service a few weeks back.

[via /r/programming]

Amazon Giving Out (Sort Of) Hackable Amazon Dash Button

October 11, 2015 by 49 Comments

We’ve seen some interesting hacks of the Amazon Dash buttons, a neat device where you press a button and it orders a product from Amazon for you. Now, [Amazon] themselves are getting into the hacking fun with the AWS IoT Button. This is a Dash button that Amazon is giving out at events to promote their new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Internet of Things (IoT) service.

As part of their efforts to take over the world, the AWS IoT service allows you to create button-based services like ordering pizza or starting Netflix, but without running your own server. Instead, Amazon handles all of the hard stuff behind the scenes on their Lambda engine, which receives the small bit of JSON that the button sends and runs a Lambda function that orders pizza, kicks off Netflix, then starts World War III. Amazon provides sample actions for things like launching the missiles sending a text message over Twilio and writing to a database. Amazon isn’t selling these buttons: they only seem to be available as swag at events. Make a loud enough noise in the comments section and maybe they’ll allocate some for the Hackaday community.

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Build An Amazon EC2 Gaming Rig

July 10, 2015 by 44 Comments

PC gaming is better than console gaming. Now that we’ve said something controversial enough to meet the comment quota for this post, let’s dig into [Larry]’s Amazon EC2 gaming rig.

A while ago, [Larry] bought a MacBook Air. It’s a great machine for what it is, but it’s not exactly the laptop you want for playing modern AAA games on the go. If you have enough bandwidth and a low enough ping, you can replicated just about everything as an EC2 instance.

[Larry] is using a Windows Server 2012 AMI with a single NVIDIA GRID K520 GPU in his instance. After getting all the security, firewall, and other basic stuff configured, it’s just a matter of installing a specific driver for an NVIDIA Titan. With Steam installed and in-home streaming properly configured it’s time to game.

The performance [Larry] is getting out of this setup is pretty impressive. It’s 60fps, but because he’s streaming all his games to a MacBook Air, he’ll never get 1080p.

If you’re wondering how much this costs, it’s actually not too bad. The first version of [Larry]’s cloud-based gaming system was about $0.54 per hour. For the price of a $1000 battle station, that’s about 1900 hours of gaming, and for the price of a $400 potato, that’s 740 hours of gaming.