Executive summary

We have two turtles who need to hibernate every winter.  Last year it was very difficult (I over-engineered) but this year it’s looking better, and there’s cool graphs to monitor their health!

Our turtles and their home

We have two red snapper turtles, Arthur and Turok:

During the summer, they enjoy the huge (700l) aquarium in our living room

…but in the winter they should go into hibernation… They would survive without a yearly hibernation cycle, but it’s better for their health to go into hibernation.

Hibernation System 1.0

Last year I built a custom refrigerator:

This was a great learning experience (microcontroller programming, peltier elements, heat exchange, insulation, pumps, warm/cold water cycles…), but unfortunately not so effective… I was plagued with teething problems such as defective peltier elements, slime in the heat exchanger, ice crystalising in the warm water cycle… which resulted in a few unhealthy warm spikes in the otherwise stable “winter”…

Optimal hibernation

On recommendation from the local reptile institute we do the following hibernation sequence:

• Over a 4 week period reduce the hours of  sunlight (150W full spectrum lamp over their island) and water temperature from the regular “summer” (10 hours/day at 25°C) to “winter” (3 hours/day at room temperature 20°C) over 6 weeks.  The regular aquarium lighting is also reduced from 12 hours/day to 6 hours/day (we can’t afford to let the plants and fish go so dark…).
• Stop feeding 5 days before transfer to reduced activity phase.
• For the reduced activity phase before complete hibernation transfer from the large tank (we can’t cool such a huge mass of water in our living room any lower than room temperature) and place into a smaller tank at ~15C in the cellar with only one hour of light per day.
• Stay in reduced activity for about a week.
• Transfer into individual small tanks (just big enough so they can turn around) with water temperature at 12°C and water level just over the shell (so the turtle can easily lift head to breath if necessary, but is completely submerged otherwise) and place in the temperature controlled refrigerator.
• Reduce the temperature in the refrigerator by 1°C every 2 days until tank temperature is at about 6°C.
• Every 2-4 weeks during the ~4 months of hibernation:
• Change the water (should be done every week the first 3 weeks because they may still dirty the water with excrement, but it is ok if they don’t empty their bowels for hibernation!)
• Weigh the turtle (a total weight loss of up to 10% during hibernation is acceptable, any more and an early spring should be induced)
• Check for  any signs of sickness
• About 3-4 months do the same again in reverse…

Hibernation Control System 2.0

The software making the data visible

Using the powers of Dancer, Plack, Starman, and jqPlot, I put a small web app together to display the data.  Here’s a post about implementing the web application.

A personal (but techy) project I’ve been doing on the side recently has just reached a milestone.
Some time in the next year we are going to move out of the city centre.  I want to live as far away from the concrete jungle, rumbling juggernauts and grumpy people as I can, but… it would be nice not to be too far away from friends, activities and shopping….

There are many parameters involved (and in time I will put them all on a map!), but probably the most important one is that our new home must be within a reasonable transit time by public transport of the city centre.  But reasonable is relative… if the new place is great it could be 40 minutes, for “ok” it would have to be less than 30, and “fantastic” might get us to stretch to 50 minutes.  The trips shouldn’t have a frequency (during the day) of more than 20 minutes either, otherwise we’d always be missing/waiting for a train…

So how can I visualise these regions on a map?

1. Write an interface to the MVV (the public transport provider in Munich) web interface.  Unfortunately they don’t have a documented API, but they do have a RESTful interface, and a Java interface already exists (thanks Andreas!).  Between that and some further reverse engineering it wasn’t too difficult.  I’ll be publishing that module soon too. 🙂
2. Localise all the stops in the region, and determine the transit times, and frequencies from the central station (Munich Hauptbahnhof) to each of the stops.  Throw all that data into a database for easy access. (SQLite is your friend).
3. Write a Perl interface to Google Fusion Tables (there are interfaces in Python and PHP already, but I prefer Perl…).
4. Analyse the data, generate polygons around each stop indicating the distance you could walk (assuming 4kmh average walking speed) from that stop after having travelled from the central station, within a time limit (10 minutes, 20 minutes, …)
5. Convert the polygons to KML (that’s an XML variant which google uses for representing geographic data).
6. Upload the polygons to Fusion tables
7. Do some tweaking with the colouring so that the data is visually appealing and understandable.

For my next party trick I’ll be putting proximity to shopping centres, parks on the map, and possibly doing the same representation for transit time with a car.  Any other ideas what would be relevant, and pretty on the map?

The last couple of weeks I’ve been getting accustomed to Google Fusion Tables.

For those who haven’t yet noticed it – Fusion Tables is a new (still in Beta) Google product for data storage: a kind of database.

Some major cool things about Fusion Tables:

1. it’s really accessible (use the usual OAuth2 authentication as for all other Google services to script interaction), or use the web interface to manually edit your tables.
2. If you include geo data in your tables, you can easily (and I mean really easily!) display your data on a map.
3. They’re really clever about geo data… a text address, longitude/latitude, polygons, shapes, … dump it into a “Location” type field, and it will probably be understood.

Net::OAuth2 isn’t actually a new Perl module, but in its previous state it wasn’t really usable for command line applications, so I reworked it a bit.  Both of these modules are very raw/alpha – they are lacking in documentation, error handling, unit tests…. all the things one would expect in productive code… but I want to get them out there now so other people can start using and abusing them.

Here’s a wee screencast of pfusion in action:

And a short instruction to install (I hope it’s complete…):

git clone git://github.com/robin13/Net-OAuth2.git
git clone git://github.com/robin13/Google-Fusion.git
vi ~/.fusion

Edit to look like this, with the id/secret of your application.  If you haven’t got an id/secret yet, you’ll have to register an application for this purpose on the Google API Console and be sure to make it an “installed application” (not “web application”)

---
client_id: 372296649547.apps.googleusercontent.com
client_secret: XDy8Y8xTuwN90F3h7ljCuw4i

# And now run fusion:

perl -I ./Google-Fusion/lib -I ./Net-OAuth2/lib ./Google-Fusion/bin/pfusion

If authentication is successful, you should be able to interact with Fusion Tables to your hearts content, and should find a .fusion.auth file in your home directory with your current tokens (you only have to enter the authentication code the first time).

I hope you have fun with it, and give me some nice pull requests on those repositories!