# Big, or just rich?

The current focus on "big data" may be obscuring something more interesting: it's often not the pure size of a dataset that's important.

The idea of extracting insight from large bodies of data promises significant advances in science and commerce. Given a large dataset, "big data" techniques cover a number of possible approaches:

• Look through the data for recurring patterns (data mining)
• Present a summary of the data to highlight features (analytics)
• (Less commonly) Identify automatically from the dataset what's happening in the real world (situation recognition)
There's a wealth of UK government data available, for example. Making it machine-readable means it can be presented in different ways, for example geographically. The real opportunities seem to come from cross-overs between datasets, though, where they can be mined and manipulated to find relationships that might otherwise remain hidden, for example the effects of crime on house prices.

Although the size and availability of datasets clearly makes a difference here -- big open data -- we might be confusing two issues. In some circumstances we might be better looking for smaller but richer datasets, and for richer connections between them.

Big data is a strange name to start with: when is data "big"? The only meaningful definition I can think of is "a dataset that's large relative to the current computing and storage capacity being deployed against it" -- which of course means that big data has always been with us, and indeed always will be. It also suggests that data might become less "big" if we become sufficiently interested in it to deploy more computing power to processing it. The alternative term popular in some places, data science, is equally tautologous, as I can't readily name a science that isn't based on data. (This isn't just academic pedantry, by the way: terms matter, if only to distinguish what topics are, and aren't, covered by big data/data science research.)

It's worth reviewing what big data lets us do. Having more data is useful when looking for patterns, since it makes the pattern stand out from the background noise. Those patterns in turn can reveal important processes at work in the world underlying the data, processes whose reach, significance, or even existence may be unsuspected. There may be patterns in the patterns, suggesting correlation or causality in the underling processes, and these can then be used for prediction: if pattern A almost always precedes pattern B in the dataset, then when I see a pattern A in the future I may infer that there's an instance of B coming. The statistical machine learning techniques that let one do this kind of analysis are powerful, but dumb: it still requires human identification and interpretation of the underlying processes to to conclude that A causes B, as opposed to A and B simply occurring together through some acausal correlation, or being related by some third, undetected process. A data-driven analysis won't reliably help you to distinguish between these options without further, non-data-driven insight.

Are there are cases in which less data is better? Our experience with situation recognition certainly suggests that this is the case. When you're trying to relate data to the the real world, it's essential to have ground truth, a record of what actually happened. You can then make a prediction about what the data indicates about the real world, and verify that this prediction is true or not against known circumstances. Doing this well over a dataset provides some confidence that the technique will work well against other data, where your prediction is all you have. In this case, what matters is not simply the size of the dataset, but its relationship to another dataset recording the actual state of the world: it's the richness that matters, not strictly the size (although having more data to train against is always welcome).

Moreover, rich connections may help with the more problematic part of data science, the identification of the processes underlying the dataset. While there may be no way to distinguish causality from correlation within a single dataset -- because they look indistinguishably alike -- the patterns of data points in the one dataset may often be related to patterns and data points in another dataset in which they don't look alike. So the richness provides a translation from one system to another, where the second provides discrimination not available in the first.

I've been struggling to think of an example of this idea, and this is the best I've come up with (and it's not all that good). Suppose we have tracking data for people around an area, and we see that person A repeatedly seems to follow person B around. Is A following B? Stalking them? Or do they live together, or work together (or even just close together)? We can distinguish between these alternatives by having a link from people to their jobs, homes, relationships and the like.

There's a converse concern, which is that poor discrimination can lead to the wrong conclusions being drawn: classifying person B as a potential stalker when he's actually an innocent who happens to follow a similar schedule. An automated analysis of a single dataset risks finding spurious connections, and it's increasingly the case that these false-positives (or -negatives, for that matter) could have real-world consequences.

Focusing on connections between data has its own dangers, of course, since we already know that we can make very precise classifications of people's actions from relatively small, but richly connected, datasets. Maybe the point here is that focusing exclusively on the size of a dataset masks both the advantages to be had from richer connections with other datasets, and the benefits and risks associated with smaller but better-connected datasets. Looking deeply can be as effective (or more so) as looking broadly.

# Some improvements to SleepySketch

It's funny how even early experiences change the way you think about a design. Two minor changes to SleepySketch have been suggested by early testing.

The first issue is obvious: milliseconds are a really inconvenient way to think about timing, especially when you're planning on staying asleep for long periods. A single method in SleepySketch to convert from more programmer-friendly days/hours/minutes/seconds times makes a lot of difference.

The second issue concerns scheduling -- or rather regular scheduling. Most sampling and communication tasks occur on predictable schedules, say every five hours. In an actor framework, that means the actor instance (or another one) has to be re-scheduled after the first has run. We can do this within the definition of the actor, for example using the post() action:

class PeriodicActor : public Actor {
void post();
void behaviour();
}

...

void PeriodicActor::post() {
Sleepy.scheduleIn(this, Sleepy.expandTime(0, 5));
}


(This also demonstrates the expandTime() function to re-schedule after 0 days and 5 hours, incidentally.) Simple, but bad design: we can't re-use PeriodicActor on a different schedule. If we add a variable to keep track of the repeating period, we'd be mixing up "real" behaviour with scheduling; more importantly, we'd have to do that for every actor that wants to run repeatedly.

A better way is to use an actor combinator that takes an actor and a period and creates an actor that runs first re-schedules the actor to run after the given period, and then runs the underlying actor. (We do it this way so that the period isn't affected by the time the actor actually takes to run.)

Actor *a = new RepeatingActor(new SomeActor(), Sleepy.expandTime(0, 5));
Sleepy.scheduleIn(a, Sleepy.expandTime(0, 5))


The RepeatingActor runs the behaviour of SomeActor every 5 hours, and we initially schedule it to run in 5 hours. We can actually encapsulate all of this by adding a method to SleepySketch itself:

Sleepy.scheduleEvery(new SomeActor(), Sleepy.expandTime(0, 5));


to perform the wrapping and initial scheduling automatically.

Simple sleepy sketches can now be created at set-up, by scheduling repeating actors, and we can define the various actors and re-use them in different scheduling situations without complicating their own code.

A simple radio survey establishes the ranges that the radios can manage.

The 2mW XBee radios we've got have a nominal range of 100m -- but that's in free air, with no obstructions like bushes, ditches, and houses, and not when enclosed in a plastic box to protect them from the elements. There's a reasonable chance that these obstacles will reduce the real range significantly.

A radio survey is fairly simple to accomplish. We load software that talks to a server on the base station -- something as simple as possible, like sending a single packet with a count every ten seconds -- and keep careful track of the return values coming back from the radio library. We then use the only output device we have -- an LED -- to indicate the success or failure of each operation, preferably with an indication of why it failed if it did. (Three flashes for unsuccessful transmission, five for no response received, and so forth.) We then walk away from the base station, watching the behaviour of the radio. When it starts to get errors, we've reached the edge of the effective range.

With two sensor motes, we can also check wireless mesh networking. If we place the first mote in range of the base station, we should then be able to walk further and have the second mote connect via the first, automatically. That's the theory, anyway...

(One extra thing to improve robustness: if the radios lose connection or get power-cycled, they can end up on a different radio channel to the co-ordinator. To prevent this, the radio needs to have an ATJV1 command issued to it. The easiest way to do this is at set-up, through the advanced settings in X-CTU.)

The results are fairly unsurprising. In an enclosure, in the field, with a base station inside a house (and so behind double glazing and suchlike) the effective range of the XBees is about 30--40m -- somewhat less than half the nominal range, and not really sufficient to reach the chosen science site: another 10--20m would be fine. On the other hand, the XBees mesh together seamlessly: taking a node out of range and placing another between it and the base station connects the network with no effort.

This is somewhat disappointing, but that's what this project is all about: the practicalities of sensor networking with cheap hardware.

There are several options to improve matters. A higher-powered radio would help: the 50mW XBee has a nominal range of 1km and so would be easily sufficient (and could probably be run at reduced transmission power). A router node halfway between base station and sensors could extend the network, and the cost of an additional non-sensing component. Better antennas on the 2mW radios might help too, especially if they could be placed outside the enclosure.

It's also worth noting that the radio segment is horrendously hard to debug with only a single LED for signalling. Adding more LEDs might help, but it's still a very poor debugging interface, even compared to printing status messages to the USB port.

# Sleepy sketches

Keeping the microcontroller asleep as much as possible is a key goal for a sensor system, so it makes sense to organise the entire software process around that.

The standard Arduino software model is, well, standard: programs ("sketches") are structured in terms of a setup() function that runs once when the system restarts and a loop() function that is run repeatedly. This suggests that the system spends its time running, which possibly isn't all that desirable: a sensor system typically tries to stay in a low-power mode as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is to provide a programming framework that handles the sleeping, and where the active bits of the program are scheduled automatically.

There are at least two ways to do this. The simplest is a library that lets loop() sleep, either directly or indirectly. This is good for simple programs and not so good for more complicated ones, as it means that loop() encapsulates all the program's logic in a single block. A more modern and compositional approach is to let program fragments request when they want to run somehow, and have a scheduler handle the sleeping, waking up, and execution of those fragments. That lets (for example) one fragment decide at run-time to schedule another

If we adopt this approach,we have to worry about the fact that one fragment might lock-out another. A desktop system might use threads; this is more problematic for a microcontroller, but an alternative is to force all fragments to only execute for a finite amount of time, so that the scheduler always gets control back. This might lead to a fragment not running when it asked (if other fragments were still running), but if we assume that the system spends most of its time asleep anyway, there will be plenty of catch-up time. Doing this results in an actor system where the fragments are actors that are scheduled from an actor queue.

Turning this into code, we get the SleepySketch library: a library for building Arduino sketches that spend most of their time sleeping.

There are a few wrinkles that need to be taken care of for running on a resource-constrained system. Firstly, the number of actors available is fixed at start-up (defaulting to 10), so that we can balance RAM usage.(With only 2k to play with, we need to be careful). Secondly, we use a class to manage the sleeping functionality in different ways: a BusySleeper that uses the normal delay() function (a busy loop) with no power-saving functions, a HeavySleeper that uses the watchdog timer to shut the system down as far as possible, and possibly some other intermediate strategies. Actors are provided by sub-classing the Actor class and providing a behaviour. We also allow pre- and post-behaviour actions to define families of actors, for example sensor observers. We separate the code for an actor from its scheduling.

The standard library uses singleton classes quite a lot, so for example the Serial object represents the USB connection from an Arduino to its host computer and is the target for all methods. We use the same approach and define a singleton, Sleepy

The program structure then loops something like this. If we assume that we've defined an actor class PingActor, then we can do the following:

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
Sleepy.begin(new HeavySleeper());

Sleepy.scheduleIn(new PingActor("Ping!"), 10000);
}

void loop() {
Sleepy.loop();
}


The setup() code initialises the serial port and the sleepy sketch using a HeavySleeper, and then schedules an actor to run in 10000ms. The loop() code runs the actors while there are actors remaining to schedule. If the PingActor instance just prints its message, then there will be no further actors to execute and the program will end; alternatively the actor could schedule further actors to be run later, and the sketch will pick them up. The sketch will remain asleep for as long as possible (probably for over 9s between start-up and the first ping), allowing for some fairly significant power saving.

This is a first design, now just about working. It's still not as easy as it could be, however, and needs some testing to make sure that the power savings do actually materialise.

# Understanding Arduino sleep modes: the watchdog timer

The Arduino has several sleep modes that can be used to reduce power consumption. The most useful for sensor networks is probably the one that uses the watchdog timer.

[mathjax]

Powering-down the Arduino makes a lot of sense for a sensor network: it saves battery power allowing the system to survive for longer. Deciding when to power the system down is another story, but in this post we'll concentrate on documenting the mechanics of the process. The details are necessarily messy and low-level. (I've been greatly helped in writing this post by the data sheet for the Atmel ATmega328P microcontroller that's used in the Arduino Uno, as well as by a series of blog posts by Donal Morrissey that also deal with other sleep modes for the Atmel.)

### Header files and general information

To use the watchdog timer, a sketch needs to include three header files:
#include <avr/power.h>
#include <avr/wdt.h>


These provide definitions for various functions and variables needed to control the watchdog timer and manage some of the other power functions.

### Power modes

A power (or sleep) mode is a setting for the microcontroller that allows it to use less power in exchange of disabling some of its functions. Since a microcontroller is, to all intents and purposes, a small computer on a chip, it has a lot of sub-systems that may not be needed all the time. A power mode lets you shut these unneeded sub-systems down. The result saves power but reduces functionality.

Power modes are pretty coarse control mechanisms, and can shut down more than you intend. If your project is basically software-driven, with the Arduino making all the decisions, then a "deep" power-saving mode is ideal; on the other hand, if you rely on hardware-based signals at all, a "deep" sleep will probably ignore your hardware and the Arduino may never wake up.

The watchdog timer is used to manage the "power-down" mode, the deepest sleep mode with the biggest power savings.

### Watchdog timer

The Arduino's watchdog timer is a countdown timer that's driven by its own oscillator on the microcontroller. It's designed to run even when all the other circuitry is powered down, meaning that the microcontroller is drawing as little power as possible without actually being turned off completely.

Why "watchdog" timer? The basic function of a watchdog timer is to "bite" after a certain period, where "biting" means raising an interrupt, re-setting the system, or both. A typical use of a watchdog is to make a system more robust to software failures. Since the watchdog is handled by the microcontroller's hardware, independent of any program being run, it will still bite even if the software gets stuck in an infinite loop (for example). Some designers set the watchdog ahead of complex operations, so that if the operation fails, the system will reset in a short amount of time and end up back in a known-good configuration. At the end of a successful operation, the program disables the watchdog (before it bites) and carries on. Of course this assumes that the operation completes before the watchdog bites, which means the programmer needs to have a good idea of how long it will take.

### Setting the time-out period

It's as well to understand how watchdog timers on microcontrollers work. Typically they have a fairly coarse resolution, counting a fixed number of timer ticks before "biting" and performing some function. In the case of the Arduino, the watchdog timer is driven by the internal oscillator running at 128KHz and counts off some multiple of ticks before biting. This value -- the number of ticks counted -- is referred to as the "prescalar" for the timer.

The prescalar is controlled by the values of four bits in the watchdog timer's control register, WDTCSR. To set them up, you pick the value of prescalar you want and set the appropriate bits. If the bits contain a number ( i ), then the watchdog will bite after ( (2048 << i) / 128000 ) seconds. So ( i = 0) means the watchdog bites after 16ms; ( i = 1 ) produces  delay of 32ms; and so on up to ( i = 9 ) (the largest value allowed) means the watchdog bites after about 8s.

The word "about" is important here: the oscillator's exact frequency depends on the supply voltage to the chip and some other factors, meaning that you should be conservative about relying on the delay time.

Writing the appropriate value of ( i ) into the control register involves representing ( i ) as a four-digit binary number and then writing these bits into four bits of the register -- and unfortunately these bits aren't consecutive. if ( i = 7 ) for example, then this is 0b0111 in binary, so we write 1 into bits WDP0, WDP1 and WDP2, and 0 into bit WDP3, and 0 into all the other bits:

WDTCSR = (1 << WDP0) | (1 << WDP1) | (1 << WDP2);


The phrases of the form (1 << WDP0) simply takes a binary digit 1 and shifts it left into bit position WDP0. The | symbols logically OR these bits together to generate the final bit mask that is assigned to the control register.

Actually there's a little bit more to it than this, as we can't change the watchdog's configuration arbitrarily. Instead we have to notify the chip that it's configuration is about to be changed, by setting two other bits in the control register and then performing the updates we want:

WDTCSR |= (1 << WDCE) | (1 << WDE);


Setting WDCE enables changes in configuration to be made in the next few processor cycles, i.e. immediately. Setting WDE resets the timer.

Finally we enable the watchdog timer interrupts by setting bit WDIE. When the watchdog timer bites, the microcontroller executes an interrupt handler, re-starts the main program, and clears WDIE. Any further interrupts, if the time is re-enabled, will then cause a system reset.

WDTCSR |= (1 << WDIE);


So the complete code the setting up the watchdog timer to bite in 2s is:

set_sleep_mode(SLEEP_MODE_PWR_DOWN);              // select the watchdog timer mode
MCUSR &= ~(1 << WDRF);                            // reset status flag
WDTCSR |= (1 << WDCE) | (1 << WDE);               // enable configuration changes
WDTCSR = (1 << WDP0) | (1 << WDP1) | (1 << WDP2); // set the prescalar = 7
WDTCSR |= (1 << WDIE);                            // enable interrupt mode
sleep_enable();                                   // enable the sleep mode ready for use
sleep_mode();                                     // trigger the sleep

/* ...time passes ... */

sleep_disable();                                  // prevent further sleeps</pre>


### Interrupt handler

What happens when the watchdog bites? It causes an interrupt that has to be handled before the program can continue. The interrupt could be used for all sorts of things, but there's often no point in worrying about it: but it still has to be there, to prevent the microcontroller just resetting. The following code installs a dummy interrupt handler:

ISR( WDT_vect ) {
/* dummy */
}


The WDT_vect identifies the watchdog timer's interrupt vector.

While this might seem like a waste of time, it's important to have an interrupt handler as the default behaviour of the watchdog timer is to reset the microcontroller, which we want to avoid. It's also worth noting that, once enabled, the watchdog timer will keep biting, so the interrupt handler will be called repeatedly. (Put a print statement in the hander to see.) This doesn't cause any problems.