Waiting for cows

Waiting for Cows is an interactive storytelling project that explores the complex relationship between humans, animals and technology. Set on a Friesian farm, the main protagonists are Dutch dairy cows monitored by wearables, conditioned by algorithms and quantified in data.

Development

Requirements: A linux machine with mpv installed

sudo apt install mpv # for debian based distros
sudo dnf install mpv # for red had based

or if you are using a mac

brew install mpv

Set up rbenv, which should install the right ruby and bundler versions.

And then

bundle install

Copy videos of the cows in videos directory. And make sure they are named in the following way

235_eating_inside.mov
235_eating_outside.mov
235_milking_main.mov
235_ruminations_inside.mov
235_ruminations_outside.mov
cows_go_inside.mp4
cows_go_outside.mp4

Do the same for the other cows.

Run the mpv player in background (notice the & at the end)

mpv --input-ipc-server=/tmp/mpvsocket --loop=inf --fullscreen videos/235_ruminations_inside.mov &

Start the script

ruby main.rb

You may set the environment API_URL=localhost:3000 if you are running our backend locally.

The correct name of the events in the filename must be ruminations, milking, eating, grazing, resting.

OR you can simply run the bash script which runs both the above commands. In the museum installation, this might be the easier approach

chmod +x ./run-wfc.sh
./run-wfc.sh

Then you can check for logs in tmp/ folder and tail it.

If you simply want to end all the processes, you can run

chmod +x ./end-wfc.sh
./end-wfc.sh

Code style

We use standardrb for code formatting and linting. Make sure to install the standard ruby vscode extension if you are using vscode/vscodium. They support various editors, do check out their repository.

Testing

We have rspec tests that uses timecop gem to check for the queuing of events and how the timeline is built. To run the tests

rspec .

or you can run the below to watch changes as you develop

bundle exec guard

Production

The following are some configurations we use on production raspberry pi machines.

Restarts

Set up crontab to perform some tasks like restarting the program.

crontab -e

This will open an editor like vim and then enter

0 6,11 * * * /home/robina/code/wfc-client/run-wfc.sh

The entry suggests to run our script run-wfc.sh at 6am and 11am. This ensures new start of the day for logging. In the above entry, robina is the name of the user, make sure to substitute with appropriate user name.

To make the video player work from crontab, we need to make some small changes to the about run-wfc.sh script. This is so that crontab has access to the display server.

You may get the current active display server by

echo $DISPLAY

This should output :0

Then add the following at the beginning of run-wfc.sh, after the hashbang

export DISPLAY=:0
export XAUTHORITY=/home/robina/.Xauthority

You should also change the path of ruby to it's executable. You can do that by

which ruby

This will output /home/robina/.rbenv/shims/ruby.

Final `run-wfc.sh` should look like

#!/bin/bash

export DISPLAY=:0
export XAUTHORITY=/home/robina/.Xauthority

cd ~/code/wfc-client

# Ensure tmp directory exists
mkdir -p tmp

./end-wfc.sh

# Generate timestamp in yyyy-mm-dd-hh format
DATESTAMP=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")

# Start mpv with logs visible and running in the background
nohup mpv --input-ipc-server=/tmp/mpvsocket --loop=inf --fullscreen ./videos/235_ruminations_inside.mov >> tmp/mpv-$DATESTAMP.log 2>&1 &

echo "mpv started. Logs are being written to tmp/mpv-$DATESTAMP.log"

# Start the Ruby script with logs visible and running in the background
nohup /home/robina/.rbenv/shims/ruby main.rb >> tmp/wfc-$DATESTAMP.log 2>&1 &

echo "Ruby script started. Logs are being written to tmp/wfc-$DATESTAMP.log"

# Display information to the user
echo "Both processes are running in the background."

Autostart

To start the program on boot:

mkdir ~/.config/autostart
cat <<EOF | tee -a ~/.config/autostart/wfc.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/bin/sh -c "sleep 5 && /home/robina/code/wfc-client/run-wfc.sh"
Name=WFC
EOF

You may run the below command to ensure the validity of the autostart file

desktop-file-validate ~/.config/autostart/wfc.desktop

Clean up logs

We are collecting some logs for monitoring the software both mpv player and ruby script. The tmp/mpv-*.log files are much heavier than the ruby logging, hence we want to clear those out. For this we have a script which can be added to crontab

crontab -e

Enter the path to the script and the time

0 7 * * * /home/robina/code/wfc-client/cleanup-logs.sh

Credits

madhums and RobBothof