How to use SciPy Least Squares to minimize multiple functions at once

SciPy comes with a least squares Levenberg-Marquardt implementation. This allows you to minimize functions. By defining your function as the difference between some measurements and your model function, you can fit a model to those measurements.

Sometimes your model contains multiple functions. You can also minimize for all functions using this approach:

  • Define your functions that you like to minimize A(p0), B(P1), …
    their cumulative paramaters will be a tuple (p0, p1, …).
  • Define your function to be minimized as f(x0), where x0 is expanded to the parameter tuple.
  • The function f returns a vector of differences between discrete measured sample and the individual functions A, B etc.
  • Let SciPy minimize this function, starting with a reasonably selected initial parameter vector.

This is an example implementation:


import math
import scipy.optimize

measured = {
1: [ 0, 0.02735, 0.47265 ],
6: [ 0.0041, 0.09335, 0.40255 ],
10: [ 0.0133, 0.14555, 0.34115 ],
20: [ 0.0361, 0.205, 0.2589 ],
30: [ 0.06345, 0.23425, 0.20225 ],
60: [ 0.132, 0.25395, 0.114 ],
90: [ 0.2046, 0.23445, 0.06095 ],
120: [ 0.2429, 0.20815, 0.04895 ],
180: [ 0.31755, 0.1618, 0.02065 ],
240: [ 0.3648, 0.121, 0.0142 ],
315: [ 0.3992, 0.0989, 0.00195 ]
}

def A( x, a, k ):
return a * math.exp( -x * k )

def B( x, a, k, l ):
return k * a / ( l - k ) * ( math.exp( -k * x ) - math.exp( -l * x ) )

def C( x, a, k, l ):
return a * ( 1 - l / ( l - k ) * math.exp( -x * k ) + k / ( l - k ) * math.exp( -x * l ) )

def f( x0 ):
a, k, l = x0
error = []
for x in measured:
error += [ C( x, a, k, l ) - measured[ x ][ 0 ],
B( x, a, k, l ) - measured[ x ][ 1 ],
A( x, a, k ) - measured[ x ][ 2 ]
]
return error

def main():
x0 = ( 0.46, 0.01, 0.001 ) # initial parameters for a, k and l
x, cov, infodict, mesg, ier = scipy.optimize.leastsq( f, x0, full_output = True, epsfcn = 1.0e-2 )
print x

if __name__ == "__main__":
main()

SciPy returns a lot more information, not only the final parameters. See their documentation for details. You also may want to tweak epsfcn for a better fit. This depends on your functions shape and properties.

Avoiding page allocation failures on the Pi

Since I’ve been using my 256MB Model B Pi as a server, I had been getting regular page allocation failures of the following kind:


sshd: page allocation failure: order:0, mode:0x20

This is rather annoying and seems to affect stability as well, like disrupted ssh or smb connections. It seems that the kernel has a setting to affect the minimum free memory that it keeps for allocations, which may be too low. So in the /etc/sysctl.conf file you can edit the last lines to bump this value from 8 Mbegabytes to 16 Megabytes:


# rpi tweaks
vm.swappiness=1
vm.min_free_kbytes = 16184

Settings are effective after a reboot. For me, this seems to fix the problem. But to be extra sure, I also changed the memory split from 192/64 to 224/32. Since my Pi runs headless, 64 MBytes seemed too much simply for a framebuffer console that is not even used. So after these tweaks my Pi shows 216 MByte of available memory and is running for some days now without page allocation errors.

Delay warnings when using USB audio on the Raspberry Pi

My kernel.log and debug log files had grown to over 2 GBytes each. This was due to log messages of this kind:


delay: estimated 0, actual 133

As another blog stated, this can be fixed by adding a parameter to the sound-usb-audio module of Alsa. So I did the same thing, creating a file /etc/modprobe.d/snd_usb_audio.conf with this content:


options snd-usb-audio nrpacks=1

After restarting Alsa or a reboot, the problems were gone, the logfiles kept small.

The Raspberry Pi and Ralink rt2800 based WiFi dongles

I strongly discourage the usage of rt2800 based WiFi dongles with the Raspberry Pi. For some weeks I have been debugging why my Raspberry Pi freezes and crashes all the time. And it turns out that it is the WiFi dongle. I was using an Edimax EW-7711UTn, but the chip is also being used in other devices. There seems to be a bug report for the Raspbian kernel, and I have spent quite some time on the Raspberry forum at Stackexchange. Currently, I hooked up the Raspberry Pi via Ethernet directly to my router. This works fine, but the router is upstairs, while the Raspberry is supposed to be downstairs, connected to my stereo. So this is only a stopgap measure until I have found a WiFi dongle that does not crash the Pi. Hints are welcome.

Update: I now switched to a TP-Link TL-WN725N with a RTL8188CUS chip. This adapter is much smaller (no external antenna) and surprisingly also quite a bit faster. I achieve ~1.9 MByte/sec sustained point to point datarates via SMB. So far no crashes or other problems. I will continue testing, but it looks much better than with the Ralink chip.
Update 2: Almost four months into testing the RTL8188CUS based WiFi dongle and it runs absolutely fine. I have uptimes of almost a month without any problems. After that the Pi degrades due to some of the daemons leaking or memory fragmentation. But I think this is bearable!

How to make the mpdas run as a daemon

The other day I installed the mpdas, which is the audio scrobbler for the music player daemon. Since there’s no debian package for the Raspberry Pi, I compiled mpdas from scratch and installed it. Now I don’t want to run it manually each time the Raspberry Pi boots up. So I found a nice template for writing your own debian-style init-script. I changed it a little and also installed the daemon tool, to turn the interactive mpdas program into a daemon. Just run apt-get install daemon to install it. Then put the following file under /etc/init.d/mpdas and run update-rc.d mpdas defaults. Then mpdas will be run automatically upon boot. Oh, one more thing: put your mpdas configuration under /usr/local/etc/mpdasrc or adjust the DAEMONOPTS in the init script accordingly.


#!/bin/bash
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: mpdas
# Required-Start: $remote_fs $syslog $mpd
# Required-Stop: $remote_fs $syslog
# Default-Start: 2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# X-Interactive: true
# Short-Description: Audio Scrobbler for mpd
# Description: Starts the Audio Scrobbler for the mpd music player daemon.
### END INIT INFO

DAEMON_PATH="/usr/bin/"

DAEMON=daemon
DAEMONOPTS="-u pi -r -X /usr/local/bin/mpdas"

NAME=mpdas
DESC="The mpdas audio scrobbler for mpd"
PIDFILE=/var/run/$NAME.pid
SCRIPTNAME=/etc/init.d/$NAME

case "$1" in
start)
printf "%-50s" "Starting $NAME..."
cd $DAEMON_PATH
PID=`$DAEMON $DAEMONOPTS > /dev/null 2>&1 & echo $!`
#echo "Saving PID" $PID " to " $PIDFILE
if [ -z $PID ]; then
printf "%sn" "Fail"
else
echo $PID > $PIDFILE
printf "%sn" "Ok"
fi
;;
status)
printf "%-50s" "Checking $NAME..."
if [ -f $PIDFILE ]; then
PID=`cat $PIDFILE`
if [ -z "`ps axf | grep ${PID} | grep -v grep`" ]; then
printf "%sn" "Process dead but pidfile exists"
else
echo "Running"
fi
else
printf "%sn" "Service not running"
fi
;;
stop)
printf "%-50s" "Stopping $NAME"
PID=`cat $PIDFILE`
cd $DAEMON_PATH
if [ -f $PIDFILE ]; then
kill -HUP $PID
printf "%sn" "Ok"
rm -f $PIDFILE
else
printf "%sn" "pidfile not found"
fi
;;

restart)
$0 stop
$0 start
;;

*)
echo "Usage: $0 {status|start|stop|restart}"
exit 1
esac

How to make the Raspberry Pi automatically restart the WiFi interface

My WiFi router sometimes goes haywire and the Pi won’t notice when the WiFi connection is up again. So I wrote this little script:

#!/bin/bash                                   

TESTIP=192.168.1.1

ping -c4 ${TESTIP} > /dev/null

if [ $? != 0 ]
then
logger -t $0 "WiFi seems down, restarting"
ifdown --force wlan0
ifup wlan0
else
logger -t $0 "WiFi seems up."
fi

You can put this script under /usr/local/bin and add the following line to the system wide /etc/crontab:

*/5 * * * * root /usr/local/bin/testwifi.sh

This will check every five minutes if the connection is still up, and restart it, if the router cannot be pinged. If you dislike all the syslog messages, you can comment them out in the script.
My corresponding /etc/network/interfaces looks like this (I uninstalled all the network managers):


auto lo

iface lo inet loopback
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.3.42
netmask 255.255.255.0

auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
pre-up wpa_supplicant -Dwext -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -B
post-down killall wpa_supplicant ; rmmod 8192cu ; modprobe 8192cu

iface default inet dhcp

The wpa_supplicant.conf should be easy to generate, there are lots of guides on the web for this.

Good console fonts for OS X terminal applications

Today I was looking for a better console font for the Apple terminal application. Up until now I was using a variant of the Terminus font, but it did not have the line drawing characters. So several programs looked quite borked. But there is a nice page with a collection of the X11 terminal fonts in Apple’s dfont format, which you know and like from all kinds of Linux distributions.
You have to tweak the spacings, for example for the 7×14 font you need to pick 0.98 and 0.93 for the horizontal and vertical spacing. Also make sure to use the fonts at their specified size. I.e. the 7×14 font at 14 points only.

Attaching a USB sound card to the Raspberry Pi

Since my Raspberry Pi runs headless, and the analog audio output is not that great, I decided to add a USB sound card to my little machine. I took a Roland UA-1G, which I was using before on an OpenWRT machine. The device was immediately recognized:


Bus 001 Device 007: ID 0582:00ea Roland Corp.

However, ALSA will prohibit the card from becoming sound device #0, thus being the default. For that you have to comment out the following line in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf:


# Keep snd-usb-audio from beeing loaded as first soundcard
#options snd-usb-audio index=-2

After rebooting or restarting ALSA, the Roland will become the default sound device:


$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: UA1G [UA-1G], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA], device 0: bcm2835 ALSA [bcm2835 ALSA]
Subdevices: 7/8
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
Subdevice #2: subdevice #2
Subdevice #3: subdevice #3
Subdevice #4: subdevice #4
Subdevice #5: subdevice #5
Subdevice #6: subdevice #6
Subdevice #7: subdevice #7

Playing with REST: SilverShield USB power web frontend

Yesterday I started to code a small tool that lets me turn on and off power outlets on my USB controlled  power strip. You can find the humble beginnings over at github. It uses the sispmctl tool to turn on and off the sockets. It is implemented in Python using the Tornado web server. The rendering is simple, not styled and not yet HTML compliant. But it already scans for attached devices, and lets you toggle single outlets. However, today the power strip sort of died on me, and now I have to look for another project to practice REST with…

How to convert a Python list into a string in a strange way

Given a list in Python, suppose you wanted a string representation of that list. Easy enough:


str( [ 1, 2, 3 ] )

However, suppose you did not want the standard notation, but rather apply some function to each string element or simply do away with the brackets and commas, you can use list comprehension, the join function and an empty string literal:


''.join( str( i ) for i in [ 1, 2, 3 ] )

I already knew list comprehension, but using it in this scenario and with a string literal as an object was new to me. Anyway, using such code is probably a bad idea, since it might be hard to read! At the very least, one should stow it away in a function with a fitting name, such as jointStringRepresentationOfListItems( list ). But really, I am not even sure what I would use that for…

Update: even better is this:


','.join( map( str, [ 1, 2, 3 ] ) )