I made a thing for my flaky broadband...

As is tradition, I shall begin my tale of spending way, WAY too much time on a project with the finished product. I call it the "Internet Connection Informant," or simply "Informant" for short, because, well, that's what it is and does.

Pretty simple in appearance, but getting it to this point was a 16-month process. Yeah, I wasn't kidding about the "spending way, WAY too much time" part.

Also, making something simple to use is actually very hard.

But first, the backstory:

My cable broadband can't seem to decide whether to work perfectly or drop every few minutes. It'll work fine for months, and then seemingly out of nowhere it'll flake out intermittently for a few weeks at a time. Trying to get it fixed has led to the discovery that it's not even on my end at all - my connection gets all wonky whenever my broadband provider is doing work on their equipment. (One of the engineers assigned to my "case" discovered a correlation between head-end update/upgrade cycles and a spike in problem calls. Apparently I'm one of the lucky ones that experiences connection problems when they get to tinkering with their equipment. Yay.)

So, I wanted something to handle automatically restarting the modem and router. No big deal, they sell things on Amazon that do that. I then looked into said products on Amazon and good Lord do they suck. The basic ones are literally Arduinos with Ethernet hats and relay boards that ping 8.8.8.8 (Google's public DNS server) and toggle relays if a ping doesn't get through.

"I can do better," I thought.

So I cobbled together some goodies and built my own. And it turned out glorious. (Well, I think it did anyway.)

It does a simple ping test (against up to five targets) every 30 seconds, and a more comprehensive connection test every quarter-hour. Failing a test triggers a modem and router power-cycle and repeat test. Test results are recorded and recorded results are converted into charts, so I can actually SEE what my connection is doing. The magic black box also records modem and router response times and alerts me to the modem and/or router lagging, so I can see if it's my hardware that's throwing a tantrum.

The world's easiest setup:

1. Plug modem into the leftmost outlet.
2. Plug router (if there is one) into the rightmost outlet.
3. Connect network cable from that RJ45 jack there to the router (or modem if it has an integrated router).
4. Plug power cable into the power socket and apply mains AC.

That's literally all there is to using this thing. It'll start up, charge up (more on that in a sec...), find and identify the modem and router (I have it set up to detect about 80 of them, encompassing most of the recommended hardware lists of the broadband providers in the US as well as top-selling consumer and "prosumer" routers), configure itself based on what it finds, and then start monitoring and testing the Internet connection it can reach through the local network.

A lot of hardware got packed into the box. There's an industrial power supply to run everything, a custom controller board to manage two solid-state relays that do the power cycling of modem and router, and a quad-core SBC (in this case, an Odroid C2) that performs the actual connection checks. I picked the C2 over, say, a Raspberry Pi because it has real gigabit networking on its own hardware layer, instead of shared gigabit that can't actually do gigabit like a RPi3 does.

The blue things are another thing I thought wouldn't be a bad idea to include: an internal UPS. Since the Odroid C2 uses a microSD card and they do NOT like power interruptions (read: if the power drops during a write it hoses the filesystem), I added two 100-farad supercapacitors and bridging/balancing circuitry to power the entire unit for a short period of time in the event of a power failure. When the power goes out, both the controller board and C2 are alerted to the situation and the C2 immediately saves all pending disk I/O and shuts itself down. The controller then watches for power to be restored and restarts the C2 when all is well again.

When the Informant is plugged into AC power for the first time (or the first time in a while), nothing shows on the front display for about a minute as the supercaps charge. When they charge enough to power the display, it shows a progress percentage until it's charged up enough to start up the C2. It finishes charging while the rest of the unit does its startup stuff.

I should probably mention that the supercapacitor power backup is only for the Informant itself - it does not power external devices like whatever's plugged into its power outlets. Nothing says the unit can't be plugged into a UPS, though, for extra redundancy and the ability to keep modem/router powered up through power failures...

A side effect of built-in supercapacitor power backup: it'll run when it's not plugged into anything, at least until the charge bleeds off the supercaps...

I don't want my crap to be set on fire, so I built in a ton of safety systems. This is one of them: a non-contact AC current detector. It's not easy to tell but I'm holding it against a power cord for my soldering station and it's sensing that there's current a-flowin'. The Informant uses two of these, sitting atop the two AC outlets in the back, to sense AC wiring faults. It'll detect a dead port (solid-state relay should be "on" but no current is flowing) as well as a stuck relay or backfeed (solid-state relay should be "off" but there's current flow for some reason).

There's also a timed "lockout" limitation on switching the power to the outlets, so that equipment plugged into them won't be damaged by toggling power on and off too quickly. The SSRs themselves are hooked to a heatsink and that heatsink has a temperature probe attached, so if things get too warm the whole thing shuts down and flashes an obnoxious overheat warning message on its front display.

Since I'm using a SBC as a "brain," and it can run a Linux distro, I can do all sorts of fun things. Like install a web stack. After the C2 boots up, it does an internal hardware check once a minute to do things like update its internal list of what the outlets are doing, take temp sensor readings, and so on. One of the steps is to determine its local IP address, which then gets shown on the display. Pointing a browser at that URL gives access to the test result charts, settings, configuration info, and even port controls for manually turning the outlets on and off.

And again since, well, SBC/Linux, I wrote an API for it so it's programmable. The test scripts are Python 3.4+ (but run fine in 2.7.9). Making custom tests for things like checking if a local fileserver is working, etc. is trivial.

Went for a nice, clean look for the web interface. I found a wonderful CSS stylesheet set from W3schools.com that makes it almost ridiculously easy to make a website that scales across platforms and automatically works just as well on mobile devices. Thanks to their CSS wizardry, that web interface is perfectly usable on a cellphone as well as a desktop PC.

Because why the hell not, I also added some basic testing tools. I can run a tracerouter or do a simple downstream speed test from there. Planning on adding a couple extras like a packet loss test at some point.

The "server latency/routing monitor targets" part should be interesting to the gaming crowd. I'm working on giving it the ability to monitor the latency and network connectivity conditions for up to 32 IP/port combinations. They'll be tested on 15-minute intervals like the main connection test, and will be listed on the main page of the unit's website here with color coded warnings for laggy connection or a higher-than-normal hop count from the traceroute.

Or, to TL;DR that bit, I can plug in the IPs/ports to my favorite game servers and see when they're lagging and/or there are routing problems between me and them. It won't tell me if a server is busy, etc. since it's only a connectivity test, but art least I'll be able to conclusively prove that my suckage in whatever game was due to lag.

Oh, that "support" menu entry was a recent addition - once I started showing this thing off to friends and acquaintances, there was a lot of "where and how much?" followed by surprise when I said it was a personal project. As such I'm exploring options for maybe crowdfunding a batch or two. That "support" menu will thus eventually point to a website somewhere if that comes to fruition.

I also added a simple little PHP script that gives the world's quickest Internet connection condition check. Again, works on any device, like my phone there.

Since the world is full of scumbags, security is a thing. I set it up so that, first off, the web server is configured to ONLY show pages to visitors whose IP address is within one of the IANA-allocated local network address blocks. So if you're trying to caress the Informant's website gently from outside the LAN (read: whoever set up the router foolishly added a port forward to the Informant instead of doing something more secure like set up a VPN) it'll serve you a 403 error and tell you to piss off.

I also set it up so that in order to access controls that can do things that might annoy fellow users of the LAN, one must have direct physical access to the Informant itself. Trying to get at the configuration controls, for example, will result in being told you need to enter a security code to proceed. Said code is shown on the front panel display of the unit for ten minutes once a "generate code" button is clicked. The authentication is per-client-device, and can be set to time out after one day/week/month/year or remain in effect permanently. That'll make it much harder for anyone to "accidentally" touch something important (like the "reset modem/router now" button).

Lunch tax!

Cat wanting lunch tax!