brainwagon

A couple of people on my twitter feed yesterday (aside: I tweet using @brainwagon, and passed 5000 tweets yesterday) had questions about how this light field camera worked, how fast the sensor was, how long it takes to acquire the image, etc… While this is the first Lytro camera I’ve ever had the time to […]

I spent a couple years of my life working on a light field motion picture camera (and got named on two patents) as part of my former work, so I’ve been interested in light field photography and computational photography more generally. The company Lytro was basically the first to market such a device, and recently […]

I think Bill and Pete have been having way too much fun with the radio projects centered around the Arduino and the SI5351, so I decided to join them and ordered one of Adafruit’s SI5351 boards (I still have the kit from Jason’s Kickstarter which will almost certainly be better once I get up the […]

Yesterday I experienced some frustration with the SainSmart I2C LCD Module that I bought to help Pete and Bill uncover the problems that they’ve been having. If you go and read, you’ll find that I had a lot of difficulty finding the right combination of code that can be used with this module. Eventually, I […]

I am a big fan of Bill Meara N2CQR and Pete Juliano N6QW, hosts of the really great Soldersmoke Podcast. Together, they chat about homebrewing ham radio equipment, and what they’ve learned in their lessons along the way. Their “tribal knowledge” is of terrific help to someone like me who keeps making small forays into […]

This little gadget arrived via Amazon Prime today: a three axis gyroscope/accelerometer that can be programmed via the I2C bus. I didn’t really have any reason to get one, other than simple curiosity, although I suspect that possibly mounting one on my (as yet unfinished) robot platform might be able to determine motion parameters of […]

While digging around looking for an LCD module I thought I had stashed somewhere, I encountered a bag with some of 8mm individually addressable RGB LEDs that I had never done anything with. For fun, I thought I’d wire a few of them up on my breadboard and see if I could get them to […]

Tonight’s tinkering was inspired by the script by spikedrba that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. I took down the hummingbird camera for a little maintenance, and while it was down decided to do some bench testing with new ideas inspired by what I read. Sadly, I didn’t have anything as photogenic as hummingbirds to stare […]

My goal in experimenting with the Raspberry Pi camera was to try to make an efficient and effective camera which can detect motion. Previous incarnations of the camera script merely looked at the differences in pixel values between adjacent frames, thresholded them at some value, and then counted the number of pixels which exceeded this […]

Tom pointed me at this awesome article about an experiment run as part of the BBC programming Stargazing Live. Basically, they asked their viewers to go outside with their cell phones and take a picture of the night sky with their cell phones and upload the (almost entirely black) images to a website. They then […]

Well, it’s not pretty, but I was just using a 17″ whip antenna on my VX-8GR, recorded it with Audacity, and then decoded it with MultiScan on my Macbook. The first bit of the recording is pretty rocky, so I had to start the sync myself. I’ve bean meaning to do some experiments with bad […]

I imagine that some of you are getting bored with this, so I won’t post another 20 minutes of hummingbird video. But I will post a couple of things. For instance, I cut a frame from the videos at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. You can clearly see […]

Note: This post was adapted by an email that I sent out to our ham radio club. If anyone is interested in a fun little ham radio related activitytonight, you can try to receive slow scan television from the International Space Station this weekend. I haven’t done this in a while,but I think I’ll give […]

Last week I was playing around with using “motion-mmal” to capture pictures of hummingbirds feeding at my feeder. That was fun, but if I wanted to get high resolution pictures, I could not get very high frame rates (maybe 2-5 fps at best). I thought that perhaps by writing my own capture application in C, […]

My weekend experiments lead me eventually toward flashing nodemcu, a Lua based firmware that runs on the ESP8266. Having a simple programming language (albeit one I’m not super fluent in) is very cool, and enables a whole bunch of nifty experiments. While reading up, I encountered the acronym MQTT again. From Wikipedia: MQTT (formerly Message […]