brainwagon

Okay, I got it realigned to better center the frame, and expanded it out to 4×3 aspect ratio. Minutes later, I had got a new capture. Lots of fun! Addendum: Within the next hour, I got the following. I used cropping to give you the image of the bird at the full resolution. Addendum2: Hey, […]

Shelby noticed that hummingbirds had made a little nest, so she got a webcam and now you can view it via live streaming. At the moment, I looked, there didn’t seem to be much action, but I’ll be checking in frequently. Awesome. Shelby’s Hatchicam

I’ve tinkered a bit with metal working over the years, but never really developed any skill. I’ve always been fascinated by precision machining, particularly those that make clocks and watches. Yesterday, I discovered the Clickspring Youtube channel, which is really, really good. I’ve linked to his video where he makes washers and screws for a […]

I know, I know, it’s probably getting a little repetitive and boring. But I’m still getting a kick out of my motion capturing hummingbird camera. Improvements are coming.

This morning I’m still drinking coffee and waking up, but I was pointed at “the ESP8266 wiki”, which appears to be this Wiki page. Bookmarked mostly so I can quickly find it again. But it has some good information. If I haven’t teased you enough with this experimentation, consider these features of the ESP8266: It’s […]

Got a chance to play around a bit more with the ESP8266 tonight. I dug out a nice little dual output power supply board that I had got from tautic.com with the hope that it would eliminate some of the erratic behavior that I had observed before. Sadly, that didn’t seem to solve my problem. […]

A couple more quick snaps from my hummingbird camera. I’m going to try to work on some improvements over the weekend, but shockingly we are gonna get some rain, so I may concentrate on getting it waterproofed and ready for life outdoors.

Carl Zimmer tweeted this ad for the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute: I’d ask for a second opinion.

Okay, after I did my quick video record yesterday re: the ESP8266, I continued to play with it a bit more. And, it must be said, I had a little bit of difficulty which I thought I would write up so that other people who are experiencing the same issues might be able to comment, […]

In the telescope making world, we call the first time that a telescope is used to look at the sky “first light”. I’ve decided to call the first time I load some code onto a new development board “first electrons”. A few weeks ago, when I did a video that illustrated some of the bucket […]

Make just published this interview with Arduino founder Massimo Banzi about the internal schism that’s currently embroiling the Arduino community. It is true that this represents only one side of the story, but it does seem that at a minimum, Arduino SRL (represented at http://arduino.org) has copied much of the Arduino LLC website without credit […]

When I got home today, it appeared that I had a few more images from my hummingbird cam. Luckily, I got several nice frames of him her (probably), so I put them together into an animated GIF. Nifty. When I get a chance to do more stuff on it this weekend, I hope to get […]

It’s no secret that I’ve been a fan of the Arduino. More than any other board, it’s got me into hacking little bits of hardware and programming in the small, and has been part of numerous projects that I’ve tinkered together, and others that I’ve helped mentor young people with. It’s a cute platform for […]

Commenter Andy wanted a version of my classic code that could generate a tone instead of just blinking an LED. I mentioned that I had done this before, but frankly couldn’t find the source code, so I modified my existing program to implement the simplest possible tone: a simple square wave. Rather than using a […]

One thing I didn’t realize when I setup the Raspberry Pi camera to monitor my humming bird feeder was that it has a bright red led which turns on when the camera is enabled. In most cases, this light isn’t a big deal, but I am pointing it out the window, so the reflection of […]