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I got a "PACKAGE RECEIPT NOTIFICATION" email today. Not being sure what it was, I figured I'd pick it up on Tuesday, when the package center reopened. However, walking to lunch today, I noticed they kept it open specially, for Valentines Day (or Singles Awareness Day, or whatever, depending if you're Nate, Carol, or the rest of us)... I stopped by, and now I'm the proud owner of two copies of the second revision of the Intervalometer board!
I got it all soldered up today, and it's working wonderfully so far! I made the jump to 3.3V (with one of Sparkfun's new 3.3V LCDs); I haven't gotten output hooked up yet, and won't, today, since I have to finish some stuff with the secondary microcontroller that's in charge of the trigger and output and stuff... including actually acquiring the exact chip I'm going to use there.
Here's a shot of it, all clean-like, with the LCD attached, and power from a 3.3V regulator:
The code/schematic/etc. is all in bzr, the pictures are all on Flickr!
I'll keep writing, especially once I make a box (which I can do now!! finally!)
I'm bored here because everyone already left (except, apparently Gino/Tara/Cecilia/Kevin, but none of them live here)... so I ran around for a few hours taking pictures...
Photoset here.
Most interestingly, a "little planet"... the best (of, to be fair, only two) I've made so far...
Clockwise from Cogswell (the really big one that consumes most of the left side of the picture): Cogswell; little tiny EMPAC (you can really only see the roof); Folsom (the library); VCC (the Church/Computer Center); JEC (first brick building); J-ROWL (L-shaped brick building); you can just see Academy Hall between J-ROWL and Cogswell again. Cool!
It's been a while since I've written anything terribly much here, so I'm going to make a nice rambling post spanning various different subjects...
Firstly, Seed! We're going to spend a lot of time finishing up Seed 0.2.0 during the next day-cycle (whatever that means, these days — last night, I went to sleep at 8PM and got up this morning at 4 to do homework...). We'll most likely release this weekend. Robb's changed the core a lot this time around — we get struct support, a much, much better memory footprint, GObject properties (and, probably, signals) from Javascript, Cairo support (it's not pretty, but it works!), many improved examples and tests. Also, exceptions work in a lot more places now, making it much easier to debug apps.
I've also been rewriting Matt's Lights Off example in Clutter — I'll upload a video when I get back if I can figure it out — it's incredibly awesome!
On another note: I got female headers and got the LCD interfaced properly to the PCB; I've taken lots of notes for revision B of the PCB, which should be the "final" revision. I've also started a Keynote (I'll post it here when I'm done) that I'm going to present to E-Club closer to the end of the semester, detailing the project from beginning to "end", as well as what I learned about executing a "project".
As for school — everything's wrapping up; last horrific diff.eq. homework next week, last data structures lab next week, etc. I'm currently in the middle of the last project for VisComm, which is where the muffin pictures on Flickr come from. You really need to take a look at this one full-size... it's... scary!
I'm calling Carol's landlord later tonight to schedule an apartment tour... yikes!
Yay! It's finally the opening weekend of the "Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center", or as we've all been calling it for a whole year now, EMPAC. It's a pretty big deal for the school, and is almost certainly the sink of most of our tuition money (along with the new athletic village, which makes even less sense...), so hopefully it turns out to be all we're hoping it does!
Amy came down for the weekend to say with Robb and I and to go to the opening weekend events we'd gotten tickets for; to pass the time tonight we went and saw Get Smart (again) at UPAC; we dragged Matt and Robb (who hadn't seen it before) along with us...
Tomorrow we're going to go to a concert, and various other EMPAC events... should be interesting!! Tonight they've got lots of searchlights (which, of course, made light-pollution-aware Matt somewhat unhappy), as you can see in the picture below!
So! It's been an awfully long time since I've written here; that's mostly because of school and stuff, also because I wasn't quite sure when I was going to get around to introducing my latest project, which is one of the only other things I have to write about right now!
I guess I'm finally getting around to introducing said project to everyone!
One of my "complaints" about my D80 is the lack of built in intervalometer (providing, of course, the ability to take time-lapse photographs). I won't be happy until I've duplicated every bit of functionality that my old Coolpix had, and this is really the only thing remaining... but the market for such devices leaves much to be desired. Prices are insane (as is usual in the photography world), with less justification than usual.
I've been a long time out of electronics (long long time), so I figured this would be a good project with which to get my feet wet again (in the process, I remembered how much fun it is to be able to manipulate things you build, and how awesome — if frustrating — the added puzzle of DIY hardware is)...
I started out by deciding what I wanted in my intervalometer, and ended up with the following list:
- Interval mode: straightforward, take a picture every so many seconds.
- Interval Bulb mode: take a picture every so many seconds, keeping the shutter open for a given duration
- Bulb mode: provide a way to hold the shutter open for longer than the camera's 30" limit
- Trigger mode: coupled with external trigger devices, allow the capture of photographs based off of high-speed triggers; such devices could be a laser beam-break switch, or a microphone
These seemed like a reasonable goal — if anyone can come up with an obvious or otherwise useful mode I'm missing, I'd be more than happy to add it! Next step was deciding my platform; this wasn't a particular problem, what with MAKE and the rest of the hobbyist electronics internet heralding the Arduino as the next coming of Einstein. I bought two Arduino-derived devices: the official Diecimila, and an unofficial clone, the Stickduino. Both have FTDI chips onboard, so they can plug straight into USB and be programmed from the Arduino environment (based loosely off of the Processing UI, which luckily runs natively on OS X, which factored in to my decision a little as well). Of course, our dorm wasn't exactly set up for electronics work, so I spent a bit more GSoC money getting all the random generic parts, breadboards, wires, tools, etc. that we would need for just about any project. I also grabbed some more project-specific parts: rotary encoders, LCDs, and various bits of silicon. I posted some pictures of the subsequent assembly on my Flickr, though none of them are up-to-date at all (I'll post more pictures tomorrow, perhaps, depending on homeworks). In fact, I'm confident in saying that nothing that sits in the most recent pictures is still on my breadboard, and the addition of 4 external ICs (shift register, digital potentiometer, 7400, 555) for various purposes has massively complicated things. New pictures must be taken! I'm at the point of PCB design now; I have working software, though there's still lots to grow there! I have to reconstruct my circuit from the ground up, and also test out the part of my schematic that involves driving the ATmega, since I'm not putting a whole Arduino in each intervalometer... EAGLE is a little bit complicated (much more so for PCB design than schematic work, which I'm getting quite comfortable with...), but seems to be what everyone uses! I've posted my code and schematic here, in a git repo. Have at it! (Especially if you see any obvious reductions to be made...) The last thing I have to figure out is what I'm going to do with the design when I'm done! I'm most certainly going to publish complete schematics, source code, ideas, pictures, parts lists, etc., but I think that it would be not-horribly-unreasonable to offer a kit, or even a constructed version for a significant bit of profit, and still be incredibly competitive (competition being ~150$ devices with no LCD and a couple of random knobs). The parts cost for my design is ~30$, not counting an enclosure and the PCB, neither of which will inflate the price much beyond ~50$... a featureful, pretty, easy-to-use, Canon-and-Nikon compatible intervalometer in the 80-90$ range would — I think — be welcomed, and provide a fair bit of profit, as well!
So! I've had my camera for a few days now, and I'm incredibly happy!
I've found it to be crazy sharp, and with really really low noise (crazily, if you use NR for long exposures), and it's just very impressive, overall! I'm still getting used to the controls, and I've made some mistakes because I don't pay enough attention to settings that I've changed previously, but I'm catching on (everything I need to know is on the little LCD on the top!). I'm also surprised that I quickly adjusted (and enjoy!) having to use the viewfinder for everything!
I managed to get some good shots:
- Sunset through the June 10th storm — JPEG RAW
- Water drops on a geranium, or something — JPEG RAW
- Grasses in the window — JPEG RAW
- Amy at the Falls — JPEG RAW
- The Mill by the Falls — JPEG RAW
- Airplane over Winooski — JPEG RAW
- Pepa eating ice cream — JPEG RAW
- Daisies on the deck — JPEG RAW
I've been shooting everything in continuous mode, as RAWs, so I've taken a lot of pictures already (almost a thousand, worth many gigabytes!), but I've only kept about a tenth of that. I should slow down, though, so I have stuff to do when I start up a variant of APAD (I'm thinking more like a summer-bounded year of pictures once a /week/, instead... more time for quality, less difficulty making a book, etc.). I'll get more details about that out there sometime in the not too-distant future — I'll probably start around July 1, but I really don't know! So my camera's been epic so far... there's only a few things I've noticed are a problem. One, I've completely lost the ability to do close-ups. I don't have a macro lens — it's on my list of things to get, but it's pretty far out there because it's so expensive (the very nice looking, manual focus, 55mm f/2.8 Nikon Micro lens is ~300$, which is crazy... well... apparently it's not crazy, but it feels crazy to me, so I'm going to wait for a while!). The other is that I have no time-lapse function, nor the ability to keep the shutter open for more than 30 seconds. These were both quite commonly used features of my last camera, for me... I made dozens of time-lapses and took a good number of star-trails pictures with the 8700 (which the incredibly noise-free D80 would be insanely much better at!). Luckily, the D80 comes with both infrared and wired shutter controls, which dad and I are going to have to rig up to work. I think wired would be better, if only because I don't know where I'd put a little IR box when outside doing night exposures (also because it's much more obvious how you're supposed to hold the shutter open with the wired control!). Problem is, I don't know what kind of connector the camera requires... I don't recognize it at all... The last thing I have to grab some time is a wide-aperture prime lens — I've been told (and have read, time and time again), that this is really the single most necessary lens (besides a standard happy zoom lens), because it's so much faster, and supposedly literally noticeably sharper than anything else... but someday! This was actually on my spreadsheet when I was initially deciding what to get, but I went with just the absolute minimal order when I went to make the purchase, for now! Anybody with other suggestions? I dunno :-)
Of note: the three title characters are not related in any way, except they were all a part of my day yesterday!
Firstly, and most-excitingly, thanks to Google, and mom, and dad, I purchased a Nikon D80 today! I simply cannot wait until it gets here... I've managed to read literally hundreds of pages of reviews and such and I'm very excited and happy and can't wait to see what it can do. Soooooooo excited — can'tcha tell?! The D80 replaces the Nikon Coolpix 8700 (don't immediately shrug it off because it's a Coolpix — for a point 'n shoot, that camera is astounding!) that Aunt Vivian graciously handed down to me a few years ago (first picture I still have appears to be from May 6, 2006, so pretty much exactly 2 years). That day was unbelievably important to me, because — before that, I'd never had a usable camera of my own (Kodak PalmPix for the IIIxe does not count!), and I'd just been handed something that would stay more or less attached to my hip for the next two years, recording countless memories (really, my memory is somewhat sketchy, so the pictures from this camera provide a great deal of my memory for me!) — almost 4000 pictures that I kept, in the end! (probably 10x that in total, because I use burst mode a lot!) So, while I most certainly have to thank Vivian for it, I'd say that it and I had an excellent run, especially through APAD'07 and all! This (outside a nursing home in Waterloo, ON, Canada) is probably the picture from this camera that gets the most 'wow's, but if I had to pick a favorite, I'd come back with about 150 pictures!
Second thing! I've got a much more stable, git-based workflow for working on Evas now, and I've even gotten the framework of the Evas-Quartz (without GL) engine sitting there! This is where the bulk of the summer's work goes, so I'm glad to have sat down and gotten that worked out. In addition, rectangles, polygons, and lines draw and animate properly! It was really awesome the first time I got the rectangles to draw, despite the fact that moments later they were animating over top of the window decorations... Text is working, to some extent, but I'm currently using an unacceptable text API (the built-in CoreGraphics one) which is so underpowered that it doesn't even support Unicode. I've got to move to ATSUI, but that involves reading lots of documentation and learning things I've never had to deal with before. I suppose that's sort-of the point of this, though, no? That might be tomorrow's job, since I know I'm not going to get much work done whichever day my new camera comes! EDIT: apparently there's a new CoreText API in Leopard. I think I'll use that instead!
The last bit — the Ma Bell bit — is that either AT&T recently added, or I recently noticed, the ability to download your call data in CSV (per-month). This meant I could clean up my call data grapher quite well (no more screen scraping means it actually works now — they broke it in January!)... so here y'all go. Figure it out on your own! My graph is below the jump!
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