These are splash pictures taken using Raspberry Pi as a controller. These aren’t your typical water-dripping-into-a-pool photos, they’re actually made by placing a drop of liquid on a speaker and blasting it with sound! Sure, you could control everything pretty easily with discrete electronics, but this sounds like a good use for a Raspberry Pi. Continue reading
Time-lapse video of winter storm Virgil on 24 March, 2013.
Make sure to click-through if you want to see the full-resolution version. The video was made using a Nikon point-n-shoot camera tethered to my laptop, and gphoto2 to capture and download one image every minute. Entire time was about 4.5 hours until I stopped it after getting dark. To get gphoto to do a timelapse, I used this command:
gphoto2 --set-config flashmode=0 -I 60 -F 400 --capture-image-and-download --filename "img_%H%M%S.jpg"
This kept the flash off, took a picture every 60 seconds (-l 60) and captured 400 frames (-F 400). It downloads them to the current folder and names them with the current time stamp, then removes from the camera. Images can then be compiled into video using ffmpeg or something like Time Lapse Assembler.
I’ve been using Python to analyze the majority of my research data, so was very excited when the iPython Notebook was released at the end of last year. Over the last few months, I’ve been learning how to use the Notebook and transitioning some of my new research data to this interactive format. And what better way to learn a new programming system than by making fractals? But before we start, I should mention the notebook and all the useful pylab dependencies can be installed from Macports as described in this post. Continue reading
Venus made its historic transit across the sun on June 5, 2012. Using binoculars to project the sun’s image onto a screen, I was able to get a number of photos of this event! Next transit, 2117.
After upgrading my Macbook to OS 10.7 Lion, I was disappointed to find my only software that was no longer compatible was the EOS utility supplied with my Canon Rebel XT. After getting by with the slow and feature-starved Image Capture program which ships with OS X, waiting patiently until “first quarter 2012”, Canon finally released a Lion-compatible version. But they unexplainably dropped support for the XT. Maybe it’s their way of making me buy a new camera.
But, there’s no need to do that when there’s open source software. Here’s my solution:
#!/bin/bash # Shut down other camera processes killall PTPCamera # Get un-downloaded files gphoto2 --new -P # Rename to CJD_YYYYMMDD_HHMM_IMGNUM.XXX # And move to folder CR2 or JPG exiftool -d %%e/CJD_%Y%m%d_%H%m_%%f.%%e '-filename<datetimeoriginal' .
Copy this to a text document, and modify the exiftool line with the filename and format you want. This example saves the pictures with my initials, the year, month, date, hour, minute, and the original image number. It also separates the JPG files from the CR2 into separate folders. Save the script as “load photos.command”, then it can be run from the Finder just like any other app!
Scanning Electron Microscopes are typically used to photograph nanoscale electronics. Occasionally, I find other “creatures” living amongst the “landscapes”. Or maybe my eyes just see things when I should be working. Color was added later for effect.
This new page to collect my photography albums was added. Current albums include Hawaii, Fall Color, and SEM Fun. Thanks to the PicasaView and WP Lightbox2 plugins!
