Not Your Average Geeks
Hobbies
One step closer.
Aug 30th
Last night I successfully fired a strobe with a microswitch hooked up to my Arduino. I’m aware that at this point, the setup is a needlessly complicated and expensive version of just pushing the “test” button on the back of the flash, but hey, progress is progress! Now all I need to do is replace the microswitch with a break-beam or sound trigger, build a variable delay into the program, and viola, I should be up and running! Hit the jump for a photo of the jury rigged mess of wires. More >
Age and treachery vs youth and skill
Aug 30th
When I was home for dinner at my parent’s house last weekend, my dad and I got to talking about the last roll of Kodachrome ever manufactured, which was just recently shot by photographer Steve McCurry (best known for his photo of the Afghan girl with the beautiful eyes).
McCurry was given the roll by Kodak themselves, and it was developed at Dewayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kansas, the only place left IN THE WORLD that can process Kodachrome. Dewayne’s will only be offering processing through December 30th of this year, so if you’ve got any Kodachrome around, you’d better get shooting!
At this point, my dad mentioned that he had some sitting in the fridge from years ago, sealed and unexposed. Cue me running to the kitchen and digging through a shoebox of expired film, and coming up with two rolls of 24 exposure, ASA 64 Kodachrome color slide film. More >
Some assembly required.
Aug 28th
My "workbench"
My order from Maker Shed arrived today, some wiring, a mini breadboard, and a protoshield kit. From the product description, it’s not super apparent that it comes unassembled, but when I opened the box I found that was indeed the case. I’d been planning to learn to solder eventually, so it wasn’t a huge deal, but this did accelerate my learning a bit!
I had to run to my parent’s house for dinner anyways, so I took the opportunity to pick up my dad’s old soldering iron, solder, and third hand, and proceeded to learn to solder by watching various YouTube videos on the subject. Once I felt I had the gist of it, I broke out the protoshield and got to work, following the instructions here.
At the start of the project, all those pins seemed pretty intimidating, but once I’d soldered in the first couple without incident, I gained some confidence and was able to chew through them pretty quickly. I was surprised by how nice (at least to my untrained eye) most of my connections turned out! I tested a few with my multimeter just to make sure everything went as planned.
When the moment of truth arrived, I fit the protoshield on top of the Arduino, plugged in a couple LEDs, since the controller was still programmed with my scrolling LED sketch, and plugged it in. Sure enough, all three LEDs worked as advertised, blinking merrily away. With the protoshield stacked on the Arduino, you have a nice, compact package to prototype circuits, without needing to wire up a separate breadboard. Now that I’ve cleared this hurdle, my next step will be to work on making the controller send a trigger signal to my Paul C. Buff Cybersync CST flash trigger, which I can then use to fire my strobes wirelessly. After that, I’ll work on hooking up my sensors and making them fire the flash. Progress is being made!
The newly assembled protoshield atop my Arduino
When these guys DIY, they don’t mess around.
Aug 26th
I am big into the DIY spirit. I love tinkering, building things myself, and figuring out how things work. For instance, I was pretty proud a couple months ago when I replaced one of the brake calipers and drive shafts on my Subaru Outback a couple of months ago. Then I read about the crazy Danes over at Copenhagen Suborbitals.
This is DIYx10^26. Copenhagen Suborbitals describe themselves as a “non-profit suborbital space endevaour, with a mission to put a man in space sometime in 2012-2013. That sounds pretty out-of-this-world, but it gets better. The mission will be launched from a self-built, floating, launch platform, towed into place by the guys at Copenhagen Suborbitals OWN SUBMARINE. This is some serious James Bond supervillian stuff!
In less than four days they will be launching the HEAT1X/Tycho Brahe mission, to test out an almost full-scale (640mm diameter) rocket with an attached crew module, complete with a dummy pilot. The launch will take place southeast of Sweden, and as we speak the catamaran launch platform is hooked up to the submarine Nautilus for towing. More >
Let there be (dancing) light(s)!
Aug 26th
I humbly present to you, the results of my very first efforts with the Arduino microcontroller…
Much more impressive things to come soon. If you’re in the Twin Cities area and like to tinker, you’d be well served to check out Ax-Man surplus! I picked up a number of resistors, LEDs, a potentiometer, and some other odds and ends for a fraction of the price of the same parts at Radioshack, plus you can pick up other awesome toys like gas masks, magnets, and the rangefinder from a Leopard tank! I love that place, and their product tags are usually good for a couple laughs as well. Now I need to get a 3.5mm stereo plug jack hooked up so I can work on triggering lights or a camera. I hoped you enjoyed the 80s soundtrack for my video, courtesy of Miami Vice season one!
Timing is everything
Aug 23rd
I was on an 11-day, 3500 mile road trip last week, and at one point in Colorado I got the opportunity to try and capture some really amazing lightning over the San Juan Mountains. I set my Canon 7D up on the deck railing, attaching it with the 
Gorillapod Focus I bought for the trip (which I’ll be reviewing later), set a small aperture to give me a longish shutter speed to increase my chances of catching a flash, and started snapping away. After about 300 photos, I’d caught maybe 6 strikes, with this being by far the best of them.
If it had been darker, I would likely have had more success, since I’d be able to have a longer shutter speed (this was taken at 1 second or so), which would give me a better ratio of shutter open to shutter closed time. The split second timing and blind luck required to get these lightning photos reminded me of another photographic adventure I had a while ago, shooting water drops. I just used a ziploc bag with a pin hole in it, and relied on reflexes and luck to fire the lights at the right time, but after seeing work like the photo below by David Pearson (fpsurgeon on flickr), I’ve been interested in setting up a more automated solution to both increase the percentage of keepers, and to allow me to shoot more complex things like the droplet collision below.
To this end, I just went ahead and ordered up an Arduino Duemilanove
Your week in Lego
Jul 26th
I had a crazily busy weekend, so I’ll make it short and very sweet! Some awesome creations came out this week, and here’s a few.
Larry Lars put together this compilation of his Star Wars cubedudes. The creative use of various parts for the details on these guys just blows me away! CubeDudes also made an appearance at ComicCon last week, although these were limited edition sets sold by creator Angus McClane.
Last week in LEGO
Jul 19th
This is the first of (hopefully) many Monday afternoon posts summing up some of the best LEGO creations built in the last week. Use them for inspiration, motivation, or just something neat to look at.
First up we’ve got an awesome Space Shuttle model by TWINLUG member Tom Anderson. It’s scaled to be half the size of the new official LEGO 10213 Shuttle Adventure
Our second model of the week is this shot of the 2010 lineup of custom building kits from Brickmania (Daniel Siskind). Siskind designs and sells custom kits for many WWII and modern military vehicles, which are all available for purchase on his website. I’ve never bought one myself, but his skill at making accurate models of vehicles with so many complex angles and shapes has always interested me. Check out his website for dozens of other awesome builds.
2010 WWII Battle Pack by Brickmania
I want one of Weta’s Rayguns to hang over my mantle
Jul 19th
I also want a mantle. But when get a place that has one, one of these will hopefully take the place of honor above it.
Based in New Zealand, the Weta Workshop is a, “multi-award winning conceptual design and physical manufacturing facility servicing the world’s entertainment and creative industries.” They have been creating props, costumes, and creatures for movies like Avatar, King Kong, the Lord of the Rings, and District 9 for over a decade.
A couple of years ago they started making these awesome retro rayguns. Some of the coolest are one-of-a-kind, so you’ll have to act quick. The guns aren’t cheap, (they seem to run anywhere from $600-1500 for most), but they ooze sci-fi style, and if I had the spare scratch, I’d have to look long and hard at getting one to spruce up the living room and increase my geek-cred. For now though, I might just try my hand at making a DIY version…
Classics on the go with PSP homebrew
Jul 16th
I have a confession to make. I’ve never played through such classics as Super Mario World, Earthbound, Super Metroid, Super Mario RPG, A Link to the Past, or ANY Final Fantasy. You can pretty much add any 8-bit or 16-bit games to that list as well.
Now, it’s not all my fault. My parents refused to buy me videogames of any sort, so the first console I actually owned as a pawn shop purchased PSX sometime in late highschool. My early forays into gaming were limited to hand-me-downs from my uncle, things like Dark Forces, Steel Panthers, and Wolfenstein.
PSP with necessary accessories, Pandora battery and memory stick
Enter the Sony PSP. I’ve had my eye on getting one for a while, not really to play PSP games, but to emulate the classics I missed out on as a kid. I scrounged up a $30 PSP with a broken disc drive (I’ll be running everything from the memory stick so the drive won’t matter) from our local Craigslist this weekend, and set to work installing a custom firmware to allow the use of homebrew like emulators. Between 8-bit, 16-bit, ScummVM, and MAME I’ll have my work cut out for me!
Emulating the classics also means I can use savestates, which will overcome one other gripe I’ve had with playing these games in their original form, the need to play them all the way through in one sitting.
Installing a custom firmware on most fat or slim PSPs is fairly easy. The PSP 3000 and PSP Go are a slightly different story, and as I don’t have any experience with them, I won’t go into it here. If you want to know if your PSP can be hacked, check here.