Scott's Blog

I think there are some fish in there somewhere... Here's what I ended up taking out. Here's what it looks like now

Over the weekend I created a Arduino controlled power outlet based on this design . With this connected to a the Arduino I can control the two plugs independently.  One end (which I cut an old US style plug) I plug into the mains power, the other end I connect to the Arduino (four connections): The fit was a bit tight! I did some tests to see if when the solenoids are on whether is would heat up too much. After about about a 1/2 hour it did heat up to 32 C° which isn't too bad.  So now I'm all set to scare some animals .

The idea this weekend was to setup the sonar with the Arduino so that I can get a shot of the Siriemas  that pass daily at the farm, or maybe a hummingbird. Well that didn't work out so well, turns out that the sonar is affected by the wind. Adding a bit of hysteresis to the code , fixed it for the most part. I used lua to program the camera, except that it looks like there some issues with it and my Canon SD450.  Calling get_shooting() repeatedly causes problems, for example. I got my intervalometer  code  to work correctly only after removing that test.  Here's some timelapse photography that did work.

This weekend I played with my Canon PowerShot SD450  (aka IXUS 55) and the  CHDK  along with the Arduino and the MaxBotix MaxSonar  LV-EZ1 .  The idea is to automatically take pictures when an object moves into frame. Part of the job involved hacking a USB cable to hook up to the Arduino which I promptly did, as you can see below. Unfortunately, I was supposed to hack a Mini-USB cable (of which I have a dozen) and instead hacked my (only) Micro-USB cable (oops). The end I soldered two break away headers and then encased the whole thing with hot glue. Here's the setup. You can see the sonar on the right.  I soldered a female header to it instead of soldering wires directly to the board.  The hacked USB cable is connected to ground and pin 13.  For the sonar I've plugged it into Ground, 5V, and pin 7. You may also note that I'm not using the AN (analog) pin on the MaxSonar, but instead the PW (pulse width) pin, unlike most code I saw on th...

In the recent past, when writers used expressions like " Procrustean bed " or " Sisyphean task ", they might have been considered rather 'snobby', even if those expressions might have been appropriate. Today, of course, we can link to the definitions or have the reader search for the definition easily. It think, as long as the article isn't full of these types of references, it isn't too much work for the percentage of readers that may not remember their greek mythology. Today, writers don't even need to go back to ancient Greece for their archetypes : " Jumped the Shark " is a great expression for when something has become passé (follow the link if you don't know this one). " Streisand Effect " is when the attempt to suppress information backfires and just makes it even more widely publicized. " Take the redpill " when you need to leave your fantasy world and meet reality. "Dialed Up to Eleven " for...

At Google we have lots of internal tools, many for the command line. On occasion some googler will take one of these tools and make it into an internal web site. Usually, when this happens I think "Why? The command line tool is much more convenient!". At first, the web site isn't all that useful, but week by week, features get added until the web version is faster, and has more useful features than the command line version. I started thinking that I have some old programs that I wrote, years ago, which could be better off on the web. One program I did this to is mm2notes which takes FreeMind MindMap and creates meeting notes. The original version was only for the command line. Already I can see the web version could be far more useful than running from the command line. For instance, I can e-mail the action items to the people that have something to act upon. Another program that I wrote, even longer ago, was a program to help me learn Portuguese. It had two part...

I've been a longtime user of subversion for source control, and with Google's Project Hosting , that was the only choice. For a new project I'm working on I decided to try mercurial , instead. I think I'll stick with mercurial from now on: It's very close to subversion for most commands. It's incredibly fast. I can perform commits without an internet connection. It uses only one hidden folder for the whole tree. The only issue I've found so far is that the default Mercurial version for Ubuntu is before version 1.3 which allows you to store the password in a ~/.hgrc file. So, for now, I need to type in the password every time I do a push.