electronics

I needed to take apart a my precious Thinkpad today. (The poor thing is getting on in years, and I needed to swap out its CPU fan.) It struck me as I was taking it apart. (something I've done many times) I don't know of any other puter manufacturer that makes it this easy on you. This is a primary reason I love the Thinkpad. It's like the Jeep of computers. Simple, easy to service, uses basic, standard parts and screws.

Most people don't care that the iPhone is closed. They don't even know what the difference between open and closed is. And they most certainly don't care.

The iPhone is a phone. It was designed to address problems with phones. The problems it tried to address mostly had to do with the fact that cellphones are almost unusable. For example, I have no idea how to use most of the features on mine, and I'm a geek. It doesn't bother me.

Apple is not interested in hackers. No one is. There are only four of them in the world, but they write in blogs all day, so it seems like there are many more. The main people people who read the blogs are the other three hackers. These four people say the same things to each other for months straight, while companies like Apple and Microsoft rake in billions by serving the other 6.5billion people on the planet.

All the Apple bashing for closing down a piece of hardware that they designed to make money for them misses the point; they don't care about you. Not any more than they have to to get your money, anyway. The way Apple has found to get your money is by limiting options on their products to just what most people want to do. This is how they deliver ease-of-use and stability. Hackers/makers/copyfighters/freetards get angry at the company instead of at themselves for wanting the toys anyway.

But nobody cares what the hackers think. There are only four of them in the whole entire world. They are an insignificant minority.

Not much to say here, this is the final result of my latest attempt. Took about 20 days or so. I've still got the camera in place, and I'm going to leave it shooting until that bloom falls off.

The results are in! (well, offloaded from the camera anyway.) This one turned out much better. Much more consistent.

there's a bit of an unfortunate shift at the end where the bloom we really want to see gets a bit cut off, but the movement is really cool!

Partial results are in! They more or less suck.. ; )

I initially set this system up and had it shoot in our living room, on a wobbley tv tray with no flash. (I figured my wife wouldn't be happy about a clamped down monstrosity and a flash going off in the dark every 30 minutes.. turns out, she's fine with it!)

So, anyway.. that's the first draft. I edited out about 80% of the frames that were just a black square..

The next one (with flash) should be much better. Though it'll be toward the end of this bugger blooming. There will be many more of these.. this is just a trial run.

I've been building this thing for quite some time. For the last 2 nights or so, I spent some time finishing up version 1. It is now functional. (and has taken 23 or so pictures of my desk plant in the last couple hours)

Photos of the rig (with notes pointing out the parts) can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/abandc/sets/72157600201419395/

When I get the pics parsed into some useable video, I'll post it here. Today is pretty much a proof of concept day, then I'm going to find a way to position it, and light a plant such that I can get pics of Celeste's blooming Christmas cactus.

I made a little video explaining how those fancy-schmancy shower toilet bottom washers works. I hope that this will be the last of my poop-themed videos, although I am in Japan, and you know what they say about Rome and their scat-porn...

Or is that just about Japan?

I created a basic model of the Arduino microcontroller board in Google Sketchup. Sketchup is a really handy tool. Once you learn to use it, you can model anything and everything with arbitrary accuracy. This model is accurate down to .01mm. (the resolution of my digital calipers)

It should be a handy thing for anyone looking to prototype something digitally before they go making parts.

I put together another video of what i've been doing with my dorky geektoys. This is a cool steppermotor/gear assembly i got out of an old dot-matrix printer. I originally assembled it all with a mess of 4 radio shack transistors, but then i found this tutorial (and discovered that nice clean transistor array chip) which made it simpler to work with.

argh... sorry I'm all sniffly in the video. It's cold in my garage. My video production skills still leave something to be desired.. oh.. and the word i was looking for was photodiode. Damned if i was going to go look it up and tape that thing again though.. ; )

so... there ya go.. that's motion.. now what the hell do I do with it? ; )

UPDATE:
Free bonus video with purchase!
How to run the arduino off of a 9.6v Makita battery!

I have to say, I'm pretty psyched about this idea. At 1.3 amp hours, I'm one step closer to some robotic fun.

It's an ambient orb style pulsating pig!

that's it... really. but i learned to read digital and analog pins, and how to write to the analog out pins, and before that the digital ones. Woot!