The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Photography & Images

Taking & making images.

Monthly Science: Solar Eclipse 2017

An hour before the festivities started, I lashed together an official NASA-approved pinhole eclipse viewer from available materials:

Eclipse 2017-08-21 – pinhole projector

Although the solar disk showed up fine on the white paper screen, the Pixel’s camera can’t show the notch growing on the left side, even with HDR+ mode in full effect:

Eclipse 2017-08-21 – pinhole projector – interior

As usual for astronomy around here, clouds threatened the outcome:

Eclipse 2017-08-21 – high clouds

Near the maximum, the skies cleared:

Eclipse 2017-08-21 – maximum – lens flare

Although it’s not proof, there’s a definite bite out of the lens flare at about 4 o’clock:

Eclipse 2017-08-21 – maximum – lens flare – detail

The maples south of the driveway produced lower-contrast images better suited to silicon sensors:

Eclipse 2017-08-21 – maximum – shadows

And, although everyone was specifically enjoined not to do this, because UV reflection = blindness, the obligatory solar eclipse selfie:

Eclipse 2017-08-21 – obligatory selfie

I’m sure similar lens flares count as UFOs in someone’s telling of the tale.

We planned to dance naked in the yard, but our neighbor’s lawn crew picked that moment to scalp his grass and we chose discretion over valor …

2017-09-01
Sharing the Road on Raymond: Friend or Foe?

A silver Honda ~~Accord~~ Civic (NY HLS-3678) passed me on Raymond, just before the Vassar Main Gate roundabout, with about as much clearance as one might expect:

Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 1

I noodled along Raymond at 18 mph and the car pulled ahead at the usual 30 to 40 mph. Just after the College Avenue roundabout, the car pulled off to the right, as if to park, but continued rolling slowly and I gave it plenty of clearance:

Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 2

The car immediately pulled out into the lane, directly in front of the Escalade that’s been following me at a courteous distance since the Main Gate roundabout, and pulled up close behind me, which immediately put me at DEFCON 3. Basically, drivers get exactly one bite at my apple; anyone who deliberately passes me a second time is likely up to no good.

As always, I signal and take the lane going into the Collegeview Avenue roundabout, still at 18-ish mph, whereupon the driver lays on the horn rather heavily. Apparently, he intended to accelerate past me into the roundabout, but I got in the way:

Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 2r

I’m now cranking 20 mph. A block later, the car passes me, rather closely this time:

Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 3

Maybe this is a friendly wave, but the horn thing suggests otherwise and, in any event, it’s hard to tell in real time running:

Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 4

At this point, I presume he’s gesturing me to GTFO the road:

Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 5

And we part company:

Raymond – Passing 2017-08-30 – 6

Raymond Avenue would be a lot more bicycle-friendly without some of the drivers …

2017-08-31
Google Pixel vs. Clip-on Lenses

The clip-on lenses for the (fancy) camera in my soon-to-be-obsolete Google Pixel XL don’t fit well on the case I added to improve its griptivity:

Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – angle

The upper half of the clip rests on the rim of the case around the bezel, with only the end of the foam pad against the glass:

Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – angle overview

That’s pretty much the only stable position.

Sticking a disk of stair-tread rubber on the foam adds just enough thickness to match the rim:

Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – aligned

The lenses came with two clips, so I left one unmodified to fit the Pixel without the case:

Pixel vs Lens Clamp vs Case – clamps

Not that that happens very often, but …

The lenses are about as good as you’d expect for ten bucks from Amazon. Stacking the 0.67 “wide angle” lens on the camera enlarges the field-of-view by a third with closer focusing at maximum zoom, so the minimum FOV drops from 2 inches down to 1 inch at a reasonable distance. The 10x “macro” lens is basically useless, with a focus distance well within the Pixel’s shadow under any normal lighting; if I were that sort of guy, I’d conjure a small LED ring powered from the USB-C port.

2017-08-25
Sandisk Extreme Pro MicroSD Card: End of Life?

The Sandisk Extreme Pro 64 GB MicroSD card in the Sony HDR-AS30V died on the road once more, got reformatted, worked OK for a while, then kicked out catastrophic I/O errors after being mounted, so I swapped in the High Endurance card:

Sandisk – 64 GB MicroSDXC cards

The Extreme Pro still passes the f3probe tests, so it’s not completely dead, but if I can’t trust it in the helmet camera, it’s dead to me.

It survived 17 months of more-or-less continuous use, although we didn’t do nearly enough riding for three months early this year. Call it 14 months x five rides / week x 1 hour / ride = 300 hours of recording. Multiply by 4 GB / 22.75 minutes to get 3 TB of video, about 50 times its total capacity.

The never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Sony cards failed after less than 1 TB and 15-ish times capacity, making the Sandisk Extreme Pro much better. However, it’s painfully obvious these cards work better for low-intensity still-image recording, rather than continuous HD video.

Using them as Raspberry Pi “hard drives” surely falls somewhere between still cameras and video, although Octoprint’s video snapshots and streaming media must make ’em sweat.

We’ll see how Sandisk’s High Endurance memory works in precisely the application it’s labeled for.

2017-08-22
Mystery Caterpillars

This being caterpillar season, we put a mystery egg mass on a Swiss Chard leaf into a small container:

Mystery Caterpillar – eggs on Swiss Chard

I think the darker egg was a dud, because two days later they all hatched and ate their egg cases, leaving that one behind:

Mystery Caterpillar – hatched

Mary deported them to the trash, put two on a leaf in an aquarium on the kitchen table, and, eight days later:

Mystery Caterpillar – 8 days

They’ve been chowing down on spare garden greenery; unlike Monarchs, they eat what’s set before them.

One has dark “fur”:

Mystery Caterpillar – black morph

The second is lighter:

Mystery Caterpillar – brown morph

A third caterpillar escaped the trash can apocalypse and also resides in the aquarium, albeit stunted by its ordeal:

Mystery Caterpillar – pale morph

They’re too bristly to be Wooly Bears. I’m sure they’ll turn into nondescript brown moths.

2017-08-20
Monthly Image: Cross-striped Cabbageworm

In the normal course of events, this critter would become an undistinguished brown moth:

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Right now, it’s a two-day-old cross-striped cabbageworm. Its kin are voracious consumers of Brassicacae out in the garden and Mary’s raising it as a show-n-tell exhibit for her Master Gardener compadres; she advised it to not start any long novels.

Taken hand-held with the Pixel XL through a clip-on 10x macro lens.

2017-08-15
Monarch Caterpillar Windshield
The Monarch Butterfly egg produced a teeny caterpillar:

Monarch caterpillar – 3 mm – 2017-08-02

Each time it molts, it eats all of its skin except for the transparent cap over the first body segment:

Monarch Windshield – 2017-08-09

If the rest of the caterpillar were behind the windshield, it’d be feet-upward with its “face” at the top.

The picture comes from a focus-stacked set of microscope images captured with VLC; I turned the positioner’s elevation knob the smallest possible amount between each of 16 images along the 1 mm (-ish) height of the capsule. This magic incantation applies more weight to high-contrast and high-entropy regions:
```
align_image_stack -C -a monarch vlcsnap-2017-08-09-18h4*
enfuse --contrast-weight=0.8 --entropy-weight=0.8 -o Monarch_Windshield.jpg monarch00*
# empty line to reveal underscores in previous line
```
That came out pretty well.
2017-08-12