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.
Taking & making images.
Woodpeckers generally perch with their tummies against a tree, so it took me a long time to understand why Red-bellied Woodpeckers have that name:
The bright red nape and head seemed entirely sufficient to me, but another woodpecker claimed that name first…
The turkey flock that normally lives along the Wappingers Creek valley, downslope from the back yard, has emerged for the ritual spring foraging:
And posturing:
And just moseying around:
You can match the trees and identify some duplicated birds, but the flock seems stable around a dozen. They used to deploy skirmish lines upwards of two dozen bird and we’ve recently counted 19; we think foxes have been encouraging better control of wandering chicks.
Turkeys are good folks…
After installing things like imagemagick and mjpg_streamer on the Raspberry Pi, I exhumed a quartet of Logitech cameras from the heap to see how they worked. None bear any identification, apart from a tag on the cable, so here’s what I found out for later reference.
They’re all reasonably good for still pictures, if you don’t mind terrible initial exposures. The default program works OK:
fswebcam -d /dev/video0 -r 320x240 image.jpg
On the other hand, getting any streaming video requires searching through the parameter space, which wasn’t helped by the total lack of documentation. The Arch Linux wiki has a useful summary of camera & drivers, with pointers to additional lists-of-lists. The OctoPrint repo documents the mjpg-streamer plugin parameters.
So, we begin…
This camera, one of two identical cameras in the heap, has a clip that used to fit on the upper edge of a laptop display:
One has a tag:
To make the tag data more useful for search engine inquiries:
From lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 008: ID 046d:08d8 Logitech, Inc. QuickCam for Notebook Deluxe
With Raspbian on the RPi, 640×480 video tears and stutters, leaving 320×240 as the least-worst alternative:
mjpg_streamer -i "/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so -r 320x240" -o "/usr/local/lib/output_http.so -w /usr/local/www"
The cameras don’t support YUYV at all and the video quality is mediocre, at best, but they do have a manual focus ring that lets you snuggle the camera right up against the subject.
This ball camera:
Has a tag:
Which reads:
From lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 009: ID 046d:08ce Logitech, Inc. QuickCam Pro 5000
It requires YUYV at 320×240 (on the Pi) and nothing else works at all:
mjpg_streamer -i "/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so -r 320x240 -y" -o "/usr/local/lib/output_http.so -w /usr/local/www"
It produces even worse video than the Notebook camera.
This HD 720p camera has C130 scrawled on the front in my handwriting:
And a tag:
Bearing this text:
The scrawled C130 doesn’t match up with what lsusb reports:
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 046d:081d Logitech, Inc. HD Webcam C510
It produces very nice results in many resolutions, using YUYV mode, although I think its native resolution is 1280×720 and that works perfectly on the Pi:
mjpg_streamer -i "/usr/local/lib/input_uvc.so -r 1280x720 -y" -o "/usr/local/lib/output_http.so -w /usr/local/www"
Video over USB is mysterious…
Thirteen months ago, that round table had self-enclosed:
We don’t have a good picture of the square table, but it had that same crater open to the central hole.
Other pictures show the topmost 14+ inches from that storm consisted of lovely, fluffy snow that cleared well, although I’d have settled for a bit less.
It’s winter in the Northeast US. Snow happens on a regular basis. I enjoy the shapes, not the shoveling…
They only come out at night:
Two raccoons took turns at the feeder, but I only caught one in the act:
Apparently they enter torpor, rather than hibernate, which means they’re getting hungry right about now.
Taken through two panes of 1955 glass with the Sony DSC-H5, using an LED flashlight for focus assist. Both culprits oozed off the far end of the patio when I opened the door…
A few more weekly snowstorms refreshed the patio tables mounds:
The spire under the square table nearly reached the cross brace:
That spire comes from snow falling straight down through the table, with a bit collecting on the struts:
Holding the camera over the table shows a thin glass rim around the edge of the hole:
I wouldn’t believe it, either, if I hadn’t seen it!
A licensed bird rescuer gave a talk before a showing of Pelican Dreams in Rhinebck and presented some of her patients…
A Red Tailed Hawk with a broken left wing, just out of its bandage:
A Barred Owl who, despite having a left eye that no longer dilates, rapidly acquired weapons lock on my camera’s focus assist light:
And a pair of insanely cute Screech Owls, both with eye damage, atop their padded perch:
Most of her patients arrive after collisions with automobiles; it seems carnivorous birds don’t look both ways before pouncing on prey near the roadside.
Contrary to her impassioned claims, however, wind turbines kill essentially zero birds, at least compared to windows, HV power lines, and cats. Some reports with actual numbers that, obviously, won’t convince anybody who already knows what the results should be:
Low light, no flash, long zoom, handheld, good-looking subjects.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 