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.
Found what I think is a Brown Marmorated Stink Bug dead on the Forester’s dashboard:
I didn’t know they had red ocelli:
The wing covers have a red tint, too, which makes me wonder if this one came from a different stink bug family:
The stylet recessed along the ventral midline does all the damage:
They’d be prettier if they weren’t so destructive … Mary doesn’t want them dead; she wants them extinct.
Taken with the Canon SX230HS through the illuminated close-up lens.
The Walkway Over the Hudson has regular “moonwalks” that feature lectures on astronomy, telescopes, and suchlike.
I’m a sucker for the terrestrial views. Looking north-northwest toward Kingston, with the Catskills in the distance:
A bit later, looking southeast toward Poughkeepsie:
The trouble with amateur astronomy: mostly, it happens at night.
Taken with the Canon SX230HS braced on the railing, then aligned and slightly tweaked.
[Update: Some info on the LED lamps along the Mid-Hudson bridge suspension cables.]
More than five hours of stand-up comedy condensed into two minutes of frenzied video showing activity like this:
The Sony HDR-AS30V perched atop a tripod behind the table, where only one errant Scout bumped it, recording one image every 5 seconds. The non-adjustable focus seems biased for selfies, but the compression definitely produces softer images in subdued lighting conditions, so it’s hard to say.
Each NP-BX1 battery lasts about 2.5 hr in that mode and I brought all three, but simply forgot to install the third one. As a result, we don’t get to see the last 2+ hours… it was a long day.
The “image processing” behind the movie went a little something like this, modulo a few edits to elide my blundering around:
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/backup sudo mount -o uid=ed /dev/sdd1 /mnt/part mkdir /mnt/backup/Video/2014-05-17 rsync -au /mnt/part/DCIM/100MSDCF/ /mnt/backup/Video/2014-05-17 rsync -au /mnt/part/DCIM/101MSDCF/ /mnt/backup/Video/2014-05-17 cd /tmp mkdir Video cd Video sn=1 ; for f in /mnt/backup/Video/2014-05-17/*JPG ; do printf -v dn 'dsc%05d.jpg' "$(( sn++ ))" ; cp -a $f $dn ; done mkdir Shrink for f in *jpg ; do convert $f -resize 50% Shrink/$f ; done cd Shrink/ avconv -r 30 -i dsc%05d.jpg -q 5 3DPrinting-q5.mp4 mv 3DPrinting-q5.mp4 "3D Printing Demo - HV Scout CamporALL 2104.mp4"
One could, of course, do all that in fewer steps, if one knew the answers ahead of time, which should may apply when I refer back to this post.
Using rsync -au to copy the files from the camera to the 2 TB backup drive neatly solves the problems that occur when the camera’s USB port abruptly disconnects itself during the copy: rsync can recover without losing or trashing any files. Alas, after the camera disconnects, it requires a power cycle to recover its wits.
The USB camera connection reads data at 6 MB/s. Removing the MicroSD card and jamming it in the card-reader slot on my monitor runs at 18 MB/s. Apart from the fact that the MicroSD card seems so flimsy, I wonder how long the spring-detent latch inside the camera will continue working. On the other paw, when the USB port finally breaks, it’ll take the GPS assist data path along with it.
Not shown: the rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *JPG that converts the original filenames to lowercase, which I did after the fact. Because blundering around, OK?
The 3964 original 1920×1080 images, hot from the camera, weigh in at 2.2 GB and the half-size video emerged at 118 MB. The default avconv quality setting produces surprisingly crappy results, so I used -q 5. Some after-the-fact fiddling showed that -qscale 5 produces the same file size with about the same apparent quality.
None of that matters, because Youtube set the maximum resolution to 480 and applied ruthless compression. Now I know better…
We planned to ride west on the Walkway and return east on the Mid-Hudson bridge, but encountered an obstruction in mid-span:
Pedestrians and cyclists on diamond-frame (a.k.a., “wedgie”) bikes could sneak past the outrigger legs on the south (left) side of the crane, although that’s surely a Bad Idea for worksite safety. Our big ‘bents wouldn’t fit through, so we just turned around and enjoyed the ride home; a good time was had by all.
While tweaking that picture, I noticed a speck of dirt on the monitor that, upon closer investigation, turned out to be a hidden object:
Using avconv (formerly ffmpeg):
avconv -ss 00:07:05 -i MAH00016.MP4 -t 2 -f image2 -q 1 Image-%03d.jpeg
The options:
Use a video player to find the interesting section, then bracket it with the starting time and duration. Putting the -ss starting time before the -i input file lets the decoder skip through the file, rather than grinding through everything preceding the specified frames.
The -q 1 setting wrings the best quality out of the input video file. That’s why the camera captures 1920×1080 video @ 60 fps; I wish I could dial its compression back a bit, but that’s not an option.
So.
Do you think he didn’t quite kill me between bites or is that a K-Mart bag and he was yakking on a phone like everybody else?
Clicky for more dots. I compressed the image from the avconv output file, but it’s good enough.
When Aitch moved to NC, he unloaded a stack of printer paper on me to avoid paying half a buck a pound to haul it along. One package contained some high-end HP photo paper that, not being a high-end photo kind of guy, I figured I’d use for my 3D printing brag sheets.
Alas, after trying several permutations of image quality / paper type / ink density, it seems that the cheap generic ink I’m using in the Epson R380 simply isn’t compatible with the HP paper. The top image shows that the ink doesn’t wet the paper and forms a weird alligator-skin pattern:
The bottom image looks perfectly fine; it’s on cheap Staples photo paper, printed with the usual Photo quality on Photo paper.
I’ve read vague statements here-and-there that some HP ink uses an entirely different chemistry from the usual inkjet printers and, perhaps, that accounts for the mismatch. Not a problem, but it did blow an hour while proving that it wasn’t the configuration settings doing me in.
Mary spotted three eggs on the ground under one of the garden bird boxes, surrounded by a spray of feathers. We first thought that a hawk had dismantled another songbird, but the feathers came from many different birds.
All three eggs were stone cold and this one had a puncture wound:
We think one of the myriad blackbirds inhabiting the forsythia along the property line cleaned out the nest. It seems sparrows completely fill their nesting cavity, putting their eggs hazardously close to the hole.
This side view shows the entire column of fill:
We’d cleaned out those boxes not long ago, so we’ll let the sparrows handle this one on their own. A pair of Carolina wrens have been hauling grass into the other garden box and we hope the sparrows won’t bother them.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 