Category: Uncategorized

This monday I had a chance to take a few shots of the moon as we caused an eclipse. You can see a bit of the “blood moon” effect as well. The shooting conditions were OK, high altitude stratus obscured the view, but it was viewable! My photography setup was on a small telescope and…

I think everything shown here happens on every conference call I’ve ever been on!

For those on the west coast USA, this will begin just before 10PM, and conditions should be perfect (clear skies, dark, early enough to watch and not miss sleep!) – I’ll take pics and post what I get!  

A new website observes that today’s scientific research is hindered by excessive regulation and oversight. On a spectrum of two possibilities, total anarchy in research vs. total control, where do we stand? I’d guess it depends on what part of science you work in, and where you work and live…

Ever since using services like AirBnB and Uber, I’ve been thinking of a system which would provide ride shares for pilots. Almost every certified airplane has 4 seats, but most flights are single pilot operations. Meanwhile, there are always people who need to get somewhere fast, or who simply would enjoy to fly. Why not…

I’ve been working on a project where I needed a consistent DAC signal to be sent from a control device to a sensor. The sensor wanted a voltage input which was steady, but arduino boards don’t have true DAC output, rather they use PWM to approximate a voltage over a given time. For many devices…

The Arduino IDE for ARM microcontrollers is just plain awesome. I’ve been using both an Uno and a Mega board for quite a while now, and continue to be impressed with how flexible these inexpensive boards are. Recently, I wanted to read the output of a pair of rotary encoders, like these:  Encoders can be…

I’ve heard of a few of these, but this is a great list!     

Just a heads up if you plan on using the NK Remote tethering solution for Micro-Manager. It appears as of now this solution only works in 32 bit installations of windows. I believe a great alternative would be to figure out a driver connection to the open source program DigiCamControl…but as I’m not that great…

I was just thinking about this issue on my morning walk. So my wife and I travel to Mendocino, and there’s no cell coverage. On one hand, it’s kind of nice to be disconnected, but on the other hand, I’m thinking, if some entrepreneurial person could figure out the hardware/software setup, they could make a…