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There have been rumors of snow in seattle. Predictions have been between zero and 30 inches. Who knows what will happen. Regardless, you can watch a live stream from a Thermal IR camera pointed at highway 99 South in SODO…

My friend Brett Beauregard has been working on this sweet open source PID controller.. and he’s finally published information online about it here.

A PID (proportional–integral–derivative) controller is a device which use hardware feedback with an algorithm; this allows the operator to maintain a target value (temp). Cruise control in car is the classic example: Set it at 60mph, and it will increase the accelerator until you hit 60. There are all sorts of things which can go wrong with closed-loop control systems – - overshoot, ringing, bias, etc. As this device is all open source, as it will make debugging these devices much easier.

It’s currently on “presale” for $85. I think this is a sweet deal. If you want to make your own Sous-vide cooker, this is the ticket. Go buy one, as I want to make sure this type of hardware is available to the masses. I’m excited to get mine.

This video shows the upper deck of the viaduct being demolished by massive jackhammers, while a brave construction worker sprays water to keep the dust down. It looks like we should expect an alien to come jumping out of this video at any moment.

I heard the viaduct was going to be closed for a week or so, but I wasn’t expecting them to demolish it. Oh well, it’s not like I was using that highway anyway?

Filmed in 1080p on a canon 5d mk II, 200mm, f2.8

This was my first try at doing a long exposure on a digital camera of the night sky. An external timer was used to keep the shutter open for 45 minutes.

Even after touch up post processing, the image is very, very noisy. The noise floor on most sensors has quite a bit to do with how warm they get. Folks go to extremes to get their sensors cold, the most typical solution is to use a TEC/Peltier junction. One issue with these chillers is that they only push heat to the other side of the plate – - you still need to get it out of the system somehow; this is typically done with large heatsinks and fans.

I found a company which will modify your stock DSLR to have a chiller, but it’s a very expensive prospect, on the order of 3 grand. I think I may try modifying a cheap point and shoot camera first to see what sort of results I can get… if I can find one which will let me take long exposures. For now, I’m going to make sure I get my camera to take a black reference first (doh*), but this effectively doubles the time it takes to do a shot, as the exposure time has to be the same for the black reference.

Anyway, here’s my first attempt at this:

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This was shot on a 5d mark II, using a 24mm f1.4 prime lens. I’m happy with the result, but I crave less noise.

-3ric

I’ve been playing around with time lapse photography… Here’s my first attempt at something. which came out pretty cool:

With thanks again to Intellectual Ventures, for use of their Phantom V12, here’s a bit of slow-motion video of a match striking. Playback speed varied to keep it to 30 seconds for a project I’m doing; the original was close to 7 1/2 minutes. Please excuse the clunky music. If anyone out there is a composer and wants to help me out, I’d love to hear from you — click through to my flickr stream and contact me from there. :) Anyway, here’s the video:

High-speed (near-)macro is neat, eh?

Just a little something I (ahem) whipped up, from a shoot we had with the Phantom back in Januaary:

Our thanks to Intellectual Ventures Lab for use of the camera!

This is a small experiment. It’s been a while; we don’t blagh much, because we are busy working on crap and being lazy. I might post these every once in a while, but don’t count on it. Also, yes, we are still alive, and more busy than ever before.

• Microscopes. Things have been getting smaller, so it was time we upgraded our optics. We have two new microscopes in the lab..

• An inspection scope for surface mount soldering and inspection (and anything else you’d like to look at using epi-illumination). It’s wired up to a crappy TV with a camera. Using a microscope on a low-latency screen like this is pure awesome. Here’s what sort of detail you can see with this system:

• The other microscope is still a work in progress, but is a 400x epi scope which was designed for Petrographic Ore imaging.   Strangely, we don’t have much Ore viewing going on, but if you look closely inside of things you see stuff like this:

• We’ve also been slowly setting up a chem lab, so we can decap our own chips.  Yay.

• Much in the way of high voltage stuff. We ran dueling tesla coils last weekend built by two different people.  Soon we’ll have three going at once, just for fun and safety.

• Costumes!

• Monthly PCB fab!  We get a board made monthly, and we all chip into it.  heh.

• We now have a makerbot!  It sometimes makes 3d stuff for us.  Hotpants.

• Crafty tools:  “cnc” embroidery machine. Serger.

• We can now sharpen drillbits.  Sweeet.

• There is tons of other little projects going on all of the time, but I wanted to push out some of the highlights which I think we can talk about.  :)

In summary: we are busy doing crazy projects; and we still don’t spend much time updating the blog.

Toorcamp was held at a Titan missile silo near Moses Lake, Washington in early July 2009.

We made a giant tent.

Though there were a few close calls, everyone survived.

Photos:

• adamcecc
• amatus2600
• Bre 1 / Bre 2
• hypatiadotca
• mattw
• pip
• rob

Are you a  member of HBL? Did you make something neat? Do you like to blog your stuff? Blog away. It may have a link for downloading, or it may have a photo. First poster in this category please delete this example post.