This page contains a listing of all my posts. You can filter them by broad topic using the submenus under "Creative Outbursts". Or you can filter articles with the tag cloud in the sidebar to the right. You can also sign up to my RSS feed to be notified of new articles.
Posted by Armin on Monday, January 27, 2014
My kids recently got a Duplo trainset (I think Set # 2933-1; second-hand), which they loved so much that the button that starts / stops the train got stuck within 20 minutes of playing. It looked like an easy fix, but the first (and hardest) hurdle was to actually open up the Duplo train.
Posted by Armin on Thursday, December 26, 2013
A few months ago I bought the fabulous book "The Nature of Code" by Daniel Shiffman. Instead of recreating the book's examples and exercises in Processing, I translated them to C++, using the Cinder library. This project is too large to house on my private web site, so here's a link to the wiki and code repository on BitBucket:
Posted by Armin on Wednesday, August 17, 2011
A video filmed at 300 fps of an axolotl trying to snatch up a food pellet. (Unfortunately, it fails both times to swallow the pellet.) Playback is slowed down to about 10x, and then 50x the actual speed of the feeding reflex. Filmed with a Casio Exilim EX-F1. Video quality is certainly not the best, but the video is still interesting, I think.
Posted by Armin on Wednesday, June 08, 2011
A Python script that's using OpenCV to open a video, loop it, and trigger playback via a command coming from the serial port (where in my case an Arduino is connected) or a key press. Playback stops after a timer has run out and commences after another trigger event.
Posted by Armin on Tuesday, May 31, 2011
It's common knowledge that MacBooks and iMacs can be controlled with any Apple remote. This feature is turned on by default, so unless people manually disable remotes, or pair a specific remote to their computer, they are easy victims for a simple prank. You can control the volume, start/pause songs in iTunes, advance and go back a song in the library, and, most annoyingly, enter FrontRow by pressing the appropriate button on the remote. Of course, it would be nice not to actually have to approach the "prankee" with a conspicuous Apple remote. It would be far nicer to have a microcontroller mimic the IR codes and control everything remotely…
Posted by Armin on Wednesday, March 16, 2011
I don't know why, but I really like to draw geckos. Below are more examples of my growing gecko collection.
Posted by Armin on Saturday, February 26, 2011
Thanks to Kevin Ford and Janneke Hille Ris Lambers at UW I recently had the opportunity to get access to a very good-looking LIDAR data set for the area around Mount Rainier, WA. They obtained a high-resolution LIDAR map of Mt. Rainier National Park from the Puget Sound Lidar Consortium. Kevin and Janneke approached me to ask whether it's possible to create a 3D print of Mount Rainier and, naturally, I was extremely intrigued by this idea.
Posted by Armin on Friday, February 11, 2011
Below is a PDF of my presentation and the code for a tutorial on making elaborate multi-axes movies with Matlab. The tutorial was part of the "hallway salon" series that has become a tradition in the Daniel Lab.
The code contained on this page contains a framework for saving movies from MATLAB that should be easily adaptable for your own work. I tried to add as many comments in the code, so it should be fairly self-explanatory.
Posted by Armin on Thursday, January 06, 2011
This page contains the source code for the Arduino-based laser trigger unit described in a separate post.
I tried to insert comments in the code, so it should be pretty self-explanatory. To play and modify the code, you can copy and paste it into your Arduino IDE. (The line numbers in the code listing won't be copied.)
Posted by Armin on Thursday, January 06, 2011
I developed the camera trigger unit in order to synchronize various events and actions during free-flight experiments with hawkmoths in the wind tunnel described in a previous post. More specifically, the goal was to trigger multiple high-speed cameras and have LEDs that indicate the exact timing of electrical stimuli delivered via a miniature stimulus chip carried by a hawkmoth. (Electric stimulation of the moth is also triggered by the unit.)
