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Monterey Bay Aquarium
Misplaced Lens Cap
sheepfilms
Origami Around
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Today's Document
noise dept.
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Kiana Khansmith
bliss lane
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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todays bird
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pixel skylines
seen from Malaysia
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@muxelmann
My trip to Germany and back
My trip to Germany and back
When I last drove to Munich and back, in order to visit my family and girlfriend, I decided to do something especially geeky: track my driving progress. The reason behind me tracking myself was two folded. For one I wanted to see if I could write a full app, front- and back-end to track myself across Europe, but mostly I wanted to keep my folks in the loop of where I am. Usually this was done by…
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Workaround MATLAB's intellisense/auto-complete issues for user defined classes
Workaround MATLAB’s intellisense/auto-complete issues for user defined classes
This will be a short post, but a little wakeup call for myself, and others that may get annoyed by the same issue. The issue at hand is, that MATLAB does not seem to have fully functioning intellisense/auto-complete when dealing with a class definition that spans over multiple files. Let me elaborate…
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Fix to MicroPython's Memory Allocation Problem on ESP8266
Fix to MicroPython’s Memory Allocation Problem on ESP8266
I’ve been trying to write code that allows me to display text on my ST7735 display. The font module I found is around 4kB of source code that needs to be loaded by Python, compiled into byte code and executed by the Python Virtual Machine, or VM (for more details refers here). This process works somewhat like Java’s VM approach, but on devices with limited memory, i.e. the ESP8266, can become…
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ESP8266 file transfer - the post I forgot...
In all my excitement about getting MicroPython running on the ESP8266, and then to get it talking to a ST7735 driven TFT LC display, I completely forgot to explain how I get the code saved on the little chip. It is very possible to write all the code in the terminal using [ccie]picocom[/ccie], [ccie]minicom[/ccie] or [ccie]screen[/ccie]. Yet this approach is very tedious, prone to errors, and if…
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TFT display for ESP8266 - shapes
TFT display for ESP8266 – shapes
Programming is awesome! Having gotten to grips with the ESP8266 on the HUZZAH board from Adafruid made me appreciate this even more. Back in my “wild” embedded-C days I was under the impression that programming a microchip was only for the hardcore geeks (myself included) and really difficult to grasp. How wrong I was! The object orientated platform MicroPython makes this little ESP an amazing…
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ESP8266 getting started
Little did I know, that programming can become so easy! When I started my electronic engineering degree back in 2009, I could not even code. Nor did I know anything about hardware, registers, or protocols. Over the past I have accumulated an immense knowledge that always relied on me writing tens, sometimes hundreds, of lines of code, just to set up a bloody micro controller and turn on a single…
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iPython from Anaconda in PyCharm
iPython from Anaconda in PyCharm
Lately I fell in love with Python and its easy capability of interfacing with DLLs. Yet so far I always relied on using MATLAB for generating reports and plots for our papers. My good old friend Dawid pointed out I could just use iPython to do the plotting for me. Removing the middle man (i.e. MATLAB) would also be beneficial since our University’s license will expire in 3 days :(
The only issue…
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Model View Controller (MVC) for MATLAB GUIs
Model View Controller (MVC) for MATLAB GUIs
The other day I attended a MATLAB training course to make pretty GUIs. It was very interesting, yet the way MathWorks recommended to share data between multiple windows was slightly off-putting for me. In short, they showed all attendees two ways to exchange data. Either have a main windows that holds all data, or the data is stored alongside all windows’ handles (handles are used in MATLAB to…
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Firewatch
I don’t think I have written a review of a game since my website on Apple’s MobileMe platform got shut down, yet I really wanted to after having finished this amazing game: Firewatch.
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Python and DLLs (applied to OpenDSS)
Python and DLLs (applied to OpenDSS)
It has been a very long time since I programmed using a Dynamic Linked Library (DLL). Last time I remember was during my 3rd year for our master project to interface the xbox Kinect to our semi-autonomous drone; good old days… For my PhD we need to interface our developed energy management algorithms with a standardized simulation environment. The one we chose is OpenDSS (link), and as it seems…
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Independent Component Alanysis
I am trying to get my head around, and fully understand and implement, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for my power profile analysis. Doing this is more challenging than I anticipated. Therefore I did what I always do when trying to understand challenging topics: find them in my mother tongue, i.e. German. Some of my colleagues would happily vouch for the unambiguousness of a native language…
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fMRI scan to 3D print (4) - last post
fMRI scan to 3D print (4) – last post
After a long endeavour and many attempts to become part of a study at CINN where I would get a brain scan, I finally did it! Last week, I partook in a study involving EEG/fMRI under the supervision of Dr I. Daly (LinkedIn) and my good friend A. Malik (PhD profile). It was quite a lot of fun (hopefully I get to do more) and as a result I got some reimbursement as well as a copy of my brain’s…
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A few summers ago, I bought a cheap second hand DSLR on eBay and converted it to take pictures in infrared. Why you may ask? The reason is twofold: for one we do not see infrared light, and the other reason is that the pictures look familiar, yet alienated. Don’t get me wrong, I could have easily taken a picture on my iPhone and applied a filter that makes the result look like IR, but that would not be the real thing. So here I go (waiting for another simulation to finish) and writing a post on my first experiences with IR photography.
Infrared explained
We are surrounded by light. More specifically electromagnetic radiation, where only a tiny bandwidth is actually considered visible light. Everybody remembers this from their physics class, but just for completeness sake I’ve included the EM spectrum picture from the Wikipedia entry (link):
The visible light spectrum sits in-between the EM wavelength of roughly 700nm (red) to 400nm (blue). Our eyes have evolved to perceive these wavelengths as “light” and either filter out shorter wavelength, i.e. ultra-violet at 350-400nm, or just ignore them, like with infrared at 700-1100nm. In fact, there are some instances where people have been born without a UV filter in their eyes. These people would see a faint additional blue in the rainbow. Unfortunately UV light is quite damaging to the eye, therefore they should probably wear sunglasses every day.
Camera and lense filters
A typical digital camera contains a sensor that is sensitive to EM radiation, not just visible light. To assure that the colour in the image is not distorted, many DSLR manufactures install a visual-pass filter, that blocks out all non-visible light. Yet as you might know, there is no such thing as a perfect filter. Therefore, on the visual-pass filter in hobby-photographers’ DSLR cameras might still leak through some IR light. And you can take advantage of that already!
When my sister was kind enough to lent me her Nikon D5000, as she wanted to try out more analogue photography, I eventually tried out whether it can snap IR pictures or not. I got my hands on an IR pass filter, which looks like black plastic to the naked eye, and installed it to the camera. It worked, but was a complete pain in the back! To start, it would take long exposure times (I am speaking of several tens of seconds here) to get enough IR light to draw a picture on the sensor. Additionally, focusing the camera is cumbersome. I had to manually focus, then carefully install the filter and as I could no longer see through the finder hope the picture works out ok.
Therefore I decided to go all in and get my hands on a second hand Nikon D50 from eBay, and replaced the visual-pass filter with an IR-pass. Now I can search through the view finder, the autofocus works again, and I can take pictures with normal exposure times. Now I experimented with this camera and tried my best at some IR picture taking. I posted my results below.
Lessons learnt
Cost – Spending a total of £160 on a camera and equipment to take IR pictures was sort of worth it. It was a pretty hefty investment for me, don’t get me wrong, but with my iPhone’s (and sister’s) camera I’m sorted for day to day snapping. At the cost of much lower inconvenience and actually learning about the best way to take an IR picture, I can highly recommend to anybody who might be interested in it to give it a go, too.
Photography – In my experience, taking pictures without any sun is pointless. There is no better source of IR radiation than our nearest star, unless you brought a powerful IR touch. Taking a picture with the sun shining at the object you want to capture yields best results. Also the less humid the air the better. Trees and vegetation seem to reflect loads of IR, whereas the sky and shadows (as you’d expect) contain no to very little IR. Anything “living” one could say is bright, whereas anything “dead” is noticeably darker.
Picture wall
Enough talk… Here are some results:
The World in Infrared
A few summers ago, I bought a cheap second hand DSLR on eBay and converted it to take pictures in infrared.
The World in Infrared A few summers ago, I bought a cheap second hand DSLR on eBay and converted it to take pictures in infrared.
Biochips - Microscopic digital networks that are similar to human tissue
Biochips – Microscopic digital networks that are similar to human tissue
Already the old alchemists have dreamed about the ability to grow miniature beings in their petri dishes. Biotechnologists at the TU Berlin could make this so called Homunculus or “Human on a Chip” become reality (link); or at least something alike. The scientists work on a micro-organism that is capable of simulating human organs and their interactions, and all that in a scale of 1:100000. The…
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fMRI scan to 3D print (3)
fMRI scan to 3D print (3)
This is the final post of the series on; how I managed to 3D print the brain of my dear friend from the the fMRI files she gave me. If you were following this series of posts, you might have noticed that I spent some late nights after work tinkering with NIfTI files and some applications to get the brain structure out of it. Finally I managed to get to the end and decided to make a last post that…
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fMRI scan to 3D print (2)
fMRI scan to 3D print (2)
From my pervious post where I attempted to convert the output files from an fMRI brain scan into a 3D printable format, I stumbled over an application called freesurfer. Now I managed to load in the provided NIfTi (*.nii) file and let the application do some magic analysis, too. This analysis resulted in a whole collection of files that are stored in the…
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Finding the needle in the haystack
Finding the needle in the haystack
For our research we run simulations to validate our algorithms. As a baseline we use the worst case scenario in order to validate that our algorithms still provide good results. An example would be a to run a simple power distribution simulation where each load in the network is fed with a power profile. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a set of power…
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