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Showing posts from 2017

Building a Thermal Camera

https://damow.net/building-a-thermal-camera/ Thermal cameras have always fascinated me. I think the ability to view a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is normally hidden from us will always be a strange and exciting thing. Unfortunately, they’re also quite expensive, especially if you’re buying one just for playing around with rather than using in some commercial capacity like thermal surveying or electronics testing. I wanted to get started with thermography without a huge price tag, so I thought I’d go all in and build my own! Obviously, this was a hugely involved process so I’ll cover a bit of each aspect here. Feel free to ask questions down in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer! 1 The Sensor I started off trying to find a microbolometer . This is the business-end of a thermal camera. This is also the expensive, difficult-to-source bit. They are commercially available as components from electronics distributors ...
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Mikrotik Update 6.40.5

What's new in 6.40.5 (2017-Oct-31 13:05): *) certificate - fixed import of certificates with empty SKID; *) crs3xx - fixed 100% CPU usage after interface related changes; *) firewall - do not NAT address to 0.0.0.0 after reboot if to-address is used but not specified; *) ike1 - fixed crash after downgrade if DH groups 19,20,21 were used for phase1; *) ike1 - fixed RSA authentication for Windows clients behind NAT; *) ipsec - fixed lost value for "remote-certificate" parameter after disable/enable; *) ipv6 - fixed IPv6 addresses constructed from prefix and static address entry; *) log - properly recognize MikroTik specific RADIUS attributes; *) lte - do not reset modem when it is not possible to access SMS storage; *) lte - fixed modem initialization after reboot; *) lte - fixed PIN option after setting up the band; *) sms - include time stamps in SMS delivery reports; *) sms - properly initialize SMS storage; *) snmp - fixed "/system license" parameters for CHR;...
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The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition. James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan ...
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The Amazing $1 Microcontroller

https://jaycarlson.net/microcontrollers/ The Amazing $1 Microcontroller As an embedded design consultant, the diverse collection of projects on my desk need an equally-diverse collection of microcontroller architectures that have the performance, peripheral selection, and power numbers to be the backbone of successful projects. At the same time, we all have our go-to chips — those parts that linger in our toolkit after being picked up in school, through forum posts, or from previous projects. In 2017, we saw several new MCUs hit the market, as well as general trends continuing in the industry: the migration to open-source, cross-platform development environments and toolchains; new code-generator tools that integrate seamlessly (or not so seamlessly…) into IDEs; and, most notably, the continued invasion of ARM Cortex-M0+ parts into the 8-bit space. I wanted to take a quick pulse of the industry to see where everything is — and what I’ve been missing while backed into...
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How to Pick a Microcontroller For Beginner

http://www.sureshjoshi.com/embedded/how-to-pick-a-microcontroller/ Many months ago when I was on vacation, I had a chat with the fantastic people behind SnapEDA about my heavily opinionated thoughts around how to pick a microcontroller (aside: if you’re a hardware designer and you’ve never used SnapEDA – sign up for free and watch your life instantaneously become easier). They briefly wrote about those thoughts in their Top 10 Microcontrollers post. Here we are about 6 months later, and I thought it would be good to re-visit some of those opinions. I’ve just selected a few new microcontrollers for some projects, so I’ve gone through these decisions again recently. There are a multitude of factors to keep in mind when picking an MCU, but the problem is that there are usually TOO many factors, and it’s easy to get stuck into an “analysis paralysis” situation. Below are a subset of design considerations when choosing an MCU, but you’ll notice that I dismiss some of th...
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Augmented Reality with Python & OpenCV

https://bitesofcode.wordpress.com/2017/09/12/augmented-reality-with-python-and-opencv-part-1/ You may (or may not) have heard of or seen the augmented reality Invizimals video game or the Topps 3D  baseball cards. The main idea is to render in the screen of a tablet, PC or smartphone a 3D model of a specific figure on top of a card according to the position and orientation of the card.   Figure 1: Invizimal augmented reality cards. Source:  Well, this past semester I took a course in Computer Vision where we studied some aspects of projective geometry and thought it would be an entertaining project to develop my own implementation of a card based augmented reality application. I warn you that we will need a bit of algebra to make it work but I’ll try to keep it as light as possible. To make the most out of it you should be comfortable working with different coordinate systems and transformation matrices. <disclaimer First, this post does not ...
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