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Image segmentation for PnP optical placement
Quick ‘n dirty (but working!) image segmenter for randomly-strewn part identification. About 1 page worth of scripting takes an image of objects on background, determines which part is the background, determines the outside contour of each object and numbers each as a separate object. Now that it’s known where to look for one specific object,…
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Pick ‘n Place Head
This weekend I got some parts in and put together a preliminary placement head for my open-source pick ‘n place project. My requirements are that it be buildable with off-the-shelf parts (ideally same-source, to save on shipping) and no special equipment, allow +/-180 degree rotation while maintaining an undisturbed vacuum, and support interchanging of the…
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Toward an open-source Pick and Place machine
So, there’s some really cool, empowering stuff going down these days with regard to manufacturing. Cartesian machines (i.e. CNC mills) are relatively simple to build from off-the-shelf parts; there are a bajillion people doing this and plenty of ready-made open-source designs available. More recently, hobbyists have gotten in on designing open-source rapid prototypers (3D printers);…
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I quit, I win, final, no talkbalks
It’s like third grade all over again, except that I could theoretically have ice cream for breakfast if I wanted to.
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Windows 2000/XP Driver for (some) Veo Stingray and IBM PC Camera V5000 webcams
UPDATE: For Veo Stingray drivers, try these first. In case they disappear… Stingray 300V (Win98/ME/2000/XP) and Stingray 323V (Win2k/XP only). The one sold by AllElectronics uses the 323V driver. I picked up an old “Veo Stingray” camera from surplus dealer AllElectronics. These things are pretty junk by modern standards (320×240 resolution, unsightly rounded “looking through…
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Tubthumping (or, Sears/Kenmore washers are shit, do not buy them)
So there we are, minding our own business, when an angry demon springs to life in the basement. He is on a rampage, pounding against the walls with all his might, THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP BANG BANG BANG. We race downstairs. Turns out it is only the Sears Kenmore front-loading washing machine’s internals beating themselves…
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No, she cannot has cheezburger. Laser pointer, yes!
We got a kitty last weekend. Like many new additions of the human kind, we hadn’t really planned on it*, but now we are in love with her. Her name is Spirit (she comes pre-named). She had no trouble settling into the new house, except for spooking out at the noise from the radiators at…
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Banned from Google (or, How I Became A Dirty Rotten Spammer)
An update, 1/28/2011: It turns out there was a legitimate problem on the site after all! Specifically, hacked by spammers at some point and filled with invisible links & keywords. Skip down to the comments for the details, and be aware that the rant that follows is based on a fairly complete lack of information!…
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My quickie guide for setting up mspgcc for ez430-cc2500
Mostly for my own reference for the next time I have to set it up on a new machine, but may help others on their first time install. Valid as of Feb. or so this year. Software ‘shopping’ list (all free/OSS tools) Set up the toolchain (mspgcc). There seem to be several important tools missing…
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DIY-Spy: a homebrew 2.4GHz wi-fi spectrum analyzer
I was reading the Thinkgeek catalog a while back and an interesting gadget caught my eye: “Wi-Spy”, a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer on a USB stick. Coming from the world where “spectrum analyzer” refers to a big benchtop box with a name like Le Croyright, we can’t afford those Agilent on it, my first thought was,…
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Throwies overtake Kendall/MIT station sculpture
Blinking RGB LED throwies adorn the “Steaming Globe” sculpture near the Kendall/MIT station just after the 4th of July fireworks show. No idea how this could have happened. Kids had a blast pulling them off and throwing them back onto the globe (and each other!). The whole rest of the night as we walked around,…
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You are invited to participate in a research study. Afterward, there will be cake.
Heh… I’ve just completed NIH certification to administer human test protocols. I feel like that’s got to be worth a few mad scientist points. So, I’m working on this project at work involving research into new forms of computer interface peripherals. (No, not that one.) As part of the project, we are required to test…
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Comcast, she’s at it again…
comcast, corporates, drivebydownload, broken, tos, contracts
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Fun with MIDI, CNC and vector maths (mid2cnc.py)
More playing: Castlevania end credits Tetris Mario Bros. theme Update: I fixed up the script to pull (usually) proper timing from the MIDI, threw together some minimal documentation and released it to the public (see link below). Downloads mid2cnc.py, sparse documentation and samples Basically, it’s possible to compute a combination of (distance, feedrate) along an…
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(Also: An experiment…)
In the last post, I made the unspeakable blargger mistake of linking to an article on a news site, which means in 7 days or so, instead of said article this link will return absolute crap and/or a “Buy membership now!” nag screen. Trying to keep up with such link rot (if anyone bothered) is…
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Cloud Computing…cirrusly? (same trash, different bag)
So, apparently I’m not the only one to notice the mid-level marketing types in IT having a big collective nut lately about “Cloud Computing”. This week even the Wall Street Journal ragged about this nonsense on the front page. For those who don’t spend their time around mid-level IT marketing types, cloud computing is… well,…
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Optical Mouse Hacks: 2D Micropositioning using cheap mouse cameras
Optical mice work by pointing a tiny cheap camera at the surface of your desktop, tracking the motion of ‘interesting’ points in the surface texture (woodgrain, imperfections, highlight/shadow) as the mouse slides around over it, and converting this to an X and Y motion. An LED is used to light the surface beneath the sensor,…
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NinBendo (cont’d): Zero-knowledge, realtime music tweaking example
This is a followup to this post. Quick video example of finding and bending the music data that plays during Super Mario Bros. 3’s World 1 map, using the FCEUX emulator’s advanced 6502 debugging features. Full-screen if you’ve got it – the video did not survive compression well, and I don’t feel like investing hours…
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NinBendo – circuit bending by corrupting 8-bit game code.
Yeah, back in junior high I had not enough friends and too much time, and discovered that keying in random Game Genie codes would sometimes cause a NES game to (harmlessly) glitch out in interesting ways. :-p Some codes just locked up the game (drat!), while others caused screen glitches, messed with colors, and rearranged…
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Better Better DXF Output for Inkscape (layers!)
I started using Inkscape, a sweet open-source vector graphics program, to produce (and/or steal from the internet and convert) designs suitable for carving on the CNC as Inkscape has a plugin to export the file as a .DXF. Converting some files, I discovered the current export script does not correctly handle all types of transforms,…
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- Das Blinkenlichten – wearable lighting
- Goldmine Electronics LCD pinout (mini-teardown)
- Mosquino: an Arduino-based energy harvesting development board
- Pick and Place Project
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