Last night I successfully fired a strobe with a microswitch hooked up to my Arduino.  I’m aware that at this point, the setup is a needlessly complicated and expensive version of just pushing the “test” button on the back of the flash, but hey, progress is progress!  Now all I need to do is replace the microswitch with a break-beam or sound trigger, build a variable delay into the program, and viola, I should be up and running!  Hit the jump for a photo of the jury rigged mess of wires.

In the photo below, you can see Cybersync transmitter in a stero-plug to hot-shoe adapter and clamped to the side of my coffee table/workbench.  It’s wired into the Arduino and switch, and send the trigger signal to the Cybersync receiver velcroed to the top of my Vivitar 285HV strobe.  With the Cybersyncs, I’ll eventually be able to hook up five or more strobes, in case I need more light, or want to get a nice colored background like this photo by flickr user fpsurgeon.  With a little luck I’ll be up and running within a week or so, since right now the main hurdle is deciding what I need to order for the triggering mechanisms.

Prototype number one

McCurry was given the roll by Kodak themselves, and it was developed at Dewayne’s Photo, in Parsons, Kansas, the only place left IN THE WORLD that can process Kodachrome.  Dewayne’s will only be offering processing through December 30th of this year, so if you’ve got any Kodachrome around, you’d better get shooting!

At this point, my dad mentioned that he had some sitting in the fridge from years ago, sealed and unexposed.  Cue me running to the kitchen and digging through a shoebox of expired film, and coming up with two rolls of 24 exposure, ASA 64 Kodachrome color slide film.

Now, I’ve only really shot film a handful of times in my life, and not at all recently.  This was mostly due to my lack of confidence with a camera, which was probably brought on by using terrible disposable cameras for most of my childhood.  Now that I know my way around an SLR a little bit, I would be a lot more comfortable shooting film, and I was really excited to shoot what many consider some of the “best looking” stuff ever made.  I threw both rolls in my bag, along with some assorted black and white film that I’d found, and excepted that to be that, but my dad had other ideas.

Just as a little background, my dad has been an avid photographer all his life, and has several old manual Nikon SLRs.  He’s got thousands of photos that he’s taken over the last 50 years, and will probably end up getting a digital SLR soon.  He proposed a little challenge.  We each take a roll, shoot it, and get it processed before December 30th, and then compare our photos (and post them online for others to compare), and see who is better.  Since I can’t resist a challenge like that, and since the film was technically his anyways, I agreed!  This will be an epic contest of new-school versus old-school, Canon versus Nikon, age versus youth!  I’m guessing dad will shoot with his Nikon, and I’m keeping an eye out for a good deal on a Canon EOS film SLR, so I can use my fancy lenses and work with controls I’m used to.  I’ll shoot a couple rolls before I do the real deal as well, just to get used to film.  I’ll probably post a bit about my experiences along the way, so keep an eye out for it!

My "workbench"

My order from Maker Shed arrived today, some wiring, a mini breadboard, and a protoshield kit.  From the product description, it’s not super apparent that it comes unassembled, but when I opened the box I found that was indeed the case.  I’d been planning to learn to solder eventually, so it wasn’t a huge deal, but this did accelerate my learning a bit!

I had to run to my parent’s house for dinner anyways, so I took the opportunity to pick up my dad’s old soldering iron, solder, and third hand, and proceeded to learn to solder by watching various YouTube videos on the subject.  Once I felt I had the gist of it, I broke out the protoshield and got to work, following the instructions here.

At the start of the project, all those pins seemed pretty intimidating, but once I’d soldered in the first couple without incident, I gained some confidence and was able to chew through them pretty quickly.  I was surprised by how nice (at least to my untrained eye) most of my connections turned out!  I tested a few with my multimeter just to make sure everything went as planned.

When the moment of truth arrived, I fit the protoshield on top of the Arduino, plugged in a couple LEDs, since the controller was still programmed with my scrolling LED sketch, and plugged it in.  Sure enough, all three LEDs worked as advertised, blinking merrily away.  With the protoshield stacked on the Arduino, you have a nice, compact package to prototype circuits, without needing to wire up a separate breadboard.  Now that I’ve cleared this hurdle, my next step will be to work on making the controller send a trigger signal to my Paul C. Buff Cybersync CST flash trigger, which I can then use to fire my strobes wirelessly.  After that, I’ll work on hooking up my sensors and making them fire the flash.  Progress is being made!

The newly assembled protoshield atop my Arduino

Me with part of the B-36's main gear

One of the neatest little apps I’ve been using on my Android phone (HTC Hero and now the EVO 4G) is MyTracks, which was developed by Google employees following Google’s 20% time philosiphy.  At it’s most basic level, MyTracks is a GPS data logging app.  It interfaces tightly with Google Maps, and lets you upload and view your tracks to My Maps on Google Maps.

The map screen

I’ve used MyTracks a couple times, mostly to track my position on hikes or various exploring adventures.  It worked great to track Rich and my progress when we canoed the St. Croix river, and I used it a couple weeks ago to record my hike up to the spot where an Air Force B-36 bomber crashed near El Paso, TX in 1953.  This hike was a great test of the app since it involved pretty extreme elevation change (about 1300 feet), a number of waypoints that I wanted to record, and since I was climbing a mountain in the desert, I had a clean line of sight to the GPS satellites the entire trip.

The hike itself really kicked my ass.  It was 102 degrees and sunny (124 with the heat index), and the combination of serious elevation gain and the rough terrain (with plenty of cactus!) made for slow going.  I also forgot to start my track for a little bit, but other than that MyTracks worked perfectly.  I used the app to mark the positions of several key waypoints or pieces of wreckage, although not as many as I’d have liked to, since I was running low on water and energy by the time I reached the wreckage.  This wasn’t as big of a deal as I’d worried though, since once I uploaded the track to Google Maps I was able to edit it and add the markers I’d missed.

The stats screen for my hike

Speaking of uploading your track, it’s easy and very handy!  You can upload it directly to Google Maps, export the track as a .kml file, or email a link to one of your contacts directly from your phone.  Once you’ve uploaded it to Google, you can view and edit the track in the My Maps screen.  Click here to see the completed and edited track of my hike to the crash site.  I added the locations of the memorial plaque, a shaded area denoting the main concentration of wreckage, and some explanations for some of my backtracking.

Your options to edit and share a track

The last thing that I’ve wanted to try with Google Maps is geotagging my photos.  By taking the GPS data logged by MyTracks, and loading the .kml file into myTracks4Mac (a completely different app!), I am able to import the RAW photos, associate them with the location they were taken, and write the coordinates to the EXIF data associated with each photo.  The whole process only takes a couple minutes and works great!  myTracks4Mac works by taking the time the photo was taken and drawing the coordinates from the .kml file.  I used this program to geotag the photo at the top of this post, which you can view on my map over at Flickr, here.  I definitely plan to make use of this combo in the future, as I love the idea of being able to associate photographs with the exact location they were taken.  MyTracks4Mac has a free 30-day, full-functionality, trial, and is only about 10 Euros to purchase, and Google MyTracks is free, so if you’re a photographer and have an Android handset, there’s no reason not to give it a try!

This is DIYx10^26.  Copenhagen Suborbitals describe themselves as a “non-profit suborbital space endevaour, with a mission to put a man in space sometime in 2012-2013.  That sounds pretty out-of-this-world, but it gets better.  The mission will be launched from a self-built, floating, launch platform, towed into place by the guys at Copenhagen Suborbitals OWN SUBMARINE.  This is some serious James Bond supervillian stuff!

In less than four days they will be launching the HEAT1X/Tycho Brahe mission, to test out an almost full-scale (640mm diameter) rocket with an attached crew module, complete with a dummy pilot.  The launch will take place southeast of Sweden, and as we speak the catamaran launch platform is hooked up to the submarine Nautilus for towing.

The eventual astronaut-bearing rocket will be larger (about 800mm), have a longer burn, and fly higher (the goal altitude is around 150km), but this will be the first of several flights to ensure that the flight will be safe and have the greatest chance possible of success.

Copenhagen Suborbitals is funded entirely by donations and sponsorships, and as of right now they are sitting at 95.8% of the 50,000 Euros they want to raise to fund this and other missions in 2010, so if you’ve got a couple extra bucks, consider heading over to their donations page and sending some there way.  Really isn’t the idea of DIY spaceflight more exciting than going out to eat this week?  Just in case you’re not sure, I’ll leave you with this photo of the HEAT1X and Tycho Brahe spacecraft mounted for launch and under tow by the submarine Nautilus.

Much more impressive things to come soon. If you’re in the Twin Cities area and like to tinker, you’d be well served to check out Ax-Man surplus!  I picked up a number of resistors, LEDs, a potentiometer, and some other odds and ends for a fraction of the price of the same parts at Radioshack, plus you can pick up other awesome toys like gas masks, magnets, and the rangefinder from a Leopard tank!  I love that place, and their product tags are usually good for a couple laughs as well.  Now I need to get a 3.5mm stereo plug jack hooked up so I can work on triggering lights or a camera. I hoped you enjoyed the 80s soundtrack for my video, courtesy of Miami Vice season one!

If it had been darker, I would likely have had more success, since I’d be able to have a longer shutter speed (this was taken at 1 second or so), which would give me a better ratio of shutter open to shutter closed time.  The split second timing and blind luck required to get these lightning photos reminded me of another photographic adventure I had a while ago, shooting water drops. I just used a ziploc bag with a pin hole in it, and relied on reflexes and luck to fire the lights at the right time, but after seeing work like the photo below by David Pearson (fpsurgeon on flickr), I’ve been interested in setting up a more automated solution to both increase the percentage of keepers, and to allow me to shoot more complex things like the droplet collision below.

To this end, I just went ahead and ordered up an Arduino Duemilanove, the book Getting Started with Arduino, and some accessories so I can put together a DIY trigger that will allow me to shoot stuff like this, along with other types of high-speed photography.  This will also serve the dual purpose of improving my knowledge of programming and basic electronics, so I like to look at it as killing three birds with one stone.  I’ll be chronicling my progress here at NerdsIRL, so keep an eye out for an update sometime after the Arduino and book arrive Wednesday!

I’m not sure exactly how they do it, but I assume they are using cell towers.  I could probably figure it out by searching the internet (yea, we get everything up here!), but I’d like to see if I can get WoW to work.

<Turbulence>

The only down side to flying on the Boeing 737 or Airbus 319/320 class of planes is that they don’t have power outlets.  I believe the 757 and 747 have power outlets.  That would be amazing!

The reason I’m writing at the moment, is that weather in Atlanta caused around half of the flights out of LGA (Laguardia, NY) to be canceled yesterday.  Some negotiations with Delta representatives got me on an 11:30am out of EWR (Newark, NJ).  The upside is that I am now flying first class.  I would like to add that if you are ever in Jersey City, the Westin there is a fantastic hotel.  Very comfortable and fairly spacious amenities.  The shower is a dual headed shower, which was also amazing.

Ok, battery life is precious on this monster of a computer.  I may have to switch over to my work computer depending on how fast WoW drains the battery life.

These have been random thoughts from 30k In the Air.

Larry Lars put together this compilation of his Star Wars cubedudes.  The creative use of various parts for the details on these guys just blows me away!  CubeDudes also made an appearance at ComicCon last week, although these were limited edition sets sold by creator Angus McClane.

Next up we’ve got an awesome WWII half-track by Andrew Becraft (Dunechaser on Flickr, and one of the guys that runs the awesome Lego blog The Brother’s Brick).  Andrew has been on a WWII building kick for a while, and this is definitely my favorite output from that!

Last but most certainly not least, Jordan Schwartz (Sir Nadroj on Flickr) built a fantastic brick-built dinosaur, which is accompanied by a classic Bentley motorcar for some unknown but surely awesome reason.  Both builds are great, and I love the creative use of every day parts to nail down the shape of the dino.

Come back next monday for more great builds, or better yet, build something yourself!