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The fact that I find this hilarious probably shows that my geekiness has no limits:

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Blogging from my iPhone. I wish it held a charge for a whole day.

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The Mac OS X tool recommendations page has been fairly popular. It hadn’t been updated for a little over a year and things change so here is the fourth update.

Enjoy !

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The Arduino Starter Pack from Adafruit is really pretty cool. It provides a really nice starting point for open source hardware hacking. In addition to the main Arduino board, the starter pack includes a few components to play with (resistors, push buttons, LEDs, …) as well as a protoshield to start prototyping with the Arduino. Get your soldering iron out for you’ll need to solder the protoshield and its components before you can do any solder-less prototyping. If you’re lazy, you can buy the assembled one but that’s no fun !

Shields are ready made modules that sit (and sometimes stack) on top of the Arduino board to provide various functionality. Many are available at Adafruit and other places: GPS, Wireless Radio (Xbee), Protoshield, Ethernet, LCD, … and come with sample source code.

LadyAda’s companion web site and forums are a great resource to start reading about all that stuff, detailing the spec and tutorials on all of the Adafruit products.

Also, I bought a few electronics book as well as Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects from Tom Igoe to get me started. The book is in the a new format for O’Reilly that sits between their Make magazine and a class book. It feels simple, didactic and approachable.

Tom’s book features a dozen simple projects and their variants mostly based on the Arduino board; some of them are pretty cheap to make but others involve slightly more expensive components (the price of communication, I guess) with Bluetooth, Radio or Ethernet modules priced at $50+. Still a lot of fun to put together.

While the book spends a lot of time detailing (what is trivial for me) network concepts it sometimes takes shortcuts when it comes to electronics basics and the IDE. However it does illustrate well how ’simple serial networking’ can be very easy to use though, for basic communications. It’s eerie to see how what we’re used to think as complex networking protocols (Ethernet, Bluetooth, Radio signals, USB) can be used as an easy and modern way to conduct a serial dialog. I wish it did spend a bit more time on some basic electronic concepts (voltage divider, pull up and pull down resistances, …) but I had to refer to other books for that.

I am nearing a point where I can now start designing my own circuits and will be hitting the electronic component store tonight (not RadioShak).

I also ordered a few shields to play with (GPS and Motor control) as well as a very small version of the Arduino (Boarduino).

PS: the Making Things Talk book is paired with a web site that contains erratum and code listings so you don’t have to type in any of the examples.

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I am not much for DIY, home projects. I am still struggling with putting curtains up in my TV room.

However, while casually browsing different sites (including Make) I discovered the Arduino board, an easy to use electronic kit based on a powerful Microcontroller that spawned a family of companion products.

This ecosystem makes it easy to experiment with various sensors, motors, displays, actuators. Furthermore, the controller is programmable through your Windows or Mac OS X PC via USB, using the Wiring environment and programing language resembling a simplified C. Environment such as Flash or Processing interface easily to the Arduino making it trivial to plot data, log things to databases.

I thought I’d chronicle my experiments with different Arduino based projects as I painful try to remember the basic of electronics that were taught to me through high-school.

To start I bought the Arduino starter pack from Adafruit. There are quite a few different versions of the board out there, the hardware and software designs being available under copyleft. Some are USB based, RS232 or even Bluetooth; some are tiny (Arduino Nano), others a tad larger but not by much (such as the Arduino Diecimila I bought) and some have odd shapes (the Arduino Lillypad is one). Regardless of the one you get, they easily interface with your Mac/PC, programmable through a pretty neat IDE, get power through AC, USB and/or a battery and offer you access to a good number of Analog input and Digital input/output pins to control or read from a whole range of things.

Next ? Receiving my Adafruit Arduino starter pack and my first few projects.

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In our quest to put more hours on our rebreathers, Sam and I dove the stern of the Chester Poling yesterday, a classic new england dive. It was my first good pair of dives on the wreck. The first one was spent trying to figure out my respiratory rate on doubles trying to ‘move the boat’ and the second was aborted because of electronics failure on my rebreather.

Yesterday everything was great, viz was over 35 feet, the water was at 45F, current was moderate and the weather was gorgeous. Dave & Heather’s boat, the Gauntlet is a great vessel to dive from and a great crew.

Here is a yet unedited movie of the dive:

It was by no means a challenging wreck dive but a good solid dive for us to get better on our rebreathers. The dive parameters were:

1. 96ft, 49mins, 44.6deg F

2. 96ft, 46mins, 46.0def F

I was thinking of my dad throughout, he’s the reason I started diving since he had shot so many underwater documentaries in the 60s. He turned 90 yesterday and he’s coming to visit me this week !

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The game was fantastic, it was so good to be back at Fenway that I won’t mind the major sunburn on half of my face.

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I just got a Sigma DP1 last week. I was lucky enough to get my hand on one of the very limited supply of DP1s in the US (as of this post, DP1 are out of stock at Amazon, BHPhotoVideo and Adorama).

But I just sold it on ebay. Why ?

I really wanted to love the camera. I went out and bought a gorgeous Voigtlander Brightline Finder for it, as well as the Sigma Hood. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very unique camera and many will like it but it’s just not for me.

Looking for a camera I could take with me everywhere (which I cannot do with my Canon 5D and its multiple lenses), a camera that would give me a picture quality approaching DSLR (approaching, I am not naive), a versatile RAWsumer, I bought the Canon G9.
The G9 had some really annoying quirks but all in all, it was a pretty good camera. But I lost it after a few weeks (duh…). Since I couldn’t bear buying a camera which albeit good, I knew was not perfect (I know, naive), I started to look at the Ricoh and the upcoming Sigma DP1.

So what’s wrong with it then ?

While the image quality is outstanding and the solid construction shines, there are a few things that really bugged me about the DP1, but I have to mention that the camera performs equally or better than most compacts, however:

• f/4 is just not open enough. I know it’s comparable to many compacts and that the high quality of high ISO should compensate for it but in my 10 days of experimenting with the camera, I found it most capable during bright days.
• Many aspects of the camera make it too slow for candid, quick street photography. Even with an Extreme III Sandisk card, RAW files take too long to write. The AF is just not quick enough and the fact that the camera locks while trying to find focus is quite painful. Due to the write speed, you can’t really take a photo after another if you want to alter the settings any. I think one thing that compounds the slowness of the AF is the fact that the display freezes when it happens, which makes it look even slower because you can’t see what’s happening. Also, after taking a photo, you’re presented with a black screen and an hourglass and have to wait a few seconds for the camera to be ready to take another picture.
• Access to a few key features (it’s a simple camera) through the menu is awkward and slow. I am thinking about ISO change and burst modes. On the G9, I was able to change ISO very quickly.
• Also and here, I might be dreaming but if I recall, the G9 gave me an idea on the LCD on whether the photo would be overexposed or underexposed. With the DP1, regardless of the exposure, the image looks fine and while it tells you if you are with numerical values, it doesn’t show you what I’d really call a live preview. Does this sound right to you ?
• My main gripe is the Sigma software. While I am quite sure that it can extract amazing image quality from the camera, it is a bit slow and it’s UI just not what I am used to. My current workflow consist of importing in Aperture, sorting and organizing all photos, adjusting RAW parameters for the best photos and then touching them up in Photoshop. Adding the Sigma photo software as Step 0 of my workflow just doesn’t seem to work for me.

It’s not you, it’s me

I think I failed to understand how to take photos the way this camera is good at. If you take a quick look at my Photo Gallery, you can check out my style and maybe see what I couldn’t. I think the cameras gives you a lot of control over the photo taking process but I find the G9 does it more effectively with different wheels (ISO, exposure, f-stop) than the DP1 (manual focus). With a wide angle camera and candid street photography or even taking time making sure everything is right, it seems to me that being able to access those three parameters (again, ISO/Exposure/f-stop) quickly and reliable AF is more important than a manual focus.

I think a lot of those issues can be fixed in firmware and software and am quite confident they will. Today though, the camera is just not for me. Mind you, neither is the G9, no camera is perfect. The G9 just worked a little better for me and I wish I hadn’t lost my first body. I will re-examine the DP1 in a few months, once the initial issues have been worked out.

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After you watch the following clip, I’d like you to imagine looking up a hill, the sun is in your eyes, and seeing three of those quadrupeds walk down towards you…

Quadruped, gun mounted Terminators centaurs anyone ?

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This could very well be the geekiest post and endeavor I ever did. I don’t even play Rockband much nor am I a musician (other than playing the bass guitar very occasionally). While Rockband and Guitar Hero probably do nothing to encourage kids to pick up a real instrument, I thought it’d be fun to play actual music with them.

It’s actually fairly easy to do. The Rockband instruments (drum & guitar) are actually fairly standard USB XBox controllers but they’re not seen by Mac OS X as HID devices. Installing a Mac OS X driver for Xbox 360 controllers worked well on Leopard with me. Using Controllermate which I think is a must have for anyone tinkering with strange USB devices on Mac OS X, I was able to map the different buttons (and levers and direction pads and drum pads) to a different keystrokes. After that, fire up GarageBand, use the keyboard mode to record music and off you go !

From what I read Controllermate will soon interface with MIDI events which might open up even more possibilities. Keep in mind that you can use Controllermate to fine tune repeat, key combinations, the effect of some levers, etc…

PS: “A,S,D, F,G,H,J,K,L ” are good examples of mapping for Garageband and the drums

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