A few weeks back, I was fortunate enough to see the solar eclipse while in Japan.
Unfortunately, the timing of the eclipse put it early in the morning, right in the middle of my long commute to work. With my trusty eclipse viewing glasses in hand, I was able to catch glimpses of it while dashing between trains in the station. I fortunately got up extra early, so I could spend some time at each stop to take a look.
Its been a while since I last posted. What with finishing up one school year, going home for vacation, then coming back and jumping right into a new year, it has been supreemly busy. I will say that I have a few posts related to the STB project in the works, as well as a a new prototype sensor node which I will unveil soon. I have also been working on several projects with THS, including a top secret(?) server power management system.
One of the first hacks required for the Set Tob Box Data Sink project is to add the VGA option to the main board.
The original unit came with S-Video installed, which makes it great for a small video player thin client, but poor for reading text. I still may utilize the S-video output for a local visual interface. The idea being that I could switch to the S-video input on my TV and get a quick look at my data. I could implement some simple remote control UI with a few buttons and visualizations.
Here is a really good article on how to prepare chemestry lab gear from an article in the February issue of Modern Mechanix.
The article may be old, but the procedures and tools are still very useful today. I found the methods of cutting glass tubing to be rather interesting, if not quite kid friendly ;)
Kalin of the Safecast organization has been working hard at building data maps from measurements taken by their mobile data collectors. The current map set includes over a million data points, and even has a few background measurements in various places around the world to serve as a comparison. These baseline measurements were taken with the same hardware that Safecast normally drives around Japan with, so there should be no adjustments needed due to differing equipment.
The Open Science Summit was last weekend, and a great many panelests presented on various aspects of science, research and education, and how open source can play a role.
The above video is a promo video shot a few months ago.
The winning entry is from HackerSpace Charlotte, and it is FANTASTIC. I totally agree with the panel on this one. The other entries were incredible, but this one hit all my own visions of good educational gear:
1: Its BIG and easy to see, easy to relate to what is in their book
A color blind artist invents a camera that converts colors to sounds, and a paralized woman walks for the first time in 20 years with the help of cyber legs.
