somerville-massachusetts

I am almost done packing the boxes with help from others at the p.irateship -- if all goes well they'll ship out today!

From the Boston-area March Mapping Madness meetup this morning. Thanks to everyone who came out!

I finally got two cameras triggering automatically using a 555 trigger. I need to do "endurance" testing but this is super encouraging. Sorry for the crappy video and no audio, but I thought folks would like to see this.

We're about to put them up for sale in the store...

For the near infrared camera mod with a Canon A495 camera, I wanted to record the size of the infrared-block filter that ships in the camera, so we can accurately cut replacement IR-pass filters.

The measurements are:

5/16 in x 3/8 in

Guido Stein was talking about mass-producing these with a paper cutter or something. Good idea, i'm tired of cutting them by hand...

Luckily there's some margin for error; the outer millimeter or so is covered by the rubber gasket anyways (see above).

I finally got this working with 4 coin cell batteries and a second 12v battery, as shown in the video below. I'll try connecting both cameras and rigging the whole thing up next. (See http://publiclaboratory.org/notes/warren/3-16-2012/powering-synchronized...)

Just a quick update on the progress of the dual-camera IR/VIS system for balloon-mapping kit Kickstarter rewards -- I figured out how to fit some coin cell batteries into the N-type battery holder, which is the same type as the other 12v battery we're using. I used a steel screw to make the battery holder smaller, and it's quite stable.

This hopefully reduces the # of parts you (or we) have to order, and is also helpful because I was having trouble finding battery holders for 3 coin cells.

The group infrared camera conversion meetup in Somerville last night went really well; we got through 11 cameras, 7 of which were modifiable (the rest had too much glue on the final screws, and we left them unmodified).

7:4 is not a bad ratio and bodes well for folks who order 2 Canon A495s with the hope that they'll be able to successfully modify at least one of them. Thanks to Pablo, Chuck and Guido for their help!

For those who missed, it, the video walk-through of the conversion is still available on the near-infrared camera page.

This article by Andy Lester has some key thoughts for those trying to get involved in open source collaboration but aren't sure about what they have to offer. The biggest thing I take away from it is that actually implementing hardware or software is only a small part of open source development - and is arguably far less important than investigating and thoroughly characterizing problems with a technology. These might be things the open source project is trying to solve, or bugs with its approach to solving the problem.