Follows Painting with Light 1.3: New Designs
Have made a few upgrades lately to the software toolchain and also what I was using to capture the images. My Canon SX280 is a great camera, but that 30 second exposure just wasn’t cutting the mustard…
Nikon D3300 with unlimited exposure time. Now we’re talking my language!
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Follows Painting with Light 1.2: Patterns Emerge
As much fun as this has been to play around with, the print area is just too small! Using SketchUp I’ve come up with some designs for a new scaled up version using MakerBeam and pulleys (instead of threaded rods like current design).
This should give a total print area of about 250mm (as opposed to the 50mm I have now). If I put an SMD LED inside a small enclosure with a tiny 1mm hole, I should be able to decrease the width of the lines to further improve resolution as well. I figure at the moment the lines are about 3mm wide and the print area is 50mm wide. So that’s a resolution of about 17×17 pixels. With 250 x 250mm bed and a 2mm wide line that will give a 125×125 resolution, or 250×250 at 1mm wide lines.
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Follows Painting with Light 1.0: Getting Started
Following my initial attempts, 5mm LEDs have been replaced with a set of 3mm LEDs to provide a little bit of extra resolution. Light pollution has been decreased a bit too by painting the bottom of the LEDs and some of the topmost surfaces of PCBs, stages.
Which makes some fun patterns after the break!
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Long exposure photography has always interested me, as have stepper motors and their various uses though I know nothing about either of them. I came up this project to try and bring the two interests together. When finished I’m hoping to have something akin to projects like this, this and this that can draw recognisable pictures with light.
Read more after the break!
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I’ve returned from a 10 day round trip of New Zealand’s central North Island. This was totally an awesome trip and I strongly recommend trying it! You don’t need much time and will get to see a lot of what the area has to offer
Pretty pictures after the break…
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The Collatz Conjecture (also known as hailstone sequences or the 3x+1 problem) is a problem in Mathematics first proposed some 60 years ago. It goes like this: Pick any positive integer. If the number is positive, we halve it. If it is odd we multiply it by 3 and add 1. Keep applying this rule until you reach a repeating sequence of numbers. For example let’s start with either of the numbers 3 or 20 and apply these rules.
As long we follow these rules our numbers will go up and down for a while before reaching a repeating sequence (4 -> 2 -> 1 -> 4 -> 2 etc). Once we reach 1 we tend to stop counting. This starts slow but gets a lot cooler after the break.
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In World War II the German Military used a rotor cipher machine commonly known as “Enigma” to communicate in secret. Because of the seemingly random way it encrypted messages it was an extremely effective piece of equipment during its heyday. Enigma went through many iterations each of which drove interesting developments in mathematics and computer technology.
An Enigma I. From Crypto Museum
For a while I’ve been fascinated by the Engima Machine and have wanted to learn more about it. Having decided the best way to approach the daunting subject was to just build one I chose Microsoft Excel as the initial medium to reconstruct Enigma. I’ve created this post to go with it as a kind of Enigma primer, covering with broad strokes the mechanisms that make Enigma work.
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For the last year I’ve been recording details about every movie I’ve watched. This only includes movies I haven’t seen before, or haven’t seen for at least 3-4 years (such that it’s kind of like watching it for the first time anyway). In addition to when I watched it, I’ve also recorded details such as when the movie was released, it’s IMDb rating, the genre keywords associated with it and other similar bits of info. The list of movies is embedded below, but can also be viewed at googledocs if it doesn’t load.
The rest of this post is a quick look at what my favourite and most hated films watched in the year were. It is a good representation of the kind of movies I watch, though I realised while writing that it does gloss over certain things. Since I was only recording the first time I watched a movie it does skip a lot of things. For example there is no mention of the fact that I must have watched Iron Man 3, The Avengers or the last two Fast & Furious movies 3-5 times each in 2013.
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