With a total solar eclipse in the continental United States coming up next month, I purchased a solar filter for my telephoto lens. Unfortunately, this OD 5.0 solar filter, which is required for safe optical viewing is much too dark...

Due to extensive trail work over the past two years, new maps of Camp Workcoeman were needed. Furthermore, the Connecticut statewide spring 2016 orthoimagery was recently released, provide a new data source for updating buildings and land cover. As with...

Recently, I’ve been looking at various fiducial markers for computer vision applications. While some of these markers, such as AprilTags, have readily available reference implementations, others have no published code. While one of the markers I was looking at, Pi-Tags,...

Although the OSD3358 system-in-package, the so-called BeagleBone on a Chip, is a BGA package, it turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to solder. Using a stencil, solder paste, and a hot plate, it ended up being easier to solder than...

A few years ago, I wrote about a method of using a modified scanner to scan large documents in segments. While this led to high quality results, it is a very slow and tedious process. More recently, I’ve had a...

Back in September, I took apart the original Amazon Dash, but now there’s a new version, so I took it apart as well. The new product number is PL46MN; the old product number is ORS3YV.1 The original wand was very...

Although there are plenty of tools that work well for stabilizing regular video, there aren’t any good ones for stabilizing 360 degree video. As I was unable to find any freely available software that worked, I used various command line...

With eight months elapsed since the release of Pannellum 2.2, it was time to release a new version of Pannellum. Actually, the release was well past due considering the plethora of bugfixes since the previous release, but there was a...

The Amazon Dash, not to be confused with the Amazon Dash Button, is a device for adding items to an AmazonFresh order, either through voice commands or via its barcode scanner. Recently, a reader sent me one he had received...

Ricoh provides a “Basic app” for Windows and Mac that will update the Theta S’ firmware and stitch the dual-fisheye video output into equirectangular video. The application UI and glue code, SphericalViewer.swf, is built using Adobe Flex, while the video...

Amazon updated the Dash Button’s hardware to revision two earlier this year, so I decided it was time for a new teardown (here’s last year’s teardown). The new product number is JK29LP; the old product number is JK76PL. While the...

A few weeks ago, The New World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness was published in Science Advances. The article is a report on artificial sky radiance, a current update to previous data. The supplement to the article is a...

A bit over a year and a half ago, I wrote Nugacious, which provides random quantity comparisons. However, I’ve found a lot of the comparisons to be a bit too random, being things I had never heard of. I finally...

I recently came across a malfunctioning Ubiquiti airFiber 5X radio, so I decided to take it apart. The radio’s case can be opened by removing six T6 screws on the back. The PCB can then be removed by unscrewing six...

Although I started mapping Camp Workcoeman years ago, I’ve always published this data as printed maps (and PDFs). I finally published my map in a different form: a mobile and web app. The apps are built using Mapbox GL, native...