Recent content on Pretending to Software
C/2017 T2 (PanSTARRS) is a near-parabolic comet that was discovered in 2017. The comet will reach closest-approach tonight (Dec 29th) at ~1.5 AU from earth, and at it's furthest distance (aphelion) it will swing all the way out to 15,000 AU. I grabbed these images last night over a two-hour time period. The orbital period is about 651,000 years so none of us will see this fellow again!
Fair amount of integration time on this target, but much of it was taken during high moon illumination (50-70%) and poor seeing/transparency conditions. We don't get a ton of cloud-free nights so I take what I can get :) That said, it resulted in a lot of noise in Sii and to a lesser extent Oiii. I think I pushed the processing a bit much trying to compensate, and not entirely sold on the color…
This is 2000 QW7, a medium sized asteroid about 1000-2,100 feet across (300 to 650 meters). Discovered in 2000, it is a little bit bigger than the Empire State Building basically. It's been in the news recently because it came relatively close this past Sunday and would make quite a mess if it hit the Earth. Next closest approach will be in 2038. I wanted to grab a few frames of the asteroid…
First light of a new setup! Getting back into the astrophoto game after being away for a few years. Still tweaking/tuning the mechanical aspects: coma corrector is at the incorrect spacing so there is some noticeable coma in all corners, and polar alignment could use some work (can definitely see some elongated stars). Also pretty sure my collimation is off since I can see double (offset)…
Tearing apart the projector, again I've been avoiding this step, but I think it's time: I need to replace the projector's LEDs with my 405nm laser. So time to open the projector back up and start dissecting it again. But first, some photos of the projector! I realized I hadn't posted any photos of the projector while mostly-assembled. So before I destroy it irrevocably, here are some photos of the…
Photoresist difficulties Not much to report from this last week, unfortunately. I printed a test enclosure for the lenses and a slide holder, then proceeded to test different exposure times with the photoresist. The goal was to find the shortest time on the projector so that I could evaluate if the projector is sufficient, or if I need to start working on integrating the laser. It was all…
Before any lithography can be done, I need to work out how to spincoat with photoresist. The photoresist I currently have is UV curable “solder mask” / “solder paint”, which is used to mask off PCBs and resist solder adhesion everywhere except the pads. The first few attempts were a bit dicey, but I think I figured it out by the end. Spincoating Theory Spincoating is a…
Pico Projector optics So the idea of using a pico projector as a maskless lithography system seems sensible, except for one minor problem. Projectors making small images big, and we want the opposite. We need to convert the projector into a microscope-projector. The first order of business is to remove the projection lens, which removes the vast majority of the image enlargement. If we revisit and…
Having received my pico projector, the first order of business was cracking it open to take a look at the light engine. The light engine is a pretty compact little unit, measuring only a few centimeters wide and one cm thick. After poking around a bit, I believe I've identified all the important bits. Here is an annotated view: As you can see, there are three LEDs which provide the illumination.
If you've ever played with lenses, you'll quickly recognize the need for some kind of optics bench. An Optics Bench is really just a fancy name for some kind of system to hold lenses precisely in line with each other, at adjustable distances. With a bench, you can easily setup multiple lenses, splitters, mirrors, etc to play around with compound systems. Optic benches are crazy expensive…
Overview I've embarked on the somewhat entirely foolhardy project of fabbing a working transistor out of silicon. One of the tools I'll need is a spincoater to spread resist on the silicon wafer. These can be purchased on eBay for a reasonable sum. Proper spincoaters give precise speed, automated ramp up/down profiles, exact timing and vacuum chucks to hold the wafer. But for my purposes, DIY will…
I've recently been working on organizing and upgrading my homelab, which is based on my 4-node Open Compute Cluster. As part of these recent upgrades, I added an Uninterruptible Power Supply to ride out power blips. I settled on a CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD, which is a 1500VA / 900watt model that outputs a proper sine wave. It's not quite big enough for my homelab; the cluster alone pulls 1200w when…
Due somewhat to recent political events here in the States, I've been binging out on literature revolving around anonymous messaging. Today was Presidents Day here in the US, so it seemed fitting to write down up my collected notes. Fair warning: I'm not involved in anonymity research at all, so this is just a high-level, “outsiders” view of the research. I probably have a lot of the…
The Venerable ESP8266 I have a drawer of random electronics parts and failed dreams. Amongst this pile is a handful ESP8266 chips. These devices are intended to be used as low-cost WiFi modules which are operated by other microprocessors, and by default you can communicate with them over UART with a variety of commands (join a network, send a packet, etc). The idea is that you solder one of these…
Work in progress, needs many more lights (and other channels). Been fighting my scope and setup, there is a noticeable “hitch” in the RA tracking. I suspect there is something wrong with the gear meshing, and need to tear the mount apart to tune the meshing just to be sure. You can see the “hitch” really well when recording the PEC: It's not just a little bump either, it's…
I'm getting married soon, and need a wedding band. I don't particularly like yellow gold, or any of the funky new materials like cobalt or titanium or carbon fiber or whatever. Silver or white gold look the best to me: plain, simple and classic. I particularly like how silver ages over time. Which got me thinking: silver is easily worked with at home. You can even cast it without much effort.
Background My primary development machine for the last few years has been a Macbook Air, which is decidedly underpowered for the things I work on these days. It was fine when I first joined the Elastic because my predominant workload was PHP related. Don't need a big machine for working on the PHP client. ;) And it makes a great travel laptop. I really do love my Air.
Well…getting better :) Tried out deconvolution for the first time, which definitely helped pull out a bit more detail. I overdid it though, and some ringing artifacts which I didn't notice at the time became apparent later (and “halos” in bright stars). Oops. I'm using a bahtinov mask for focusing now, and managed to fix my guiding and polar alignment (mostly), so I can guide at…
The last article on Cajal set up a lot of important background, but it was rather light on Rust'y material. In this article, I'll walk through the growth phase of Cajal which should, hopefully, be a bit more interesting Rustc version: rustc 1.8.0-nightly (fae516277 2016-02-13) To entice you into reading, I'll be covering the mechanics that makes this happen: Low density Cajal growth. Brown =…
I've always been interested in biologically-inspired machine learning models. My first first flirtation with bio-inspired ML was nearly 8 years ago. Named “Distributed Neuron”, the goal was to build a clustered machine learning algorithm inspired by actual growth patterns of neurons (neurotropic factors, signaling gradients, etc), instead of the relatively sterile and rigid…
Work-in-progress of Pleiades (need more lights), but since we aren't supposed to get clear skies for a while, I decided to practice my Pixinsight on the collected data so far. Outstanding issues that I'm working on Doubled diffraction spikes? I checked, and this was present in the raw frames too, so it isn't a stacking/registration problem. I know the scope is a bit out of collimation (stars are…
Equipment Orion f/4 8” Newtonian Astrograph Atlas EQ-G Canon 7d (unmodified) No guiding (still fighting drivers for my SSAG) Software Sequence Generator Pro PixInsight Lightroom EQmod Frames Bortle Zone: ~3 Average temp: 6° - 10° F Lights: 71x90” ISO1600 Darks: 40x90” ISO1600 Bias: NA (Messed up and these captured at too slow of shutter speed) Flats: NA (Took these in the morning…
I'm agonizing over a telescope purchase at the moment, so in the mean time, I'm working on automating my setup and using a telephoto lens. I dabbled in astrophotography some last year, but the bitter winter cold kept me from using my mount much. So this time around, I'm trying it with Ekos and a raspberry pi. The RPi sits outside with the scope and runs the indi server, while I sit inside toasty…
I've recently become interested in unikernels, particularly in combination with Rust. Unikernels are single-purpose, bootable images that run your application. Instead of making syscalls into the kernel to interact with hardware, the kernel syscalls are compiled directly into your application. The kernel code essentially becomes a library used by your application, rather than a separate layer that…
Rustc version: rustc 1.4.0-nightly (7d78f2d33 2015-09-01) Four months ago, I decided to build a toy distributed key:value store in Rust. As so often happens, real life got in the way and I tabled the project for a while. But no longer! I've resurrected this idea and have started hacking out some code. My plan is largely the same with one major difference: I've decided to use Mioco instead of Mio…
I needed a lighter backpack for dayhikes, as previously I was using a heavy climbing bag. So I designed an ultralight bag and sewed it up. The bag weighs 7.5oz, and holds about ~40 liters. It probably hold ~15 lbs without becoming uncomfortable or ripping. The bottom of the bag forms a “bucket” of more durable cordura, and is flat-felled for strength and appearance. The upper portions…
Rust 1.0 is being released tomorrow. While not a contributor or even power-user, I've been toying with it long enough for my oldest code to be hopelessly out of date, and moderately knowledgeable enough to fumble through dangerous data-structures. I've been interested in Rust for a few years, and closely monitoring it for about a year. It's very exciting to see the 1.0 release come to fruition. I…
Oh, I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay, I sleep all night and I work all day. I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, I go to the lava-try. On Wednesdays I go shoppin' And have buttered scones for tea. Officially trained as a molecular neurobiologist, I'm currently employed as a software engineer at Elastic. I've written a number articles about Elasticsearch, and am the co-author of Elasticsearch - The…
This humidor is made out of purpleheart and curly maple for the exterior, spanish cedar for the interior. The exterior was finished with a few coats of boiled linseed oil to bring out the figure, followed by a sealer coat of shellac and finally topcoated with acrylic spray lacquer. I was originally going to polish the finish to a high-gloss, but there were enough problems that I decided it wasn't…
For Christmas, I made my girlfriend a jewelry box. It was my first serious woodworking project, made out of maple and purpleheart. I worked very hard on the box… …but it was a bit of an ugly duckling. I wanted to make her a new, less-shitty box. I've been dating my girlfriend for three years, and decided it was time to propose to her. So I embarked on a project of building an…
Rescuing a series of forum posts about an old Hive Guard model that I painted, so that I can save it for posterity :) Initial WIP All paints are Vallejo Model Color. Skin tones were painted with: Krylon Grey Primer Basecoat: Grey-Green Secret Weapon Violet dry pigment, smooshed into all the crevices and shadows. Originally used a DIY pastel, but the purple I chose was too bright.
Rescuing a series of forum posts about an old Hive Guard model that I painted, so that I can save it for posterity :) Initial Post So I'm starting a Tyranid army and am leaning towards a “realistic” paint scheme, rather than the traditional hyper-neon-fluorsecent GW styles. Something like this: What I don't like about that model is the level of contrast. I really like the sickly…
Rescuing an oooooold paint job from CoolMiniOrNot, so that I can save it for posterity :)