I recently decided that I needed to add some color to my workspace, but didn’t want to just use any off-the-shelf RGB controller. My first thought was to use an Arduino to control some RGB strips, but I didn’t want to have to to open the Arduino IDE and modify the firmware every time I wanted to change the program. This desire eventually escalated to implementing a virtual machine on top of the Arduino with an application-specific instruction set designed to easily manipulate LEDs. [Read More]

I thought it would be cool to extend the scripts I posted about yesterday with the ability to create a timelapse. [Read More]

One extension I had been planning for my previous project involving terrain meshes was the addition of satellite imagery to add color to the models. Landsat, in addition to enabling important climatology research and other science missions, turned out to be a great source of open data to use for this. [Read More]

The idea that my blog has been running on Wordpress for all these years has been haunting me. In the back of my head, I’ve been thinking about how not only is the CMS itself known for being full of vulnerabilities, but it’s also built with PHP, which itself isn’t really the most secure. The platform also has too many moving parts for me to be comfortable with – maintaining a VPS with Apache, PHP, and MySQL installations is relatively straightforward, but still has its moments of suffering. [Read More]

A while back, I thought 3D printed models of the local terrain might be a cool gift idea. To make this a reality, I have implemented a simple Python utility to convert publicly-available terrain data into a format suitable for 3D printing. [Read More]