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.
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.
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.
In my last post, I explained how I reverse-engineered the Alesis SysEx protocol and detailed my findings. Now, two months later, I’ve finally decided to implement a tool for configuring these controllers on Linux.