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I’ve been wanting to experiment with Arduino’s for a long time. They are little micro controllers that are easily programmed and able to perform many tasks and projects. The first project I decided to take on was to make a home brew Glow Buddy. We’ve had a couple and they always broke, so I wanted to see if I could build one. To make it even better, I decided two add two RGB Leds, not just one.  I ended up using two ShiftBrites and a push button to select various color schemes including a random mood light scheme. I ordered everything from AdaFruit, great customer service! The case is a carboard box used for storing 5″x7″ pictures and I used two ping pong balls as the LED diffusers.

Check it out:

The code is here:

Continue reading ‘Arduino Glow Buddy Project’

I added pictures of our New York trip in the family section including a new HDR shot that came out pretty nice:

I taught my son how to take pictures of cars in motion with a fixed low shutter speed like 1/80th of a sec and panning with the car while depressing the trigger. I think the results came out quite good. Check them out:

I’ve been delinquent updating our family blog — lots of other things going on. But I did manage to upload pictures from the past 2-3 months in the family section including pictures of our trip to the Outerbanks of North Carolina. Check them out in the family section.

Lot’s of great shots of this great weekend with wonderful weather and cherry blossoms in full bloom.

Dominic and I flew the scale heli this weekend and he took some nice shots of the action.

The Macupdate bundle included Hydra, an HDR plugin for Aperture and I decided to buy it. It works great!!! I had take a shot of downtown San Francisco a couple of years ago with a tripod and with a few different exposures. Not one of the 3 shots looked that good, but combined in HDR, they look amazing. Check it out:

You can also see in the same version of this Picture created with a trial version of Photomatix here. It does not look anywhere near as nice. Both were using default settings. Hydra wins in my opinion. Next, I’m going to try using a single Raw image to see what results that gives.

The Yellow watchman Goby in my reef tank is an elusive fish, it tends to hide a lot. For a while, I hadn’t seen it in months and I thought it was dead. Recently it has been coming out into the open more and I got a good picture of him finally:

I just uploaded a lot of pictures including plenty of pics of snowmaggedon in DC. Click on the family link to the right.