Received hexapod parts

Received main parts for building the msr-h01 hexapod today.

The full list of parts is as follows:
From Micromagic systems the following:

• MSR-H01 Hexapod Robot Kit (BLACK)
• Battery::     6V 4300 mAh NiMh + Switch Harness
• Electronics::     None
• Head Option::     Pan & Tilt + Servos HS-225BB & HS-322HD
• Miscellaneous:     PP3 9V Battery Box + Black Cable Ties x 100
• Servo Pack::     Full Metal Gear: 12 x HS-645MG + 6 x HS-225MG
• ESD200 Bluetooth Serial Module

From NoDna (Not arrived yet):

• Serielles Kabel DB9
• Lynxmotion Bot Board II mit Basic Atom Pro
• Lynxmotion SSC-32 Servo Controller

Still needed:

• 9V battery (for processors)
• 6V main battery (for servos)
• USB to rs232 cable
• 5V power supply (for testing)
• 9V power supply (for testing)

The 9V can be low amperage as it only has to power the logic, so a small switched power supply will do. The 5V power supply has to be beefy to power 20 servos at 0.5A max each. I chose to get a standard pc power supply for this, as they are a pretty cheap source for high amp 5 and 12V.

>3 dimensional visualisation

I’ve always been fascinated with the problem of thinking about more than 3 dimensions. Humans only needed to survive in a 3 dimensional world and are therefore best suited to think about 3 dimensional shapes. Although we don’t really think in 3 dimensions. We don’t have a 3 dimensional volume in our head that we can slice and rotate or manipulate in any way we see fit. It’s more like a association structure. We store things like: this edge is connected to this one with this angle. And due to our need to work with objects: If I push my finger here, this is what it feels like and this is how the object will respond.

Recognizing license plates from video

The following is written in c with the use of the very handy opencv library.

So I wanted to identify the license plate numbers of cars that drive by my home. Set up a camera with a telephoto lens connected to a simple self made motion detection program that would capture images when there is enough movement in the video. Let it capture for an hour or so and see what it received (hopefully no privacy issues) :

Converting music into pictures and back

The objective I had in mind was to be able to convert music into a picture and convert it back again without too much quality loss. The simplest way is of course to use a lossless format like .png and simply use the rgb values as storage for 3 bytes from for instance an mp3. But that is not very interesting. So I wanted to make it possible to use a lossy format for the picture, of which the most famous is jpeg.

Stress induced birefringence

Due to to the way TFT screens function, they emit polarized light. A nice thing that can be done with a polarized light source is investigating Stress induced birefringence in plastic materials.