Medieval Fair 2013 - Making rings for chainmail

I have dressed up as Robin Hood and gone to the Medieval fair in Gumeracha sporting a bow. This year I decided to sport my camera with the classic 20mm pancake instead. The first thing I walked into was a sword holding competition. The challenge was to hold a 15 kilo sword with the arm extended horizontally for as long as possible. Plenty of fitness instructors and heavy lifters had a go at it, the record while I watched was around 3 minutes. I think I am going to practice with a cricket bat for next year.

Being a builder builds muscles

There were also jugglers and irish dancers, and to my dismay people with huge amounts of camera gear shadowing them. I felt really unprofessional with my dinky m43, then again this is the age of mobile photography and the battle between processing vs gear is on. It is now even being used as a marketing point by those Sony NEX ads. Granted a micro-four thirds sensor is smaller than the APS-C, still the weight advantages and flexibility bonuses do apply.

Juggler practicing

There were a few knights in chainmain and I walked into a conversation involving effort and time that goes into making the armor. Eventually the talk drifted to cheap Indian labour working for $1 a day so that people can have fun the fair, at that point people glanced at me and stopped talking. I should start tinkering with fencing wire to keep the stereotype going. Some things cannot be mechanised yet, clothing be it out of fibres or metals is one of them. The economics of hobbies is also interesting.

Riveted chainmail

The melee of kids with pugil sticks reminded me of a Schlock Mercenary episode. It will be good to get some excercise done while in costume.

Pugilists not boxing

There were also Middle eastern belly dancers and scribes doing calligraphy while complaining that the Belly dancers are not Medieval. Though the ululation accompanying the dancing is fairly universal.

Belly dancer and musician

Finally I managed to put the 850mm IR filter to good use and capture a panorama including the little lake at the Viking encampment. Without special IR modifications to the camera I had to use a pretty high ISO (1600) and a 2 second exposure. The processing through RawTherapee worked fine using some IR profiles I found floating around in Github, Hugin did a fair job of stitching as well.

850mm IR filter with unmodified camera panorama

NASA SpaceApps Adelaide 2013

A few weeks ago NASA hosted its second annual space apps challenge. I did not manage to participate on the first day and only managed to struggle in on the second day to witness the finale. The Adelaide Hackerspace provided the venue this year and Simon has very nice write-up on their blog.

 

There were a few more entries from around Australia including a slinky based greenhouse suitable for use on the moon and a meteor tracker integrated with Google sky. It was a couple of days of pizza and coffee, ending with beers by the time we finished.

 

Everybody went home pretty tired, but happy. I will definitely try to put in a couple of days of participation next year. Meanwhile feel free to use Mearth and look up all those cold place in Russia, Scandanavia and Hokkaido which have Mars like temperatures. Whoever is considering applying for Mars-One should visit one of these places and film on location.

Accurate positioning with UBlox Neo-6P and STM32

The Ublox Neo-6P provides raw clock phases and ephemeris suitable for use in post-processing based accurate positioning, or even RTK solutions using RTKLib.

STM32 with Eclipse was fairly messy to set up and depending on which version of GCC and CoreSupport libraries you use their are a few bugs to iron out. Used Code-Sourcery Lite toolchain, but compiled version did not behave as original firmware did. There are Eclipse based STM32 development commercial support from Atollic, and there were hacks to get the debugger Atollic packages working for ST-Link using the free options, but in the recent incarnation they have locked it down to TrueStudio only. I had to resort to OpenOCD for my debugging needs, it works like a charm with standard Eclipse settings, but I managed to nuke my STLink driver in the process and had to work hard to get it back.

Importing to GrafNav is fairly straight forward via the UBX converter, but it gives no indication on how it converts events, and you need sufficiently long logs to pick up any ephemeris. UBlox Receiver protocol is a must read for configuring the NEO-6P properly and monitoring the logs to ensure GPS lock. I am looking into the STM32 demonstration samples to add some more functionality to the project, including external interrupts from a camera for event marking and a GPS lock acquired status LED.

Adelaide Mini Maker Faire, Zoo and Indian Mela

I have been involved with the Adelaide Hackerspace on and off. Lately my attendance has dropped a lot due to work commitments and a casual addiction to photography. A few photography related hacks are stewing in my brain, so I might go back there. Anyway a few weeks back I went to the Adelaide Mini Makerfaire and it was great opportunity to see all the different things going on in Adelaide, from Dalek making, Metal working to 3D printing and Electric cars. I had a great time catching up with people and learning about new groups. The airstream guys had some hacked wireless AP's on display, including the Minitar on which I cut my teeth in cross-compiling and writing kernel modules to interact with the wifi-stack. There are a lot more photos.

I had planned a busy day, so I headed off to the zoo to attend the local photography group session and check out some pandas. It was my first time at the Adelaide zoo, so it took a while to get oriented. We covered a fair bit of ground in the hour and a half before closing. Managed a few shots of hippos, birds, otters and mountain goats. Lots of other animals which hardly stood still enough to compensate for my nascent photography skills.

We were trudging and hobbling back to the car when we noticed the bright lights and steady stream of people heading to Elder park. The local indian community was throwing their annual mela. So we headed there for a meal and to feed our cameras with some colour. The movement and low light made photography pretty difficult from the back of the crowd. It was a great day overall.

Building Liblas for Win x64 with GDAL and Geotiff

Some things are obvious to even the most oblivious, how to get liblas from OSGeo4W is one of them. However you quickly run into trouble as images, dem files and las files get bigger and the 32 bit osgeo builds start causing issues. There have been some discussions regarding a 64 bit version of Osgeo4W but getting builders for all the packages probably hasn't been achieved yet. I will see if I can step in and fill my drive with source trees and wield my MSVC 2010 license for good rather than evil. It is now up on the OSGeo GSOC ideas page, may be someone will take it up and make GIS toolchain deployment easier.

Liblas install for OSGeo4W set-up

Anyway here is how to built Liblas, assuming you are reasonably familiar with downloading sources and clicking a few buttons in CMake GUI. Grab LibLAS 1.7.0 sources. Since we want to add image support, grab GDAL 64 bit builds with headers from GISInternals. Build Geotiff 64 bit by hand using the handy CMake system, pointing it to proj and tiff obtained from the GDAL build above. Grab Boost from the handy distribution in PCL, you can get it somewhere else but PCL was my last port of call for boost. The final Liblas config page in CMake should look something like below.

CMake Liblas config

Change CMakeLists.txt for LibLAS to include the boost chrono library, there are linker errors otherwise.

find_package(Boost 1.38 COMPONENTS program_options thread chrono REQUIRED)

MSVC 2010 Liblas project

Configure and build away. I use MSVC 2010 Professional, running the bigfile_test after building has finished creates a 4GB+ dummy .las file and is nice for checking the x64 version. Put all the dependency DLL's in place after the build has finished using the handy Dependency walker.

Dependency walker check for libraries

Most windows users do not have a compiler installed and the inability to get a GIS toolchain on windows which can handle large datasets beyond 32bit restrictions is a major stumbling block in the wider adoption of the OSGeo toolchain. You can grab my Liblas binaries here and if you are interested student looking to package for 64bit let  OSGeo know.

Where am I .... all the time

Okay lets start by clearly stating the futility of position, every defintion of position requires a reference frame. It would be pretty messy to define where I am relative to the centre of our galaxy at all times, the super-massive blackhole makes measuring time there pretty messy as well. I could define my position better in ECEF or ENU or in most cases Platte Carre. I set out to build a project which could define where I am at all times for the posterity and essentially keep a track of my spime. My spime is the only thing I have absolute natural rights to, everything else can be taken away and be subject to argument with sufficient legal juggling. Come to think of it even the personal spime is not inviolate, meh reading to much Hannu Rajaniemi. Android My Tracks is pretty good, but a phone sometimes feels like too many eggs in one basket, I don't want to leave it lying around in the car dash gathering sunlight.

The project is mainly based on a Seeeduino stalker board with a convenient Bee socket. I plugged the UBlox Neo-6M based GPS Bee there. Data logs go to a 2GB SD card and Lipo power is backed by a 1w solar cell. The GPS constantly spits out NMEA strings which get logged to the SD card as long as power and space is available. A log with 2 days worth of data took up 45Mb, so I can hold about 3 months of data. Unfortunately the 2000mAh battery died after 2 days of continous use, with some solar recharge while in use. Since the battery death, in order to prevent melt down in harsh sunlight and continuous use, I have added a USB charger option as a stop gap. This should hold the fort till I plug in the quartz/heat powered charger for use while hiking and the mini windmill for use while wind surfing. Eventually the SD card will blow off into star dust after I have had my fun and extracted and time and location of said fun, but hey SD cards are more expensive per-ounce than gold.

Baby food and Poker machines - Snapping stuff in MongKok

The biggest story making headlines while I killed time between city walks in HongKong was one featuring "Baby Formula", including an event just a few steps from me at the MongKok East station. Someone taking lights over was cornered and searched for baby food by citizens and angry mothers.

Australia is one of the wealthiest nations in the world in per-capita terms and most of our wealth is locked up in the Australian dream - house. In contrast it is quite difficult for young people to own a house in HongKong, so the consumption tends to be high in other areas. People eat out more often, since the living areas are small and can be a hassle cooking.

 People invest more in personal appearance, buying jewellery, clothes and watches. Admittedly I am very poor at brand recognition, but the greek links to Doxa made me remember that particular brand. Personal investment is also apparent in all the rush for cosmetics and offers for private tuition. Image and wealth you can carry about on you is everything here. Just like the pokie joints pretending to be video game parlours.

There is a tension between pro and anti-Falun gung groups. The posters for both factions are displayed side-by-side near the star ferry terminal, right next to the anti-communist party booth. The Harbour city mall with its clientele of mostly mainland buyers is nearby. The rebelliousness may be filtering back along with the baby food.