Sony Actioncam HDR-AS15 – Biking from my home to tarrafa hackerspace

Yesterday I decided to shoot a video showing the way I take to go to Tarrafa Hackerspace by bike. I used a Sony Actioncam HDR-AS15 mounted on the helmet. And this is the result.

Can anyone do DIY tech?

BBC has made this interesting video on Do It Yourself (DIY) and hackerspaces and I wanted to share with you guys.

And happy tweaking

BarTop Mame Cabinet – Last Update: 02-11-12

Who hasn’t spend a lot of money and time on arcades during childhood? What about build one and play all those games again?

Browsing the web I found that a lot of people are building their own machines, building over a pc running a MAME emulator with a cool front-end. If you google images for ‘arcade cabinet‘ you will be amazed by what people are doing!!

I decided then to build my own, trying to use as much used stuff as possible, like a old computer, old screen and two usb game controllers that were broken but with the electronics hardware in perfect conditions. The cabinet will stay on the hackerspace from my town, TARRAFA HACKERSPACE, so we can set some championships, it will be fun for sure!!!

On this post, I will be giving updates on the progress (not much will be done during university semester, I hope to finish this project on holidays).

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ATmega8A Development Kit Review

Few days ago I received a ATmega8A Development Kit from ProtoStack.

The board is well made, and it has everything you need to start developing any kind of project using the famous Atmega8, which is the same µC used by the first Arduino. Actually, you can also use this board with different µC’s such as Atmega168 and Atmega328 (used in Arduino UNO).

The kit have a lot of space to add more components, and a good thing is that the VCC and GND voltage is easily accessed everywhere of the board. On the pictures and the video I posted here, I have connected the output pin PB2 to an resistor, green LED and to the ground, even without soldering the board works great.

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Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination

Renaming JPEGmini files with Python

JpegMINI is awesome! If you guys haven’t checked this project out you should take a look at it! They have built an amazing jpeg compression algorithm; I even bought the mac app, it’s really good for compressing ≈ 8mb into 3mb pics without loss of quality.

But right now their mac app can only compress files bigger than 2 megapixels, which is quite annoying when you want to compress small files for a website.

You can do that by uploading the pictures for free on their website. The problem is that all pictures are renamed with an annoying _mini.jpg at the end.

So I just created a very small python script to handle this renaming:

import os

for filename in os.listdir("."):
	if filename.endswith('_mini.jpg'):
		mini = filename.find('_mini.jpg')
		name = filename[:mini] + '.jpg'
		os.rename(filename, name)

PicPlz Python Backup Script

So long and thanks for all the fish!!!
PicPlz is going down, I guess that soon they will allow users to download their pictures before all is wiped off their data centers. While we wait, I’ve created a simple Python Script when entering the username you can download all the photo stream.

You get follow the project on GitHub

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Measuring distance from two Geo-Points in PHP & Python

Here goes a quick code,
I needed to calculate the distance between two Geo-Points using PHP.

Using Haversine formula you get to this function, where you enter lat1, long1, lat2, long2 and it will give the distance in Km.

In case you want to show the distance in Miles, simply change the Earth radius to 3956.

PHP:

function distance($lat1, $long1, $lat2, $long2) {
	$R = 6371; // Earth Radius in Km
	$dLat = deg2rad($lat2-$lat1);
	$dLong = deg2rad($long2-$long1);
	$lat1 = deg2rad($lat1);
	$lat2 = deg2rad($lat2);

	$a = sin($dLat/2)*sin($dLat/2) + sin($dLong/2)*sin($dLong/2)*cos($lat1)*cos($lat2);
	$c = 2 * atan2(sqrt($a),sqrt(1-$a));
	$d = $R * $c;
	// Return with the distance
	return $d; 
}

Python

import math

def distance(lat1, long1, lat2, long2):
	R = 6371 # Earth Radius in Km
	dLat = math.radians(lat2 - lat1) # Convert Degrees 2 Radians
	dLong = math.radians(long2 - long1)
	lat1 = math.radians(lat1)
	lat2 = math.radians(lat2)
	a = math.sin(dLat/2) * math.sin(dLat/2) + math.sin(dLong/2) * math.sin(dLong/2) * math.cos(lat1) * math.cos(lat2)
	c = 2 * math.atan2(math.sqrt(a), math.sqrt(1-a))
	d = R * c
	return d

Hope it helps someone!

Open Hardware MoodLamp

Finally it’s here, my first Open Hardware project, in which I have delayed some years to release due my lack of time to finish it and make it presentable.

For this project I’ve created a Project Page, in which I will be updating in a regular basis.

So I want to invite you to take a look at the OPEN HARDWARE MOODLAMP PROJECT PAGE.

Incremental Backups using RSYNC and SSH

QuickPost: I was studying last semester in Politecnico di Milano, a great university in Milan, Italy. Anyway, I am taking lots and lots of pictures here (Italy is a beautiful country).

I am saving my pictures on my computer, but WHAT IF something goes wrong with my computer?
So what I am doing is backing up my pictures (also other things as work files) to my NAS SERVER in Brazil during the night, using RSYNC via SSH (Of course it’s an incremental backup, as I have more then 300GB of photos).

On my server I don’t run SSH on the regular port 22. I use, for example the port 223.

Where /Users/dansku/MyDocs/Fotografias is the local dir, and /daniel/SERVER/Backups is the remote dir.

This way, even if my computer is stolen, I know my data is backed up!