dword.dk

Well it’s starting to thaw now, but since last Thursday large parts of the country has been nearly in state of emergency because of heavy snow (by the standards here). Thursday until Sunday it has been almost impossible to get anywhere. All bus routes were cancelled for four days, but not completely without reason; see the picture to the right. This was the first real snow this winter, so maybe it came as a surprise for those responsible for snow removal.

Anyway, I just wanted to share this little gem. It’s a program called AutoStitch, which makes it really easy to create panoramas from a series of pictures. You basically just point and shoot a series of pictures that overlap a little, and when they’re fed into the program it automatically figures out how they fit together. It works really well and is damn fast compared to other panorama software I’ve used before. Below are some panoramas I made with it. (I cheated a little with the sky, because the originals didn’t cover enough—that’s also why the composition is a little messed.)

I’m still alive, although it’s been 5 months since my last post. I’ve been busy with university and work the last couple of months, so there hasn’t been much time for Ogre or other projects lately.

Anyway, just for the fun of it, I recently bought Olympus SDK to play with controlling my (rather old) C-5060WZ from the PC. It’s not the best piece of software I’ve seen, but it wasn’t that expensive either and seems to work just fine. It allows you to control much of the camera’s functions programmatically from the PC, i.e. setting focal length and lots of other settings, capturing pictures, and downloading/managing picture files etc.

Inspired by BBC’s Planet Earth, where they show e.g. plants growing in fast motion, I hacked together a small application capturing a picture of a small candle every 15 seconds. You can see a video of the result by clicking on the picture to the right of this text. The 33 seconds of video are made from 264 pictures taken during a period of about 1½ hour. Then there was no more space left on the CF card in the camera. Next time I’ll have to delete the pictures after having downloaded them - and find a more interesting scene.

Some weeks ago I bought an “X-Ufo” which is kind of a remote-controlled helicopter with 4 rotors. It’s great fun to fly but it takes a little practice to control it in the beginning, and the ufo inevitably takes some hard crashes. It’s for indoor and outdoor use, but I learned after chopping a couple of my plants that it was best to keep it outside. Unfortunately that requires next to no wind.

A couple of days ago some friends visited, and one of them got the idea to mount a mobile phone with a camera underneath the ufo. This resulted in some quite funny videos, some of which you can watch here. The phone survived, but at the end of the day, the ufo didn’t fly that well, so there’s a new one on its way. I can always use this one for spare parts.

Next thing, if money and time allows it, will be replacing the batteries with some larger capacity ones - the flight time is about 5 minutes currently - and a gyroscope replacement if possible. The gyroscope sitting on it is mechanical, and when the ufo is tilted more than around 20 degrees, it looses track of what is horizontal, and the ufo will crash. It appears it is possible to mod the ufo by replacing the gyroscope with a custom “piezo” module that has no mecanical parts and provides for better control. In fact “LiPo” (batteries) and “piezo” appear to be the buzzwords over at the X-Ufo forums. My German isn’t very good, but hopefully we’ll be able to get some hints from that source.

Click one of the pictures to the right to see some pictures and videos of the beast in action.