Download:

• Slic3r Settings (3K)
• convert-gcode.bash (1K)
• transfer.bash (1K)
• upload-file.py (1K)

XYZPrinting puts out a nice printer “DaVinci” with an enclosed build platform (helps immensely with build quality). Unfortunately the software that comes with it is abusive to the end-user, but we can put in our own stack! Caveat: the ABS spools that the company sells (high-quality product, by the way) cause the machine to destroy itself if you run the machine past the end of the spool… which wouldn’t happen if one just used their software. So long as you don’t run the machine while you sleep, I’ve run out two spools without too many problems.

The DaVinci is designed to plug in via USB so the user can send their files over for printing. The software that ships with the printer also uses this interface to update the firmware of the printer, which may or may not be in the user’s interest. Since we’re going to use our own software stack, we’ll just ignore the USB interface.

Pictured: Signal to users that this printer should never be plugged in by USB.

This printer is basically a reprap clone, and will run slightly modified gcode that standard tools (such as Slic3r [settings file]) can produce. If the factory-installed firmware is old enough, you can remove the SD card from the control board, overwrite one of the three demo prints, and use the “Build Sample” interface from the menu on the front of the machine to make arbitrary prints.

Pictured: A coping saw removes a small amount of plastic from the hinge.

Pictured: The stock SD Card is accessible after removing all screws (Torx T10) from the control board.

Pictured: An “SD Card extender” is installed to make the SD Card easier to acccess.

Download:

• Headless .obj Renderer (6K)
• .obj Renderer (6K)
• .obj (Stanford Rabbit) used in Demonstration (400K)

Output:

Recent versions of PyOpenGL (>3.0.2) have support for software rendering using OSMesa. This makes rendering with OpenGL on a headless node much easier!

Download:

• Arduino: Read Ambient Light (2K)
• Arduino: Read Ambient Light from Four Sensors (2K)
• Arduino: Detect Calibration Scene, Output Calibration (4K)
• Python: Produce the Calibration Scene (4K)
• Python: Perform a Projected Homography (8K)
• Image used in Demonstrations (32K)

This project’s aim is to replicate the results of J. Lee’s projective homography demonstration (citation at bottom).

The original project used costly fiber optic hardware to input a binary positional argument to each of four light sensors (each corner of a rectangular surface, later extended to arbitrary surfaces) via a projector that shows a series of calibration images a.k.a “structured light”, “gray-coded binary” etc.

The approach for this project will be:

• fiber optic cabling sourced from TOSLINK (cheap) cables (optical fiber audio)
• commodity light sensors (<1USD/ea i.e. "ambient light photodiodes")
• simple binary calibration images (gray-coded binary images add more fidelity, but aren’t as simple to implement)
• decoupling of the automation aspects (this project will read in a binary code, compute the position of the surface, then the user will manually input these positions to the homography program)

I reviewed “TUIC: Enabling Tangible Interaction on Capacitive Multi-touch Displays” (citation below) for my course on human-computer interaction.

TUIC is a method for providing tangible input to unmodified capacitive-touch screens by simulating finger-touch events. In my review, I list the advantages and disadvantages of the technology as reported in the paper, then provide some possible improvements.

N. Yu, L. Chan, S. Lau, S. Tsai, I. Hsiao, D. Tsai, L. Cheng, F. Hsiao, M.Y. Chen, P. Huang, and Y. Hung. TUIC: Enabling Tangible Interaction on Capacitive Multi-touch Display. Proceedings of ACM CHI. 2011.
Original Paper
ACM Digital Library

I presented my paper: The Design of Multiplayer Simulations in Online Game-Based Learning at the TEL 2013 Conference in Los Angeles, CA (Marina del Ray) on 12 November 2013.

Deciding to break away from the usual, I attended the Computational Neuroscience conference COSYNE 2013 in Salt Lake City, UT. The take-aways that were the most compelling for me:

• Performing experiments is tremendously difficult! Imagine attaching probes to indivdual neurons, or reducing interfering factors when training rats to react to certain stimuli. The most “out-there” method for me was optogenetics, the use of laser light to stimulate neurons in genetically-modified mice.
• Dr. Anthony Movshon’s talk, where he provided evidence that using anything simpler than a primate was not producing compelling enough of results. He suggested that researchers investigate mouse lemurs instead, a very small primate with a sophisticated brain.
• The discussion during the “Large-Scale Neuronal Simulations” workshop, where Dr. Chris Eliasmith introduced me to the philosophical idea of a “hyper-Turing machine” and directed me to the work of Dr. Marcin Miłkowski, particularly his soon-to-be released “Explaining the Computational Mind”. Having been in Computer Science for so long, it had never even occured to me to study any “non-Turing” computational models!

http://www.github.com/matti-kariluoma/LFManip/tree/master/html

Demo

Here, a version of LFmanip that doesn’t require an executable! As described in the Intel proposal.

Code: http://github.com/matti-kariluoma-ndsu/wheat-dissem/
Live site: http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/varietyselectiontool/
Contributors.

Sometime during March 2011, I was asked if I could so some work on a web view of NDSU’s varietal trial publications, which are currently sent out yearly to farmers and available as PDFs. I threw together a demo of search results with some jQuery polish using static data, and we were off!

Like all great projects, we needed some data entry. We hired a student to do this data entry (copying rows of numbers from PDFs), bullet dodged. Now that we were actually using a database, I tried to rope in our department’s systems administrator, but he wisely resisted. He did highly recommend the Django project (Python), and that’s how our framework was chosen. Since we couldn’t get the sysadmin, we hired an additional web developer, and later an artist.

After some steady progess, and talks with the administrators of www.ag.ndsu.edu, we were ready to put the site up live. By this point, the other developers had finished their tasks and gone back to school, and I was doing the work during my off-hours.

After a bit, we decided to tweak the search results a bit, but found the legacy code (only 1-year old!) to be getting in the way. Since summer (2012) was approaching, we decided to hire a handful of undergraduates to help with the polish and the rewrite of the search result backends.

With the fall semester underway, we’re back to a sole developer, and performing a few bug fixes now and again, with the exception of a new method for calculating our LSD results, using R behind-the-scenes as we orignally intended… turns out the Python LSD I wrote wasn’t as robust as we’d like.

Publications:

• Wiersma, Ransom, Kariluoma. “Wheat Information Project (WHIP): Another Web-Based Variety Trials Database.” ASA Section: Biometry and Statistical Computing. ASA International Annual Meeting, San Antonio TX, October 16-19 2011.
  Abstract.
  Poster.
• Wiersma. Conference talk. Wheat Production Forum, Moorhead MN, October 25-26 2011.
  Conference Program.
• Ransom, Wiersma. Break-out session. Prairie Grains Conference, Grand Forks ND, December 7-8 2011.
• Ransom. Casselton ND. 2011.
• Wiersma. NWREC. December 2011.
• Wiersma. Prairie Grains Conference, Grand Forks ND, December 12-13 2012.

Update 21 Apr 2013: We’ve been published in the International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science (IJITCS)!

Juan Li, Justin Anderson, Matti Kariluoma, Kailash Joshi, Prateek Rajan, Pubudu Wijeyaratne,”iText – SMS-based Web Services for Low-end Cell Phones”, IJITCS, vol.5, no.5, pp.22-28, 2013.DOI: 10.5815/ijitcs.2013.05.03
Paper
IJITCS

Also available on github : http://www.github.com/matti-kariluoma/sms-plusplus

For my computer networks class, I convinced our group to do a project involving the SMS protocol. We agreed to do some sort of SMS service, where you’d message a particular number or email address (not obvious that you can message an email address!) using a small command language, and access web services such as email, calender, etc.

We ended up with web search and email (through google’s OpenAuth and a registration website we cooked up), and managed to do a demo live in class during our report. We used a Nokia N900 and two webservers, which aren’t live anymore unfortunately, shit’s expensive.

Pictured: An optoisolated (the computer is separated from the motor’s power supply by an air gap. The control signals are transmitted over a LED / photodiode pair) unipolar stepper driver.

Dan and I tried to build a cheap book scanner. Enjoy the Cardboard Book Scanner.

Dan and I have just put the finishing touches on two new Instructables:

First, a primer on Computational Photography: Computational Photography Primer
Second, a quick tutorial on using a single camera to make a refocusable image: Using one Camera to Make Refocusable Pictures