I Love Cynics!

Ok, so I’ve been neglecting my blog again. But I promise it was for a good cause.

I’ve posted a few times about my photography business. Before it was all focused on stock photography, and the various outlets I sell those images on. Well, now I’ve branched out a bit and have created an online store for my more artistic endeavors.

Urban Raven Photo has been designed using SmugMug as the back-end for sales. I have to give them a big thumbs up for their ability to customize their interface. You can go with their various templates, or you can get more in-depth and create your own styles and layouts. It’s actually kinda fun to see what you can do.

Aside from that, it looks like you can take a picture and sell boatloads of different products, from framed prints to mouse pads. I know I’m sounding like some crappy salesman, but I’m actually pretty impressed with how easy they made it to set up.

Right now, I don’t have a lot of images up. I need to go through my photos and choose the best to put up there. After several years of focusing primarily on stock imagery, it’s nice to have an outlet for my more creative endeavors.

On the stock front, I’ve updated my stock site to better match the newer looking interface of the SmugMug based site. I’m not overly pleased with the results. I need to make it much easier to find images, or at least the site that their sold on. However, since this on my personal site, that will mean a lot of updating of the database I built to contain that info. I neglected that for far too long, so it’s going to take a while to get it up to date.

One of my “resolutions” for this year is to get my photography business in better order. As the various business models for stock imagery continue to ebb and flow, I need to take better advantage of the resources that are available. I’ve been slacking lately, and that can only mean bad things for a business.

Anyway, would love to hear any comments on the various layouts of the updated sites.

I have it on good authority that SQUEEEEE is the sound of pure internet joy. I take it that you must also bring your hands up near your chest and wiggle them around while saying it.

Today I received my distinctive red box from SparkFun that signified that my order was here. This makes me a happy, happy camper. Again, I’ve gotta give SparkFun kudos for their quick shipping.

So, to repeat myself (’cause I’m not a great blogger who updates stuff daily…), the project is to create a device for my motorcycle that integrates a GPS, with display, and a camera. The idea is to take pictures either at a set time or distance interval. The original idea was to use a cheap-o off the shelf digital camera. However, my camera died. Instead of buying a new digital camera, I decided to purchase a camera “break-out” board that integrated a small camera sensor and lens. That cut the cost to less than half what I’d expect to pay for a new full digital camera.

The project is based on the Arduino platform, and follows the ideas presented by the JARV.org geotagger project. Well, it didn’t start that way, but why reinvent the wheel AND the car…

Anyway, on to what I received from SparkFun today.

The smallest item in that photograph is the Arduino Pro Mini. I’m working on the project right now using the largest one on the left, the Arduino Duemilanove. However, ultimately I’ll be moving it to the Mini. This will save me some space. Given the limited space of my motorcycle’s handlebar, all space is at a premium. The width of the project is now dictated by the width of my GPS, which is slimmer than the Duemilanove. It’s not a big space savings, but I’ll take all I can get.

I was absolutely amazed at the size of this camera. As a friend pointed out, I shouldn’t be so in awe, given the size of cameras in cell phones these days, but I can’t help it. It’s so freakin’ cute and small. John from JARV.org did suggest I stick with an off the shelf digital camera, noting this is pretty much hobby-grade. I tend to agree. While this is a nifty piece of kit, you focus it by screwing in and out a small lens. That lens, as is, is mighty loose. For what it is, the lens is pretty decent quality. I just don’t trust it to maintain focus on bumpy, unpaved roads. If I do use it, I’ll have to find some – non-destructive – way of holding focus.

This is the microSD card breakout board from SparkFun. I know I’m repeating myself again, but how small storage has become makes me giddy. Two gigs on a chip the size of my thumbnail? Awesome! Makes me wonder where we’ll be in another few years. Anyway, this will store the images after the GPS data has been inserted into the IPTC headers of the image.

And this is everything, together. Just about everything I’ll need for the project is right here. All that’s missing are the connections from piece to piece.

To follow the path of what’s happening – The GPS provides a visual at all times, even when not in use by this project. Currently powered by a pair of AA batteries, but possibly by motorcycle battery later. The GPS is attached to a signal conversion board taking its RS232 signal and converting it to TTL and sending it to the Arduino.

The Arduino, in turn, is connected to both the camera and the microSD card. At specific times (or distances) the Arduino will be programmed to activated the camera, take an image, grab the GPS data and inject specific fields into the image data. That image data, then, will be stored to the microSD card. Everything then goes back in to waiting mode until that predetermined time or distance occurs again. Loop until done or until the microSD card is full (or stuff that currently run on batteries drains them…)

Right now, as shown in the picture, the Arduino is powered off a polymer lithium ion battery. I’d rather power everything from the motorcycle, which should have 6 volts to supply. I’ll tackle that later (motorcycle is currently frozen up at -20F outside my apartment. ).

So, now that everything is here, I can start getting this all put together and programmed! Yay!

Back up and running. Never had that much trouble updating WordPress before. I suspect I missed some basic instruction. What was most odd was that all of the administrative functions worked just fine, but there was absolutely no display from the user side. Strangeness, indeed.

Anyway, it appears to be working again. If anyone notices anything weird, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Blog is not working. I has a sad.

As Greg pointed out in a comment to my last post someone has worked on a project similar to mine. I have to say, their solutions are much more elegant than my own. So, in the spirit of design, I’m gonna totally steal a bunch of their ideas. The use of a dedicated camera breakout board will simplify my project tremendously. I’ve postponed working on that part of the project for two reasons. One – my camera died and I hadn’t bought a new one yet. Two – I really had no idea how I was going to accomplish turning on the camera, focusing and then taking a picture. I had a kludgey idea of using servos, but that was overly complex. Another idea was to find a bluetooth enabled camera, but that would likely be spendy.

The JPEG Color Camera breakout board from SparkFun eliminates this problem. The only downside is that the images will be of a lower resolution than an “off the shelf” digital camera. For this project, that’s a compromise I’m willing to make. And the fun of these breakout boards is that should a better camera come along, it should be relatively easy to replace.

There are two other aspects of the JARV.org project I’m going to utilize. First, since size is a concern in my project, I’m going to switch to the Arduino Pro Mini, a smaller version of the microcontroller that I’ve been using. Additionally, I’ll be switching from the SD card format to the microSD format using this microSD breakout board, also from SparkFun. I still get a kick out of how small data storage has physically become in the past decade. That you can fit several gigs worth of data on something no bigger than my fingernail is amazing to me.

Since I still want the display from my eTrex Garmin, I will be retaining its use, so the work I’ve done so far is still valid. I’ll still need the conversion circuit, but I can get rid of the bulky GPS datalogger shield I’ve been trying to get to work. Let’s face it, with essential tremor anything I have to solder is suspect. I’m happy I got the conversion circuit working, but I still can’t figure out where I failed on the datalogger. Everything I’ve ordered now has been prebuilt. No more relying on my crappy soldering.

One other aspect of the JARV project really sold me on their design. The JARV project injects the GPS data directly into the EXIF data of the images. I was going to simply tie images with a text file that corresponded to each image. I expect roughly 600 images from my trip up the Dalton Highway this summer. That’s a lot of images to cross-reference with GPS data. If the data is already tied to the images in the EXIF data, a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of time will be saved.

Placed the parts order yesterday. Oddly, it seems every time I order something from SparkFun, I do it right at a holiday. Despite that, they’ve always done a really good job getting things here quickly, doubly impressive since it seems like it takes forever for anyone else to send stuff to Alaska.

I want to thank Greg for pointing me towards the JARV project and John at JARV for paving an easy to follow path.

Pictured here is a circuit I was working with last winter, trying to convert the RS232 signal from the Garmin eTrex GPS to the TTL signal understood by the Arduino. I made two of those damn boards and neither worked. After intensely looking them over today, I found one that was salvageable. All that needed to be done was correct a couple of the solder points. And voila, it now works. That means I am now farther along then I managed to get last time. I’m now in new territory.

Right now, all that the Arduino is programmed to do is take the data from the GPS and parse it out into a human readable form. An example is shown here. Basically, it breaks the data down in to its individual parts and sends them to the serial reader of the Arduino IDE. I’ll eventually want to send that data as a text file to an SD card to store for later use. The previously mentioned GPS data logger shield will do that work. I never completed its construction last winter, so I’ll need to finish that up before I can continue with that section of the project.

The other part of the project is the camera. I still need to pick up a new cheap-o digital camera. There are plenty that fit the bill. I’m considering the Nikon Coolpix L20. It’s small and can generally be found for under $100. Samsung also has a couple of cheap cameras. Why cheap? Cause I’m likely to break the damn thing trying to get this project to work. Cheap equals easy to replace.

Some other things that need to be figured out, aside from triggering the camera shutter, include:

• Where and how to mount the control box on the motorcycle
• Where and how to mount the camera on the motorcycle
• Weather proofing everything
• Batteries – specifically, battery life and recharging
• Shock resistance – this is, after all, the Dalton Highway we’re talking about
• Integrating the GPS data files in to the digital images

Last winter I started on a project that would integrate a camera and gps into my motorcycle. The plan was to drive the Dalton Highway and have the system snap a picture every few minutes or miles. A few things put that plan on hold. First, I changed my summer plans and drove down to Idaho to visit my kiddos. Second, I broke the GPS. Oops.

However, now that winter is kicking in and my brain longs for something to do, I’ve resurrected the project. And, oddly enough, the GPS, too. Turns out, the only thing broken was the outer casing. I’ve removed the main-board from the case. That’s what you see in the above picture. Soldered on a battery pack, and it seems good to go. The overall build should be less bulky now, but I’ll have to find some way making the final enclosure weather proof.

When I shelved the project last spring, I hadn’t really made much progress. I’d found a circuit that would translate the RS232 signal from the GPS to TTY that the Arduino expected. It worked great when breadboarded, but as soon as I soldered up a final board, nothing worked. Even after going over all connections and making sure everything matched the breadboard, it still wouldn’t work. One of the last things I did was order the Adafruit GPS logger Shield. I’m hoping I can simply connect the output from the Garmin to this shield. If so, that’ll make things much simpler.

The steps then after that would be finding some way to trigger the camera. This would involve powering up the camera, focusing, snapping the shot and then powering the camera down to conserve batteries. That’s likely the hardest part. It’s also complicated by the fact that the camera I was using last winter is on its deathbed. Time to look for another cheap-cam.

The final part is to write the GPS data to the SD card on the GPS Shield. There are code examples out there of how to do this, so I suspect this will be fairly easy.

The end result? A photo trail of the trip with GPS data pinpointing each shot. There are easier ways to do this. Many cameras now integrate GPS receivers. But I like the learning aspects of this project. The many things you can do on the Arduino platform really intrigue me.

In a recent assessment of American student achievement in science education, it was found that by 2005 only 18% of graduating seniors were considered proficient. Forty-six percent were considered below a basic achievement level. That was up 3% from 1996.

How did we arrive at this situation? How did the United States go from being one of the envies of scientific achievement to a nation of near scientific ignorance? Author, and science journalist, Chris Mooney teams up with marine scientist Sheri Kirshenbaum, to create a compelling examination of the state of science education in the U.S. and what can be done about it in their book Unscientific America – How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.

In Mooney’s previous book, The Republican War On Science, he describes one front of the decaying state of science in this nation. The politicization of science, the distortion of fact, particularly by the far right’s distortion of the global warming crisis, has lead to a general mistrust of the scientific establishment. A major portion of this new book examines what the scientific establishment, then, can do to recover.

Don’t make the mistake of going in to this book assuming Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s assessment of American scientists to be glowing. The finger of blame is pointing both ways – scientists and politics, with a good helping of religion and media (both news and entertainment), all share fault.

Politics was well covered in The Republican War On Science, but additions are made here. Kirshenbaum worked as a congressional science fellow. During her time working with Congress men and women, she saw the confusion of politicians trying to grasp deeply scientific subjects. It was not necessarily the politicians fault.

There’s a major disconnect in discussions between scientists and politicians. Mooney and Kirshenbaum refer to this disconnect in terms of communication. Scientists, they note, are “source-oriented” while politicians are “receiver-oriented.”

Source-oriented communicators speak the way they feel comfortable with. Receiver-oriented communicators speak in a way they hope an audience will accept. When the two clash, conflict arises.

Scientists, deeply passionate about their work, often do not know how to communicate that passion in ways understandable to non-scientists. They may not consider the social impacts of their works. Meanwhile, politicians may hold a distrust of scientists, either because of conflicting ideology, or political agendas.

In my opinion, the book puts a great deal of the resolution on the heads of the science establishment. While I’m not sure that’s wholly fair, I do agree with the methods.

Science education needs to include outreach and communication efforts. Honestly, I feel all fields should require this, not just science. Scientific fields, however, deeply ingrained with their own jargon, are at a distinct disadvantage currently. Outreach has never, really, been a part of the curriculum, and communication, with an emphasis on writing for science journals, would need to be further expanded to more mainstream media.

And mainstream media isn’t immune from Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s finger of blame. The two primary outlets, fact and fiction – news and entertainment – are viewed critically in this book.

On the news front, it is shown how coverage of science has been in steady decline over the years. Indeed, on television, for every five hours of news coverage, only one minute pertains to science. News papers that once had entire sections devoted to science have dwindled to less than a page devoted to the field – and that often highlighting only the latest tech gadget.

In entertainment, the scientist is either the geek or the villain. Few heroes are scientists. Corporate scientists want to keep the deadly Aliens, House is an antisocial jerk, Dr. Emmett Brown was a crazy mad scientist in Back to the Future.

Oddly, in this section the authors choose to quote Michael Crichton as “the voice of reason”. Crichton, whose State of Fear has been roundly debunked, states that real science and movie making “don’t mesh.” This is primarily do to the fact that movies need a number of things that are incompatible with science, including the need for compelling characters, villains and a motivation for action. He may be a twit, but he’s right.

Again, the authors put the impetus upon scientists. They suggest scientists need to “seek out constructive consulting roles within the entertainment industry.” It’s my opinion that this is something that needs to go both ways. Many good movies have been made in which directors and producers have worked closely with scientists to create entertaining works.

Shifting to one of the lasts fronts in this ongoing conflict, we move to religion. And this is perhaps where I have the most disagreement with the authors. One of the things they do is suggest that faith is not incompatible with science. Ok, I can agree with that. But then it appears to me that they make the leap from that to suggesting that atheism is not. I find that a fairly shaky premise.

They point a very strong accusatory finger at what they refer to as the “New Athiests” – essentially people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Zachary. The authors suggest, perhaps justly, that the confrontational style of these people is driving an expanding rift between science and the majority of the country, which happens to prescribe to one religion or other.

Their solution seems to be essentially, “Tone it down.” But this lacks historical context. Saber rattling on one side is generally the result of saber rattling on the other. And while I hate to sound wishy-washy, this is definitely one of those areas where a middle ground must be found. A give on one side needs to be met with a give on the other. Religious fundamentalism, as much as militant atheism, is also responsible for the current sad state of affairs.

The book repeatedly mentions one name as an example of excellence in science communication. I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m a Sagan fanboy, and I was pleasantly surprised at the number of times he was held up as a standard to strive for. Not that there weren’t people who despised him – he made plenty of enemies during the Reagan administration – but his communication skills, his ability to show his deeply held passion for science, have never been rivaled.

And, honestly, that’s a shame. Don’t get me wrong, there are many scientists who strive to fill the gap left by Sagan. Neil deGrass Tyson and Stephen Hawking come to mind.

As does Bill Nye. He comes to mind, for me, because of a recent video going around the internet in which he was interviewed on CNN regarding “bombing the moon” in a science experiment to detect water. The video exemplifies the discussion of science education in the U.S. and how poor it has become. CNN was being flooded with concerns about the affects of the experiment – Would it cause weather disruptions on earth? Would it influence tides? Could it destroy the moon?

In his response, Nye suggests that such questions indicate that he, as a science educator, has failed. My response to that is that he hasn’t failed, but that there simply aren’t enough people like him, people both passionate about science and able to communicate easily with non-scientists.

I think this book is an excellent starting point. While I may quibble with a few points, the overall plan is spot on. We must start emphasizing the education of future scientists and arming them with the communication skills they need.

Just realized that this blog turned five years old a bit over a week ago. Oddly, that doesn’t add up to a ton of posts. As many promises of “posting more” as I’ve made, you’d think there’d be more! Might as well make that promise again. I will do my best to post at least once a week.

I have a book review coming up, hopefully tomorrow.

I’ll also begin work on the Arduino project I had going last winter, as well. That project got put on hold as my summer plans changed. I also managed to break the case of the GPS I was using. Oddly, that’s proven to be a bonus. I pulled the electronics out of the case and found that the proprietary cable I complained about building last time may be unnecessary. I should be able just interface the control board to my conversion circuit directly. An additional bonus of that would be that everything could be contained within the same housing – the less stuff I have to mount to my motorcycle, the better. On the other hand, the cheap-o camera I was using back then is on its deathbed, so I may need to track down another cheap digital camera.

Anyway, again, I’ll try to do a better job of updating this site. Here’s to another tedious five years of random chatter.

Today is Make-fun-of-contradictions Day. Some choice quotes from today’s News-Miner article on Lisa Murkowski’s Health Care Town Hall Meeting.

Rick Sikma of North Pole asked why the federal government thought it ought to be involved in health care in the first place.

“I don’t see that in the Constitution,” he said, applause drowning out the rest of his remarks.

“You’re going right to the core of the issue,” Murkowski responded. “Is this a right?”

“No,” people returned.

And then…

One North Pole woman, who has undergone chemotherapy twice, talked to her doctor about moving to Anchorage to be closer to her grandchildren, she said. Her doctor warned the 65-plus-year-old that she wouldn’t find a new doctor there willing to take on a new Medicare client.

“I think it is unconscionable people over 65 are not being … there is no option. Are not being given the right for medical care,” she said.