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Eye @ Electromagetic Fields 2024

It has been a while since I've posted anything here, so thought I would put something up about the first project I managed to take in an even vaguely finished state to Electromagnetic Fields. I first attended in 2016 and was lucky enough to be invited to the amazing Hat Village. To get a feeling for the festival I'll refer you to fellow Hat Villager Sam's excellent blog. If you've returned after reading that, I can state that yes indeed my son will be back for the next one (although it may involve more exam revision this time)!

We unsurprisingly make silly hats for Hat Village and this started as an idea by my son wanting a hat like the Las Vegas sphere. While impractical as headwear, the idea remained and grew into this. I'm going to put up more details in the GitHub repository but here are a few details for now:-

  • It's built from a translucent street light sphere with a 3D printed mount for a micro-projector and fish-eye lens, all designed and assembled by my good friend Charles.
  • The videos are projected by a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi 5 using OpenGL to warp and move the videos during playback.
  • Control is via an Akai LPD8 allowing for video clip selection and tuning of the projection mapping parameters.
  • It has an animation capture mode for recording the eye movement via mouse to be used during playback of each video.

It worked really well but there are definitely some things that could be improved:-

  • Improve the playback performance by moving the simple OpenGL commands into shaders.
  • Add sensors to allow the eye to look and react to people around it.
  • Build a bigger one with more projectors for full coverage.
  • Build several and have them networked so that they can coordinate when interacting with people.

I'll also get more video of it in action during the further development process, but here are a few clips of it in situ at Hat Village!

Posted Fri 09 May '25 in Build

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Building a smart central heating and hot water controller with an Arduino, a Pi Zero W and Home Assistant.

The Brief

My study/workspace is in the basement, which can get cold. The central heating button is two floors up at the opposite end of the house. I wanted a …

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envassume

Assume an AWS IAM role from AWS API credentials in environment variables.

I like to use envdir when selecting AWS API keys for CLI usage. Assuming IAM roles is awkward on the CLI as you have to get the temporary role credentials via aws sts assume-role and manually extract them …

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Posted Sun 14 May '17 in AWS

3D Printer 2017 Plans

I got quite into 3D printing in 2016 after fixing up a borrowed Bits From Bytes printer, then going on to build my own Prusa i3 from scratch.

printer

It's been an enjoyable project that has taken a few upgrades to improve print quality:-

  • A properly copper etched heated bed as …

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Posted Mon 02 Jan '17 in 3D Printing