Here’s how the Blinker is looking now. I now have 3 of the 4 panels together (I’m short two lights and a dozen cables to finish the 4th). It uses an Arduino Mega, 64 macetech MegaBrites, an 4x20 LCD display, 4 rotary encoders, a power supply and a lot of wire. The wall will be seen in public for the first time on New Years Eve at the Promise/AlienInFlux/Good Times Gang party at 6 Nobel in Toronto.
This is an early (and one time -- it was taken apart on November 1st) version of this blinky lights thing that I’m working on. It uses an Arduino Mega, 13 macetech MegaBrites, an 4x20 LCD display, 4 rotary encoders, a power supply and a lot of wire. It’s meant to light up parties. My original intent was to make a 4X6 grid to hang on a ceiling but after sticking the lights to balloons and hanging it vertically I think I may, instead, make two vertical 16 -- 20 light pendants to hang on either side of a DJ. Hopefully I’ll have a more finalized version ready in the next month or so.
Sorry about the recording. I tried to redo it but my phone died on the second attempt so we get this muffled portrait view version instead. Oops.
When we were in Argentina I started taking quite a few more panoramic photographs than I normally do because of this amazing software that I stumbled upon called autostitch. It’s nothing new. It’s been around for over two years but I, apparently, having been living under a rock. One of my favourite panoramic photos that I took was this one of the Iglesia San Francisco in the town of Salta. A wedding ceremony was being performed as we walked by so we snuck a peak inside. It was packed with people and the lighting was magical.
Take a look at the larger image or the original image to see more detail – careful the original is over 20 megs!
It appears as though there is a good distance between me and the church but I was standing kitty corner seperated only by a street wide enough for two cars to pass by. I only had my Rebel XTi and a 50mm portrait lense with me, which is good for shooting in low light but not good for getting a wide angle, so I set the ISO to 800, stood back and started clicking away. 60 photos later I had a library of very detailed photos of every angle of the church.
At home I loaded up autostitch, tweaked a couple settings and a few minutes later I was blown away by the awesome photo that it had produced.
Last week I compiled all of my panoramas from the last few years using a great piece of software called Autostitch. Here’s one from Phi Phi Thailand in 2004:
One of the things I don’t like about Autostitch is that the resulting image has no EXIF data in it. So I set out looking for a way to take the information from the first image in the set and transfer it into the resulting panorama. I really wanted to be able to do this in ACDSee Pro because it’s my image manager of choice but after digging around it looks like it’s not possible even in the latest version. After some searching I did manage to find a solution though:
It’s originally a Perl script but there are Windows and OSX executables available to download. It’s a command line tool so you’ll have to extract it into a folder that is in your PATH.
ExifTool can do all sorts of various EXIF related tasks but the one I was interested in was copying the info from one JPG to another and that is achieved by doing the following:
exiftool -TagsFromFile STA_2319.JPG (image from) IMG_2319_pano.JPG (image to)
And it worked like a charm. It even created backups of the file that it was modifying. Sweet!
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