A quick summary before I work on the year-end post.
Hardware hacking
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More work on the tree tomography project, including much writeup on
Hackaday.io:
- Hammer of Science: a da Vinci hammer first done in cardboard and
then wood.
- Code for microsecond-level time-of-flight measurements.
- Initial analysis & graphing.
- A prototype board for the Pi Pico, with connections for the piezo
sensors, that doesn’t suck.
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Side note: I wanted to see what it was like to document things on
Hackaday.io, so I added the project & was curious to see how I’d
like it. While the site has a few little hiccups, it’s pretty good.
What stood out to me, though, was how much I wrote there as opposed
to here. I think there are a few reasons for that: the different
audience (and, honestly, the chance for a nice dopamine attention
hit); the novelty of writing on a different website; and the ease of
adding images.
That last point is pretty big: I’d never thought before about what a
difference that makes. I work with Emacs, and as a text editor I
love it – but the process I have for adding pictures is clumsy.
This needs some thought; I know there are graphical markdown
editors, but I’d hate the idea of giving up the sheer flexibility I
have with Emacs.
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Not exactly hardware hacking, but: I got a Keychron Q8 programmable
mechanical keyboard, and OMFG I love it. The switches are
Gateron G Pro Reds, so it’s fairly quiet. I’d never understood the
appeal of mechanical keyboards before, but I get it now. But the
programmable part is even bigger; I’m able to set this up with the
keyboard shortcuts I’d always wanted.
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Began working on replicating a project written up on Hackaday.com
in 2016: a one-pixel camera. There was an episode of the
Hackaday podcast where one of the hosts called for people to
trawl through that site’s vast archive and look for fun projects;
that seemed like a great idea, and in short order I tripped over the
one-pixel camera. This was a great excuse to order a bunch of
servos, so I did. Current status:
- I was able to get an X-Y setup with two servos and an Arduino
controlling them directly, and have it scan a field of view
successfully.
- I’m now working on duplicating that by controlling (and
powering) them through a PCA9685 module.
- I was able to set up a single photoresistor & get measurements
from it.
- I’ve got Python code to graph those measurements.
So far, the results aren’t great, but I’m plugging away on it.
Nature
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More observations for iNaturalist, of course.
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I’ve taken a couple of freshwater samples from local streams to keep
at home, so that I can examine the organisms in there a bit closer.
I’ve found Eucyclops, copepods, pocopods, and
pea clams. Terribly fun!
Climate emergency
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Still trying to book a meeting with my MLA; this has taken longer
than expected. But I was able to meet her, along with my federal
MP, briefly at a Christmas community event & talk about climate
action, so there’s that.
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Switched retirement investments away from TD due to their refusal
to take climate change seriously.
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Attended the Vancouver climate march in September.
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Emailed New Westminster City Council about following Nanaimo’s
example and banning new natural gas hookups; got reply from 2
councillors (both in favour) and the mayor (in favour, though wants
to see how this can be worked into current city policy). In
general, I’m very happy with how our current mayor & council are
handling this…though I’d like to see more serious engagement from
the New West Progressives, who seem more focused on scoring points
than actually getting anything done (whether about climate or
anything else).
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Submissions to the BC government against the Ksi Lisims LNG project.
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Attended a protest against fracking at the BC NDP convention in
Victoria. This is the best explanation I’ve found of what
happened with the failed resolution against fracking in the convention.
Learning
I’ve found much better ways of examining earthquake data
received by my station. Thanks to Alan Sheehan, who was kind enough
to post his excellent report generation tool, I’ve now got some
actual data we can use. I’ve updated his code a bit and changed it to
better match my workflow; my repo is here. Like Alan’s, my code
is under the MIT License. Share and enjoy!
Here’s a sample of what we’ve been able to see:
This is the result of a magnitude 6.2 earthquake that struck off
the coast of El Salvador. Fortunately, no damage, injuries or
fatalities were reported.
Here’s a sample of what I’m pretty sure is a freight train going by:
This happened about 15 minutes after I saw the train go by another
crossing about 10km west of where the seismometer lives. The
equidistant lines in the spectrum sure seem like the ones reported in
this study, “Equidistant Spectral Lines in Train Vibrations” by
Florian Fuchs, Götz Bokelmann, and the AlpArray Working Group
(https://doi.org/10.1785/0220170092 …but see the previous link for
the actual paper).
Hello, world! A couple weeks ago, I took delivery of a Raspberry
Shake 1D. It’s pretty sweet. Right now it’s set up at my inlaws'
house, and I wanted to see how it’s doing by looking at whether it can
detect recent larger earthquakes.
Macquarie Island Region: Mag 5.9, June 9 2023, 21:21:42 UTC
I’m starting with the USGS map of recent earthquakes:
From there I can drill down to individual earthquakes – such as that
first one, 5.9 in the Macquarie Islands. Going to Waveforms
takes me to this page, which lets me find stations that recorded
data from it. Looks like there’s one in Corvallis, Oregon:
Clicking on that gets me the data:
Side note: this is narrowed down to VH channels. V means a sample
rate of ~ 0.1 HZ; H is a High Gain seismometer; and Z means vertical
orientation. From there I can see when the phases arrived. The original
earthquake, according to the USGS, happened at 2023-06-09 21:21:42
(UTC); the P phase arrived 15 & a half minutes after that, and
other phases past that. The P is barely noticeable, but the PP and S
waves definitely show up.
It’s interesting to compare this with the heliplot:
So – how does this compare to my seismometer? The Corvallis
station is 13,550 km away; mine is 13,990 km. The arrival
time should be a little later – by simple/stupid math, about 30
seconds later.
I’ll be honest: for this one, I’m not sure I see anything. The spike
around 21:52 seems like a candidate for the S wave.
Fiji Islands Region: Mag 5.8, June 10 2023, 09:12:50 UTC
Here’s the USGS page for this one, and the IRIS page.
Here’s the Corvallis data:
I’m curious to know that that 09:50 spike is about…but let’s keep
going. The S and SKS waves showed up pretty strongly at 09:35 or so.
Here’s what I saw:
Don’t know that that 09:28 data is, but there’s bupkiss at 09:35. Hm.
Anderson Springs, California - Mag 2.6, June 10 2023, 09:43:04 UTC
The peak at 09:50 caught my eye, so I tried looking for anything
around that time. I found a small one near Anderson,
California. Here’s the IRIS data:
That doesn’t seem a good fit either…but: Corvallis is 652 km away
from the epicentre, and it took 90 to 170 seconds for the waves to
arrive. I’m 1164km, about 1.8x further. Again, stupid math: 90-170
seconds becomes 160 to 306 seconds, or about 2.5 - 3 minutes. And
look at what I recorded 3 minutes after that quake:
Here it is really zoomed in:
This seems like a good candidate to me!
So what next?
All this is just a first pass through the data (and a very manual one
at that).
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I’d like to do more digging. Finding some way to automate at least
the collection of links & data would be wonderful.
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I’d also like to compare my data against this station in Queen
Elizabeth Park in Vancouver, run by Natural Resources Canada.
I do wish it had a little better data view.
February and March got away from me…but fair enough, because I
started my new job at a 🌠SPACE🌠COMPANY 🛰📡🤯. I’m pretty excited.
Also, though, I got COVID and then a sinus infection in March, which
sapped my energy. I got over it, but man, that was not pleasant.
So what did I do?
Hardware hacking
- Continued to work on firmware for weather vane.
Climate letters
- Three sets, rather than the 8 that should have been. But COVID.
Work
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So much Terraform work. I’ve got the luxury of setting up the
codebase from scratch, and so far (🤞) I think I’m doing a decent
job of it.
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Travelled to Edmonton for an offsite, and actually met my team in
person for the first time. I talked to almost everyone in the
company. Such an amazing bunch of people. And hey, our first
satellite is due to launch real soon now…
First thing to mention, which doesn’t really have a category: I walked
from my home in New Westminster to UBC in one day; it was about 32km,
which is the longest walk I’ve done in one day. I am mulling the
possibility of walking across the US when I’m 60, and this is the kind
of daily distance I’d want to maintain. I got some good blisters and
was sore the next day, but not crippled; I think I could have done
that again. It’s a good sign.
Webby
Hardware hacking
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More work on the weather vane; got it mounted on a peanut butter jar
lid. If that sounds silly, then in my defense it turns out to be
very handy to have a standalone mount for a project.
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Made an HTML page to display readings from the weather vane, using
javascript to rotate an arrow graphic to reflect the direction it
was measuring. Surprisingly handy.
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Bought an Ikea Vindriktning, aiming to read its measurements
directly with an ESP32. Took a while to figure out how to get
it working – turns out that a common ground between the ESP32 and
the sensor board was necessary to get the UART working – but I
think it’s coming along.
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Took apart a coffee maker that died on us to figure out what was
wrong, and it turns out to be a thermal fuse that blew – apparently
this is quite common. Will be picking up a replacement and seeing
if I can get it going again.
ML/AI/Earth Observation
Space
- After nearly 5 years of searching, I have finally got a job in the
space industry: beginning January 9th 2023, I’ll be working for
Wyvern Space. They are building satellites to do
high-resolution hyperspectral imaging; my position is senior devops
software developer, helping to build and operate their image
processing pipeline. I couldn’t be more thrilled. 😁
