Many of my friends know that I’m an aspiring amateur photographer. While I’m currently of the school of thought “accuracy by volume,” I am working to get good enough to always take quality pictures the first shot (I still have a ways to go…). Part of getting better is experimenting and getting more equipment to help in my pursuit.

The newest addition to my equipment inventory is a light tent (or light box) for taking cleanly lit close-up pictures of small to medium sized objects. I’ve been toying with the idea of buying one for a few years, but have been on a DIY kick for a while and decided to just go out and build one for myself.

Part one of this post will cover the construction of the frame, while part 2 will cover the construction of the light diffusing fabric panels on the sides of the tent.

| Read the rest of this page …

A few years ago, I got the crazy idea that I wanted to work on a weather monitoring embedded microcontroller project. While the basic idea is not new, it is something that’s sufficiently complicated to become a great learning tool in various engineering disciplines.

| Read the rest of this page …

Pretending that you have all of the money that you could want to buy camera gear, what would you buy and why?

| Read the rest of this page …

I ordered some camera equipment on Wednesday and requested the “slow” shipping method to save some cash, Amazon marked it as shipped on Thursday, the USPS picked it up today, and, according to the tracking information, it arrived today (Friday). How’s that for fast?!?!

Followup: I had to know this was too good to be true. The package never made it to my apartment or even the office and, even though it was listed as delivered, I’m going to have to try to go to the post office to hunt it down.

There’s been talk about Code Katas for quite some time now. The lore on the internet states that the idea of a code kata, or practice exercises that a programmer can go through to hone their skills, was created within the book “The Pragmatic Programmer” by coauthor Dave Thomas (interestingly, he keeps a rather cool blog with various katas listed to help programmers). Katas are great ideas for application coders, so I figured they’d be great for embedded coders as well; as they say, practice makes perfect.

| Read the rest of this page …