Drifting

January 29, 2019January 28, 2019 Nick MomrikLeave a comment

The drifting during yesterday’s winter storm really stacked up on my back patio. Here’s the entire day in 30 seconds. Pretty cool that you can download time-lapses from your Nest/Dropcam recordings.

April 14, 2018 Storm in Saginaw, Michigan

April 16, 2018April 15, 2018 Nick MomrikLeave a comment

On Thursday it was 64° when I ran outside. Then we had a winter storm come through the weekend.

Since it’s rare to get a storm this late in the year, I thought it would be neat to document it.

My makeshift ruler and stand was a complete failure; it blew over, spun around, and wasn’t readable. I’m happy with the rest of the project though. I really like the worms crawling around, seeing the water freeze, and how the lines of the bricks come through.

I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W and the camera module.

In order to get images for the time-lapse I added cron job that ran a bash script every minute, which in turn called raspistill to capture a photo. It was very easy to set up. Here is the bash script.

#!/bin/bash

DATE=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S")

raspistill -vf -hf -o /home/pi/time-lapse/images/$DATE.jpg

This is the line I added to my crontab.

* * * * * /home/pi/time-lapse/capture.sh

Before transferring all of the images to my Mac, I compressed the images folder.

tar -czvf images.tar.gz images

Then, from my Mac I could grab them by doing a secure copy.

scp pi@pi.local:/home/pi/time-lapse/images.tar.gz images.tar.gz

In order to stitch everything together, I imported the images into iMovie, changed the crop style to fill, and set a 0.01 second duration.

Quarterly Maker Box #MKR08 by Adam Savage Part 1

December 17, 2017December 20, 2017 Nick Momrik2 Comments

Several weeks ago, when I posted about Brain Candy Live!, I mentioned being a fan of Adam Savage’s work. Well, I saw him post a YouTube video announcing that he’d be curating a Maker Box for Quarterly and jumped on it. Apparently I’m not getting enough from my AdaBox and HackerBoxes subscriptions, which I already have a hard time keeping up with. I do love getting surprise packages and I understand some of it is paying for an experience.

It was unclear how many boxes Adam would be involved in, but it definitely sounded like multiple. Turns out there will be two, announced in a teaser of the first box. At $99 per box, it’s a pricey subscription compared to others. What they don’t tell you is that it’s another $8 for shipping, so really $107. Bit of a surprise when my other subscriptions include shipping in the quoted price.

The first of Adam’s boxes, which is Quarterly’s Maker Box #MKR08, arrived this week. Of course I did an unboxing video. Doing these has become good practice at describing things on-the-fly.

Neat box. Very unique. I’d been thinking about buying several items in the box, so it’s nice when a surprise comes through like this. Each Quarterly Maker Box must come with a puzzle that leads you to a web page about the contents. So naturally I worked on the puzzle before diving into the projects. To go along with one of the themes of the box, the puzzle involved doing a scaled drawing. It was actually a lot of fun and I think it turned out pretty well!

I’ll publish some other posts as I work on the projects.

Garage Reorganization

July 23, 2017July 23, 2017 Nick Momrik2 Comments

Last weekend I started cleaning my garage and came up with an idea of how to rearrange things so that the lawn mower wasn’t blocking access to my workbench.

Maybe I should have turned on some lights.

Yesterday I continued the cleaning, but started with a couple of moves. I had to shift the vise over one stud to make room for the workbench on the same wall. I also had to move the wall tool hangers over to the front wall of the garage.

This project was a good opportunity to try out the time-lapse feature on my new YI Action Camera, which I think was configured to take a picture every 0.5 second. I didn’t realize until I’d already processed the video in iMovie and uploaded it that I forgot to add some audio. I wasn’t going to start over though.

This morning I continued with a few more improvements. I put up an additional 2×4′ pegboard to the right of the workbench. I’m using it for the less frequently used tools and accessories. It also allowed me to get some things out of the drawers. I bought a couple of brackets so I could put up another shelf I had in the basement.

I really like how the reorg turned out; the area is more functional. I was really getting sick of climbing over the mower to access my tools. I’m sure I’ll move things around and reorganize the shelves as I go to make sure the common stuff is within easy reach. This also puts the workbench underneath a light, which I hadn’t even thought about.

Always be iterating!

Speed Morning

VideoOctober 14, 2015 Nick Momrik1 Comment

This morning I set my GoPro out on the balcony of my room (Sundial Lodge in Park City, UT) while I went for a hike. It recorded just over 81 minutes of video using 18.56 GB of space. By speeding it up 80x I got it down to this 1 minute and 93.4 MB. The […]