Lightdesigns’s Blog

Apart from my interest in research, writing programs, and designing schematics, I actually make things. Some of these are for the sake of further research. Others are just for fun. This falls (mostly) into the latter category.

PRS asked me to create a new HQ setup. For the past few years we’ve been staring at plain beige tables, facing the same problems. Beige. Again? Really? Where are the audio splitters? Pardon me, but your headphone cord seems to be choking me. And the list goes on.

Over the course of a week, I built two tables to attack these problems. Particularly the beige bit. It’s got just a touch of steampunk feel, but mostly it’s just classy. Hope these inspire someone out there:

Thanks to Taddy for filming and Serg for the setup. Look for them on a Paranormal State near you.

Do you enjoy Science? Do you like the Paranormal? How about the combination of the two?

It’s rather strange that what could be a Reese’s moment (‘you got your science in my paranormal’/ ‘rather you seem to have gotten your paranormal in my science’) usually tends to end poorly. Science oft seems to serve as little more than garnish to make the paranormal appear more palatable. Can the two converge to form something mutually beneficial? Of course! However, you’ve got to remove the distractions and understand the practical uses of the technology first.

Join Sergey and I for a discussion on EMF meters, the Ovilus, Tesla Coils, and other wacky entertainment!

PRS Open House IV
April 17th, 2010

Following the technical ranting and raving, Father Bob will be there to tackle the paranormal from an entirely different perspective.

http://openhouse4.eventbrite.com/

There’s been a bit of a lag in posts lately for a good reason.  I just have to come up with it quick.  Thinking…thinking…

Oh yeah, I’ve been busy.  Really busy.  There you go.

I tend to get sucked in to projects and disappear into the lab for months at a time.  Ask around.  Go on.  It’s a vicious cycle, really.  Because I’m always in the middle of one project or the other, this should come as no surprise.  But this one…this is a project I’ve been working on for years now.

If you go back far enough you can find DARN.  Slightly less far back is a post involving DARN and frequency analysis.  Now I’m preparing for the next iteration.  The biggest change is a surprise, but something that will make this version better than ever.  The pressure, temperature, accelerometer, and gauss meter are already sussed, but the EMF/dynamic magnetic field /magnetic flux sensor is becoming quite troublesome.  Ever try to filter and amplify something that’s between 1-200uV, in the low frequency range, and with a .6V DC component?  It’s all fine and dandy until you replace the ideal op-amp model with the gritty real world.

Then things get really fun.

On the previous versions, I just modified this rather swell design to suit my needs:

http://www.zen22142.zen.co.uk/Circuits/Misc/emf.htm

But my inductors were always hand-wound and, frankly, horribly unappealing in terms of aesthetics.  And because of their homemade nature, each varied wildly causing me to calibrate each sensor in software.  While it worked for the last two models, I’m hoping for a bit more consistency this time around.  And…well, I’m out of old ferrite antennas.  Ehrm.  As such, I decided to take the inductor out of the equation entirely and try rocking this little guy:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=708

Which, as you might imagine, is proving quite the headache.  Even with multiple gain/HP filtering stages, it’s getting a bit dicey.  I suppose that’s why there’s a lack of schematics featuring them in an ‘EMF’ meter design.  Nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Drat.

Back to work I go!

–Josh

I’ve been getting poked and prodded to keep this site somewhat updated, so I thought I’d share my experience over Christmas and New Years…and prove beyond a doubt that I truly need to get out more.

First the Java part of things.  This was my very first programming language–even before HTML, oddly enough.  I needed to turn an EE class into an honors credit (back when I was still in the Schreyer’s Honors College, mind you) and the professor agreed on the condition that I worked within a group to write a Java applet.  Somehow or other, I ended up doing the coding (despite the fact that my other two cohorts were Computer Science majors or Computer Engineers at that current time.)  Mike Mansell rewrote my code into something vaguely resembling humorous English and Emrys Smith ended up doing the PowerPoint.  Care to see it?

http://www.personal.psu.edu/ked2/CSE/Conversion.html

Pretty boring, right?  As I said, that was my first program and it taught me quite a bit.  But that was the last time I used Java…

…until just a few months ago.  I got it into my head that I wanted to do something involving Speech Control.  And I wanted something that I could toss onto any system from XP to Ubuntu (to be fair those are the only two OSes I use on a regular basis.)  Also, I didn’t want to have to upgrade to Vista just to get a taste of SAPI 5.3.  I was well aware of CMU’s Sphinx and its numerous variants, so I started out with that.  To put it mildly, it isn’t really for a novice in Java programming.  To put it realistically, I spent a week trying to get a GUI to work with it before abandoning it in favour of a third party interface that utilized the Sphinx speech recognition engine.  Then I tried both Julius and Simon, but they just weren’t what I was looking for.  Then I found Voce.  Using the sample code, I was able get a custom GUI up and running in about ten days with it understanding a dozen words clearly. In fact, the moment of my first breakthrough happened at about 1am on New Years Day.  Note to self, try to get out of house next year.  Then within three days, I had it outputting through a serial port for real world applications.

This is where things could get interesting–or fail disastrously.  My original notion was to create a speech controlled robotic arm with a camera end effector to document my projects.  “Left, Down, Cheese, *Click*.  You get the picture.  But as it turns out, robot arms don’t grow on trees and good robot arms are even more difficult to come by.  And I’ve got to say, the whole “Lights on, Lights off” bit gets rather boring if not outright cumbersome.  “Sarah, beer (coffee) me” (a la Eureka) has its appeal, but even that would get a touch dull.  Without a clear idea of what to do now that I’ve gotten so far along on the project, I’ve just been waiting for these past three months for a moment of inspiration.  But it appears that my muse is off on hiatus.  So I’m reaching out to anyone reading this entry to toss up your suggestions in the comments section.  It’s got to have some form of physical payoff, opening programs on the computer is just too easy. And it should be rather nifty or why do it at all?

Related links:

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/html/cmusphinx.php

http://sourceforge.net/projects/speech2text/

http://julius.sourceforge.jp/en_index.php

http://voce.sourceforge.net/