As part of my ongoing garage renovation I installed new LED light fixtures on the ceiling. This required me to rebuild the existing network of surface-mounted conduits and brought to light some disturbing discoveries about the state of the electrical system in the garage I've lived next to, in blissful ignorance, since 2019. For more on that, watch the video above and learn how NOT to wire a garage with an extra circuit.

In addition to the downright hazardous faults I'm referring to was a class of problems that rise to the level of the merely annoying. One of those: the ceiling box that the lights depend on was rotated by a small but immediately apparent angle from the walls of the building. If, as planned, I installed the linear LED lamps using conduits connected to the box, the pattern of lights would not be perpendicular to anything else, which I obviously could not accept.

New video! I rescue this X-Carve CNC router by tearing it down, cleaning it up, putting it back together, and building a "torsion box" tabletop for it to live on. Part 1 of a series!

I've recently submitted a machine vision paper to arxiv (my first!), co-authored with Daniel Raviv and Juan Yepes of Florida Atlantic University, about an analytical method for measuring the angular velocity of rotating objects. If you can track one point on an object reliably you can estimate the rotation rate, given that you have an orthographic camera at your disposal. Okay, they don't exist in reality! But if the object is far enough away the approximation provided by a real camera is good enough to be useful. Please read “A Vision-Based Closed-Form Solution for Measuring the Rotation Rate of an Object by Tracking One Point” at arxiv.org.

At the beginning of the year I published to YouTube this video, in which I build a smart sprinkler controller using a Raspberry Pi and Open Sprinkler software. It's gradually becoming one of my most popular videos. Although I've been neglecting this blog somewhat, I have been making video content! Be sure and subscribe on YouTube if you'd like to be kept aware of those projects.

After a couple of years of thinking about it, I built a floating planter, similar to the ones at WDW's EPCOT, and set sail with it on the lake my parents live on. Disney was kind enough to provide instructions in a book titled Secrets of Disney's Glorious Gardens, but I departed from this book in some significant ways, for instance, by adding an anchor system that allows us to bring the planter to shore for maintenance. Also, in the video I build a hot-wire cutter to make the styrofoam circles of the planter, a cutter equipped with a motorized rotary stage that turns it into something like a foam lathe.