Author: Luke Miller

• July 26, 2016

  Time lapse camera using ArduCAM

  Design files and code for this project can be found here: https://github.com/millerlp/Time_lapse_arducam The goal of this project was to build a cheap and power-efficient time lapse camera to monitor some of my experiments in the field. The camera would capture an JPEG image every 30 seconds and write it to a micro SD card, and…
• May 17, 2016

  Arduino compile error: the filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect

  GetFileAttributesEx D:\Arduino\libraries\SdFat/SdInfo.h D:\Arduino\libraries\SdFat/SdSpi.h: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect. The error message above started cropping up shortly after I upgraded to Arduino 1.6.8 on Windows 7 x64. The cause seems to be due to some folder becoming locked in the Arduino compile pathway. One solution seems to be to close the…
• January 10, 2016

  Is live-tweeting meetings losing steam? #scicomm

  As I write this in early 2016, sitting in the armpit of Silicon Valley (San Jose is, undeniably based on geography, the armpit of the south San Francisco Bay), we are beginning to witness the first signs of a contraction of the exuberant venture capital markets that have fueled utterly silly tech startup company valuations…
• November 30, 2015

  Building a simple tide clock

  Myself and Jeremy Long recently had a paper published in PeerJ (open access, free to read) describing the use of an Arduino microcontroller to predict tides and regulate the water levels in aquaria in synchrony with the natural tides. You can read more about that tide controller system here and further variations here. As part…
• November 30, 2015

  Controlling tide height in lab aquaria

  A few years back I posted about a set of Arduino libraries I wrote to allow an Arduino with an attached clock to predict the tides for a coastal site. In that post, I showed a variation on the theme that had a motor-driven rack that transited up and down in time with the tide.…
• November 28, 2015

  Using knitr and R to make instructor/student handout versions

  I teach some of my lab sections using R, and so I need to create lab handouts that include nicely formatted R commands and R output as an example for the students. These handouts will also include exercises where the students will be writing their own R code, or interpreting the results, or generating figures.…
• September 3, 2015

  Adventures in course management software: Canvas

  Course management software is universally garbage, but Canvas has managed to be better than most. Which is a lot like saying “This is the best tasting pile of dog poop I’ve found today.” The ability to create online quizzes that have the answers entered for easy grading should make for a useful system, but today…
• July 15, 2015

  PCB silkscreen sizes

  Recently I’ve been getting my printed circuit boards manufactured through OSH Park, and they make good quality (to my eye) boards at a decent price, with less than a 2-week turnaround time. They also take files directly from Eagle software, rather than having to produce gerber files (though this is also an option). On a…
• May 21, 2015

  iButton internals

  I’ve written in the past about iButtons and my attempts to waterproof them. Although iButton temperature dataloggers are fairly well sealed, they are not waterproof. But if you know an old person that used iButtons in the late 90s or early 2000s, they might claim that iButtons are absolutely waterproof. It turns out that iButtons…
• May 18, 2015

  Basic text string functions in R

  To get the length of a text string (i.e. the number of characters in the string): [code lang=”R” gutter=”false”] nchar()[/code] Using length() would just give you the length of the vector containing the string, which will be 1 if the string is just a single string. To get the position of a regular expression match(es)…