Author: Luke Miller
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Electronics parts list
Here’s the start of a list of common bits and doo-dads I use for building electronics projects. https://github.com/millerlp/parts_guide/blob/master/parts_guide.md That’s all there is to it.
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Preserving equations in Powerpoint when going cross-platform
This is another one of those tricks that I forget how to do unless I write it down. When I move Powerpoint (2010) presentations from my Windows machine to my Mac (Powerpoint 2011), the equations usually get destroyed along the way. The workaround is to turn the equations into images that can’t be altered by…
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A plot of co-authorships in my little corner of science
Here’s a mostly useless visualization of the collection of journal articles that sits in my reference database in Endnote. I deal mostly in marine biology, physiology, biomechanics, and climate change papers, with a few molecular/genetics papers thrown in here and there. The database has 3325 entries, 2 of which have ambiguous publication years and…
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Disassembling an ancient Si-Tech dry suit exhaust valve
Experienced cold water scuba divers will tell you that a dry suit is a vital piece of safety equipment, especially in challenging conditions (seriously, they’ll tell you without prompting, and then babble on about their gear until you walk away). Serious divers will also tell you that maintaining your gear in tip-top shape is an…
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Open Wave Height Logger prototype in the water
I finally got around to deploying a prototype OWHL unit in the real live ocean to log some waves. The low-tech housing is made of 1.5″ schedule 40 pvc pipe. The pipe snugly fits the D-cell battery holder, while the electronics fit inside the modified 1.5″ end cap. I try not to rely solely on…
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OWHL micro SD card current draw tests
As outlined in an earlier post, I found that certain old micro SD cards were performing spectacularly poorly when it came to power consumption because they failed to go into a low-power sleep state immediately after writing data to the card. I recently purchased a few new SanDisk micro SD cards in various capacities to…
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Extracting NOAA sea surface temperatures with ncdf4
I’ve written previously about some example R scripts I created to extract sea surface temperature data from NOAA’s Optimum Interpolated Sea Surface Temperature products. If you want daily global sea surface temperatures on a 0.25×0.25° grid, they gather those into 1-year files available at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.noaa.oisst.v2.highres.html. If you want weekly average SST values on a 1×1°…
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Revised Open Wave Height Logger battery tests
The Open Wave Height Logger is meant to be a submersible pressure logger that will record absolute pressure at 4Hz for several months to give a record of wave height, and ideally do this on a single set of 3 D-cell batteries. I have recently made a few changes to the OWHL software, and discovered…
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The effect of water temperature on whelk drilling speed
Last year I published a little paper showing how whelks (Nucella lapillus) drill through mussel shells at different rates depending on water temperature. This involved making hundreds of hours of recordings of whelks slowly scraping their way through the calcium carbonate shell of Mytilus edulis mussels in different water temperatures. The video above includes two…
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ffmpeg time lapse notes
ffmpeg is a movie-encoding command line tool that is also useful for capturing and assembling time lapse movies, particularly using webcams. Below are some example commands to get it to do stuff. It is run from a terminal command line on Linux, OSX, and Windows. You will probably want to add the location of the…