Joey Hagedorn | dotcom

Algernon for Squeak

Joey — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:41:39 +0000

This semester in Ralph Johnson’s Object Oriented Programming class, CS598rej, Erik and I wrote a cool program for Squeak called Algernon.

Algernon is a keyboard-based launcher that provides lightning quick access to categories, classes, morphs, and global variables in your image. It’s inspired by similar tools like Quicksilver and LaunchBar for Mac OS X. We’re really proud of it, as it seems to really increase productivity. If you’re a Squeak user, I encourage you to check it out.

Class Project Page
Development Home
SqueakMap Page

AVI ‘08

Joey — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 20:54:47 +0000

I’m headed to Advanced Visual Interfaces ‘08 this summer in Naples, Italy to present the work Josh and I did on VCode + VData regarding video coding tools. I’m really proud, as it’s my first first-author!

You can download VCode and get more info about it on the Social website.

Enjoy!

Blu-Ray Laser Pointer

Joey — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:46:01 +0000

I was sitting in the basement of the Siebel Center one day when Matt Sparks mentioned the Blu-Ray Laser Phaser project, made possible by the Sony Blu-Ray replacement drive assembly for the PS3. I impulsively purchased one such module on eBay and set out to build the best possible Blu-Ray Laser Pointer.

Home-built Blu-Ray Laser Pointer

I focused on building a high quality device. I am really happy with the size and quality of the case, and current-limited power supply, as opposed to the simple resistor based design some other designs suggest. I also opted for rechargeable Li-Ion batteries for great performance and size. This necessitated the installation of a charging jack on the back of the pointer as well.

Parts:

Sony KES-400a replacement Blu-Ray drive module for PlayStation 3
Pomona Electronics Size “B” Die Cast Aluminum Box with Cover, Baked Blue Enamel finish, Model# 2417
as seen on page 53 of their catalog. All of their other products are great too. Highly Recommended.
650nm 5mw 12X30mm laser module from Aixiz. This company, on the other hand, is as sketchy as you get, but I’ve always had great services, so, if you need cheap lasers, it works.
(2) AAA Li-Ion cells with solder tabs.
Protection Circuit Module for Li-Ion cells.

You’ll need some other items as well, such as a jack for charging the device, wires, a breadboard PCB, and various components for the power supply. You can pick those out from the schematic below though.

There’s lots of great info regarding the Blu-Ray diode on a page at Sam’s Laser FAQ. This was the source of the power supply circuit, and information about the amount of current that could be run through the diode. Unfortunately, the construction quality of the power supply isn’t the greatest, and I find the case design for the pointer at the bottom rather wasteful. The circuit is, however, of sound design.

It is only somewhat difficult to fit the power supply on to a suitably small breadboard to fit in the case. I think a smaller package version of the LM317 would be better suited than the TO-220 packaged one I chose.

All parts ready for assembly / Power Supply

Aperture / Operational

More pictures in the Album.

The experience using the Blu-Ray laser pointer is rather interesting. It is clearly extremely bright, and for this reason I must underscore the importance of being extremely careful to avoid eye exposure. However bright it is, sometimes it appears quite dim because the color is very near UV and normally much more deep violet than it appears in the photo above. On paper and bleached targets it does appear very blue, or even white on orange fluorescent surfaces. Occasionally there is even some eye-strain associated with looking at the beam incident on a light colored surface.

In a completely dark room it is even possible to see the beam in air, which is rather interesting, because the dot appears less bright than a cheap 5mw red laser pointer might in a well-lit room. I don’t have the appropriate equipment to properly measure light output, but I have chosen not to run it at maximum current in order to prolong diode life. It is plenty bright at it’s current level of ~30-40ma.

Soon I hope to label the box with appropriate warnings and specifications for the charging port on the back, but I need to prepare appropriate stencils for painting first. I think it is built such that I can expect many years of service before needing to service it.

I’d love to hear if you’re building one or have any questions about mine.

YouTube in MP4 via QuickTime Plugin!

Joey — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:09:10 +0000

Today I saw this link on Daring Fireball that presents a bookmarklet to add a link to the YouTube page to download a (higher quality) MP4 version of the video you’re viewing. This is great, but I dislike flash in general, so I’d rather not even watch the embedded version to begin with. I’ve crafted the following bookmarklet to replace the existing flash player with an embedded QuickTime player for the MP4 file. Go try it out on YouTube.

To install the bookmarklet, simply drag it to your Bookmarks Bar (in Firefox, Safari):

QTYouTube

This has only been tested on a Mac. I expect it won’t work on some other OSes because it uses the tag rather than the tag. I encourage someone fix up this bookmarklet to work on other platforms by using the tag, and condense it a little–because it is rather long. I’d be happy to post an updated version if someone improves it. Additionally, a GreaseKit script would be great too.

Enjoy!

Update:
Seems to work in Firefox on Windows.

Update:
Comment from Kris below provides a Greasemonkey/GreaseKit Userscript.
Userscript

Nuage Vert is Live!

Joey — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:28:09 +0000

There are some really great photos up now at http://www.nuagevert.org please go check it out!

PS3 Blu-Ray Laser Diode

Joey — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:02:41 +0000

As if I didn’t already have enough going on this week, I just did this:

Parts were approximately $60, using the PS3 replacement drive assembly and other recommended items from various how-tos on the Internet. Essentially, the diode is removed from the disc assembly, installed in an old 5mw red laser housing, and connected to a brand new LM317 based power supply. I am well on my way to building an adorable little blue laser pointer for far under $100. It is really more purple than blue, but it looks pretty cool. Right now I’m still too afraid to crank up the juice to see how bright it can get.

According to some random forum post:
lasing threshold: 27-28ma working current/voltage: 4.4v @ 30-40ma output: 30mA 2.68mW 35mA 9.45mW 40mA 13.3mw 45mA 17.0mW

I can at least verify the lasing threshold was accurate–I do not have the appropriate equipment to measure power output.

And of course, I couldn’t have done it without information from Sam’s Laser FAQ, specifically the article examining Blu-Ray Laser Diodes.

Nuage Vert

Joey — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:55:51 +0000

Last fall I was contacted by Heiko Hansen (of HeHe) regarding using the EasyLase USB on the Mac. I must say I was quite intrigued when I found out that he was working on Nuage Vert, a visualization of energy usage in Helsinki. The project uses the cloud of emissions from the Salmisaari power plant as a canvas to demonstrate how much energy is in use by the city.

photo credit HeHe

The project is going on display February 22-29 in Helsinki. I encourage you to go check it out more in depth at www.nuagevert.org.

For the project, I ended up creating a Java wrapper for the libEasyLase driver for OS X. It is now possible to get laser output on the EasyLase USB from inside a Java app on the Mac. Please contact me if you’re interested using this.

EasyLase USB Driver for Mac OS X Released

Joey — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 02:42:22 +0000

I’ve finally put together an installer for the EasyLase USB driver for Mac OS X. I am making the driver available for download today, after more than a year of use internally with the LaserLine project as well as the Laser MacMAME and iTunes visualizer projects.

The build is Universal and has been tested on PPC and x86. The installer includes libftd2xx, a necessary library from FTDI. It is working well with libftd2xx version 0.1.3; Version 0.1.0 is the current released version, and I expect FTDI to update this soon.

Please let me know if you’re using this driver to access an EasyLase USB on the Mac, I am happy to help with usage and development of laser software on Mac OS X.

Download EasyLase USB Driver v1.0 (Universal) for Mac OS X:

libEasyLase.dmg.

Subjectivity 1.0.1

Joey — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:50:41 +0000

Subjectivity is (fortunately?) no longer needed with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Leopard’s mail client dutifully warns senders of blank subject lines before sending mail. I am, for this reason, stopping active development. This built in feature will likely be more useful as it is there by default. So with this release, I’ve fixed up the installer a bit, this time a shell script instead of an AppleScript, and prevented it from trying to install on Leopard. A bit of a farewell for this piece of software–on to bigger and better things.

Download Subjectivity v1.0.1 (Universal) for Mac OS X 10.4:

Subjectivity.dmg.

Panoramas and Stitched Photographs

Joey — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:51:41 +0000

In my final project for my photography class this semester I had intended to take very wide angle pictures of spaces to evoke a feeling of emptiness and desolateness around the university. As the project progressed, I found it had turned in to something else; extremely wide angle and stitched photos. The process produced high resolution images which allowed me to print them very large. The image “beautifulcourtyard” seems to reflect the original intent most accurately.

Prints covering the entire floor of my apartment

They were put together with Adobe Photoshop CS3; Realviz stitcher provided unsatisfactory results.

The “big” versions I’ve put up for viewing in the gallery are 33% scaled versions of the originals. The originals are impressively large, which yielded the interesting prints. Well, they’re not wall sized or anything, but they’re the first time I’ve printed this large.

One more round of photos coming after I get back to school and scan the black & white film project.

5

Joey — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:20:23 +0000

My proceeding Fall 2007 semester entailed a photography course. In light of all the photos I took, I’ve here made several of my favourite photos available for your viewing pleasure right here on my website. They’re all available in the gallery section, as well as this post. These are all from the first project, I intend to post more photos in the future. Happy 2008.

I would very much appreciate some comments; critical ones equally as much as praise.

End of Semester Post

Joey — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 05:13:54 +0000

So, perhaps you were confused by the last post. If so, I apologize. Finals are a busy time, so there wasn’t much time to explain–this is also why there’s been a break in posting. The link was a blog that was setup during the very intensive finals studying. We commandeered a conference room for a week straight. We even did some original research while in there.

After finals is when the fun really began though.

Coffee on a snowy night with Erik

An icy wall and adorable snowmen outside the Siebel Center

The snowy and icy days were a fun cap to the end of the semester and signaled a start to winter.

Then iPhone came and changed my life

But getting my iPhone was simply fantastic. I can’t wait to start writing apps.

Finals, Fall 2007

Joey — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:30:32 +0000

The Latest from the Front Lines of Unproductivity

The USPTO website is horrible

Joey — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 05:00:15 +0000

And my web browser of choice is Safari 3.0 for Leopard. Unfortunately this makes viewing TIFF images of the Patent Office’s website an absolutely abysmal experience.

So today in CS421 I found GreaseKit, a Safari Plugin that allows one to run Greasemonkey-like scripts on web pages in Safari. So I wrote a userscript: usptofix.user.js to change the tag to the tag, resulting in success.

(original left, modified right)

I simply scale the TIFF to the page width, and everything is okay.

Unfortunately, it crashes Safari half of the time I load this page; I’ve reported a bug against GreaseKit.

It is probably better to just use Google Patents, but at least I learned something.

Asteroids! on MacLaserMAME

Joey — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 10:06:40 +0000

After a bit of work over Thanksgiving break, I was able to get the laser projecting Asteroids well enough to play. I apologize for the quality of the photos, but we were really interested in doing it BIG, so the beam was dim and my camera didn’t capture it especially well.

I was happy to see a number of ACM folk braved the extreme cold weather to play Asteroids on exterior walls at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, an excellent venue which I intend on visiting again next Friday, when my good friend Erik will be playing Cello in the last orchestra concert of the semester.

This whole event turned out to be a quite a success with a Hot Cocoa + Helvetica reception afterwards, despite the fact that the software is still mostly a quick hack. I look forward to further development of additional laserware on the Mac.

Now just to write the real optimization code to make it work well… : )