Richard's blog

grumble...

Well its not painted, needs sanding, flops down when trying to use it etc but I think I have finally kicked the head cold and other stuff.

Having an early night regardless of how behind I am and will go in and see martin tomorrow.

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Have a wedding reception to make it to tonight. Hope these cold pills actually kick in by then or I will be a wreck.

Not much to go before the handin on monday, final paint and figure out how to recharge the batteries in the lamp since they are now almost dead.

I know the brief says that we should be handing in a presentation grade model, well this one is someway short on it without the paint. I think I will wait till I talk to martin about it. Not heard back from my queries last week about being crook for most of it. Think I am over the hump with this headcold tho so should be good.

Ugh.

Head is throbbing and cant concentrate.

Knew this run off good days was too good to be true. Ah well.

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Picking my usual cellphone up from where I left it last week so you will be able to phone me on it again.

touch sensitive leds.

No idea how this works, or if you can change the brightness of them when you aer using them to detect, or if it will work with white ones since they have the phosphor layer in them. but its DAMN cool.

From here - http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ledtouch/index.html

a youtube video of leds responding to being touched.

Location on the N97...

Seems to be a lot worse with a telecom sim in the phone then the vodafone one. When sitting at home it keeps showing me in the center of town, and sometimes (assuming its using the wifi to position) its showing me outside my flatmates old house, since they must have the location of that wireless network logged as there.

Heres a tui billboard...

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This has to be the least natural looking "realistic" flame.

It is red. The camera does not do it justice. red like a clock radio. I would have thought orange would be a more natural choice, but no. Red.

And "flickering" means shifting between 2 brightnesses - dim, and really dim in a semi-random manner.

Didn't even register on the light meter when I tried it, but the diffusion method was interesting (I thought at least)

Get a normal led with a beam, sand/grind the top of it off. There's your diffuse LED.

Diffusing of the lamp.

One of the things that is quite clear is that the light form a bare LED is too intensely from a single point to have as a table light, so some diffusing is in order.

This here http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbon/3859107567/in/set-72157622151360228/

is someone who has used pingpong balls as a diffuser when making a large wall of LEDs. This is a good starting point for my experimentation into this.

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(from this set on flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbon/3859116409/in/set-72157622151360228/ ) - no idea how I am supposed to embedd from flickr on damn vox - it only shows my photos on the flickr page.

Next up, my experimentation of LEDs and pingpong balls - off to the $2 shop to get some.

Details of the light level needed test for outdoor dining illumination.

Origionally I was going to have people over and pizza and bbq and beer etc, but really, thats just too much for this late in the brief. There will be pizza beer and bbq once the grad show is over and all is done so these tests will do for now.

 

Firstly, I set up an outdoor table and umbrella. I did it inside because it’s so damn cold outside.

Phew – just fits!

 

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anyway, this and the light meter i got off deal extreme allowed me to check various light levels.

See my other blogpost/section of the report on light level measuerments for details about what they mean.

First test was a cheap ugly set of 5 tealight candles (ignore the lantern in the pic)

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Light level on the meter was 0.8 lux – that’s on the lowest range so my fears about the meter not being sensitive enough appear to be unfounded.

The lighting was totally unacceptable to eat under. I would post a picture of it without the N97 flash, but all there was were the 5 flames visible and not focused.

Next test I got a plug in dimmer and an 80 watt incandescent light. I used a par38 spot lamp like you would use in a sensor light or similar.

A problem I found here is that the colour of the light when dimmed to 50-60 lux becomes very very orange, which makes it look a lot dimmer then the 25 lux from the camping light.

Also, at full brightness on the dimmer it gets 1500 lux, and plugged in directly it is 1650 lux – way, way too bright, and that’s a 80 watt. Time to think dimmer.

The obvious first solution is to get a non reflector lamp so that there is less coming down hitting the table. A lower wattage lamp is also an obvious solution, so a 25 watt frosted GLS lamp was swapped out.

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This will dim down much better, max is 27 lux and at 10 lux it is still acceptably white.

 

Outcome:

10-20 lux on my meter is an acceptable value for a dining table.

This fits in with what that table off Wikipedia says.

blardy n97...

Had enough of its crashyness, laggyness, cant open emails etc so did a reset on it and now have to re-set everything up on it. And its still bloody slow after the reset.

Will just USB the pics off it and upload the old way for now I think. Will talk to Thom next week about if its faulty.