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Transcontinental Express

May 31st, 2013 | Posted by admin in Education | Fun! | Ideas | Inspiration | Michigan | New York | RaspberryPi - (Comments Off on Transcontinental Express)

Recently I found myself with a couple months of time off. I decided to use it in the most productive manner I could think of so I booked a one month rail pass on Amtrak. I already had plans to go to Ada Camp in San Francisco and my sister’s high school graduation in Mechanicsville, Virginia. At $670 the rail pass was cheaper than plane tickets and I got to see most of the country. Tentatively I plan to visit Portland, San Francisco/Silicon Valley/Oakland, Iowa City, Richmond Virginia, and New York City. I was able to schedule my trip so I could take the Empire Builder line, the California Zephyr, and a good chunk of the Coast Starlight. My tentative schedule is below.


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My exact schedule for the first leg of the trip can be found here. Packing for this trip has been a little crazy. I want to squeeze everything I need into a back pack, but train travel is tough as traveling in coach requires that you bring a lot of necessities (and entertainment).

Try squeezing a month's worth of clothes, electronics, supplies, and food into a backpack!

Try squeezing a month’s worth of clothes, electronics, supplies, and food into a backpack!

I purchased a Nexus 7 tablet for the journey and I have a tupperware container with a raspberry pi, arduino, makey-makey, breadboard, and various component to keep me entertained on the train. The transcontinental trips are almost three whole days so I should have lots of time to read, code, and build cool stuff with my fellow travelers. Hopefully I will post some cool stuff from the road, and have 4G coverage for most of the trip.

My home for the next month.

My home for the next month.

SimpleCV 1.0 Released!

June 20th, 2011 | Posted by admin in Ann Arbor | automation | code | computer vision | entrepreneurship | Ingenuitas | manufacturing | Michigan | New York | Open Source | OpenCV - (Comments Off on SimpleCV 1.0 Released!)

I’ve been so busy lately that I have had no time to write about all the projects I have been working on. Today I want to take a moment to announce the release of SimpleCV 1.0 by Ingenuitas. SimpleCV is shipped as a super pack that installs SimpleCV and all of the dependencies in a single shot on all of the most common operating systems(OSX, Windows, and Linux). The Ingenuitas team has been working hard to implement most the common image processing tasks one would need to do machine inspection; and to make the process of developing applications that use these operations as quick and painless as possible. This is a big milestone for us as it means we feel that we have a good initial feature set and we can start adding more advanced features to SimpleCV, features you won’t find in OpenCV or on the existing for-pay machine inspection systems. In our next development scrum I plan to roll out a whole host of new features that make it easy to perform image based classification tasks, and to make a first pass at camera calibration and measurement tasks. Our next release will also provide much tighter integration with the Microsoft Kinect. We are also going to work up quite a few really cool demos of SimpleCV for the Detroit Makers Faire and the World Makers Faire in New York City. The video above is a dry run of one of our demos at the Ann Arbor Makers Faire. This demo is shipped with SimpleCV so feel free to download the source code and give it a shot.

What I have learned in New York

February 23rd, 2011 | Posted by admin in New York | pics or it didn't happen | silly - (Comments Off on What I have learned in New York)