- Build a laser projector to augment a cloudy night sky. The plan here was to laser project stars, satellites, and other heavenly bodies onto the clouds in Pittsburgh, since nobody would be able to see them otherwise. I don’t think the weather will work for that in the Bay Area, but I could still project onto a ceiling or something.
- Implement a pretty basic portion of Johnny C. Lee’s thesis.
- Add Windows support to the camera module in Pygame. Linux support for webcams is finally being released with Pygame 1.9 fairly soon. Werner Laurensse is working on an OS X implementation for 1.9.1. It would be a bit strange to leave out perhaps the largest portion of Pygame’s audience.
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
This is what happens (best case) when geeks have too much free time. My friend John Martin and I decided to take part in Star Wars Uncut, an experiment to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope in a series of several hundred 15 second chunks, each created by random people across the internet. I chose a scene with a pleasant blend of dialog and pyrotechnics.
John has an inordinate quantity of Star Wars merchandise, so we went with stop motion animation for the scene, something neither of us was familiar with. We found the actual action figures for almost every part of the 15 seconds, and really only had to improvise on the explosions, as we would rather not blow up collectibles.
With assistance from Peter Martin and Meg Blake, we fabricated Y-wings out of soda bottles, cardboard tubes, cardboard, and spray paint. We filled each with a mixture of half potassium nitrate and half sugar, lit it with a fuse, and dragged it with a string as we took pictures. As you can see by the video above, the results are reasonable for an afternoon of filming and a $0 budget.
