Dan Barlow's Webpage

Updated 2019-02-07

Random interests

• ADP (Ammonium Dihydrogen Phosphate) Crystal Growing. I got a kit from the Smithsonian and grew some cool crystals. I will be recording how they interact with polarized light in an electric field.
• Nixie Tubes. Got lots of them, need to take pictures and make clocks.
• Galvanometers. Used to deflect light beams. I have many different types to test and I think I have a good idea on how to make some custom ones.
• DVD Player Laser. DVDs use visible red lasers and the laser should be salvageable even after the drive won't read data anymore.
• MSP430 microcontroller from Texas Instruments. I want to use these to control the galvanometers for a middle-end laser show. Better than the "laser crab" anyway.
• RGB LEDs. I have a bunch of them and a design for a nice 8*8 programmable icon.
• Photography. I have taken several cubic feet of photographs and need to get them sorted and scanned in. The ones from Sunset Beach Oahu came out particularly well.
  Optio 60 camera pictures More Bono Film-era pictures Sony Alpha a100 camera pictures
• Video. I have some evaluation chips for converting from NTSC to parallel digital video. It would be great to get them hooked up to an IDE interface for direct to hard drive recording.
• Holographic Audio. I've read about systems to capture and play back multichannel sound in such a way that you really can hear the sound coming from a specific empty spot in space. I'd like to try! Dodecaphonic audio.
• Plotter Art. This is some of the lost content. I had perl scripts to generate several spirographs and some string art, with scanned plotter output. I still have the plotter that does two by three foot output and I want to get it set up again.
• Programming!
  • Tcl/Tk is a nice cross-platform scripting language and GUI toolkit.
  • mingw-w64 is GCC for Windows 64 & 32 bits.
  • Arduino is an environment and hardware attachments for hacking about.
  • I'm learning how to attack the following projects:.
  • I want to write a video editing application.
  • Laser Show Editor. I'd like to incorporate all my old ideas.
  • Lab Logic Generator. A program that lets you generate arbitrary logic signals on an output port. Intend to use the Arduino Mega and possibly old IDE interfaces because it's 16 bit, relatively fast, and easier to design than PCI.
  • I'd like to write some abstract pattern generators, kind of like many screen savers and demos I've seen. SDL for OpenGL or frame buffer.
  • 3D animation. I have lots of POVRay stuff already finished which I would like to put up here. I also have a couple projects in mind that I would like to do.
• Printed Circuit Boards. I've made a few attempts at toner transfer and other ways of making my own boards. I need to scan the sucesses and the failures. I am currently using a photosensitive mask paste which works really well.
• WS2812 controllable LEDs.
• Ethernet to multichannel analog IO with scientific grade specifications.