In the later part of 2016, there was an event that captured the attention of the public. The internet of things had it’s major debut as a tool by those with bad intent. It had been seen as a serious problem by security professionals long before. Now the threat was real. Automation should still require attention. The IoT world is not something that should be left to default, unabated to run as is. Unlike traditional user interface devices that would…
My initial intent for this post was to elaborate on a concept that I found inspiring. Jörn Loviscach (http://www.j3l7h.de/about.html) had posted a demonstration of a “Poor Man’s Thermographic Camera” that consisted of low cost parts. It scans a scene and processes the visual data to create a thermographic image. The thermo cam consists of a pyrometer sensor (aka non contact ir thermometer), two servos that tilt mirrors, and mounting hardware. It acquires images from the reflection of heat by tilting…
Presenting visual data readings into an image file can seem challenging. It need not be thanks to the Netpbm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm_format) file formats. First developed by Jef Poskanzer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Poskanzer) as a means of sending image data via email. The early adaptations of email did not work well with data other than ASCII. Messages would become corrupt if binary data was included in messages. Today, this is not an issue. However, the work around for this was to use one of the…