potatoeskillme

TI-86 Intervalometer for Canon XTi

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:33:43 +0000

I just came across this instructable yesterday and forgot all about that TI-86 in my backpack buried somewhere in the closet. So I dug it out, found the 2.5mm cable and gave it a whirl using my Canon 400D. It didn’t work at first, but after a bit of googling all I had to do was splice the cable (red and white on the calculator side to red on the camera side then reconnect ground) and make sure the camera was in manual focus. It worked!

Here’s the first test run:

I was inspired by this, but somewhat unhappy with the lack of options using the code supplied in the instructable. It’s been almost a decade since the last time I programmed something in TI-BASIC, but alas, I wanted more options. So I hacked away and ended up making 3 basic modes for the intervalometer:

Shoot: Fires the shutter at will by pushing the F1 button
XLoop: Input a number and interval and it will shoot that number of times at the given interval
Lapse: For extra long time lapses, loops infinitely and exposes at the supplied interval

The loop and lapse modes also display the number of shots. Code for the program is below:

^?View Code TI-BASIC

:Lbl Z
:ClLCD
:Disp "XTiControl V 0.5","","Approx Intervals:","800 = 5sec","2000 = 10sec"
:Menu(1,"Shoot",R,2,"XLoop",L,3,"Lapse",A,5,"Quit",Q
:End
:
:Lbl Q
:ClLCD
:Stop
:
:Lbl R
:ClLCD
:Disp "Ready to fire"
:Menu(1,"Fire",F,5,"Quit",Z
:End
:
:Lbl F
:1->E
:ClLCD
:Disp "Shooting..."
:Send(E)
:Goto R
:End
:
:Lbl L
:ClLCD
:Input "How many shots? ",N
:Input "Interval: ",I
:ClLCD
:For(B,1,N
:ClLCD
:Disp "Shooting: "+B	
:For(T,1,I
:End
:Send(B)
:End
:Goto Z
:
:Lbl A
:ClLCD
:Input "Interval: ",V
:1->X:While X>0
:ClLCD
:Disp "Shooting: ",X
:Disp "","","","","Press ON to quit"
:For(H,1,V
:End
:Send(V)
:X+1->X
:End

MintTv

admin — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:03:02 +0000

A modified script (based on the earlier one for feisty) to sync audio with TvTime in Ubuntu 8.10 — I’m actually testing this on Linux Mint 6 which is based on 8.10. So for those of you out there with SAA7134 tuner chipsets, look closely at the sox line below. I’m using alsa rather than ossdsp this time, and once I got it working the volume was very faint so I also added the -v flag to adjust the volume of the input. BE CAREFUL with the -v flag… the number value is a FACTOR, not the actual volume level! 8 bumps up the volume quite a bit.

^?View Code BASH

#!/bin/sh
tvtime &
t=`pidof tvtime`
sleep 5
sox -c 2 -v 8 -r 32000 -w -t alsa hw:1,0 -t alsa hw:0,0 &
wait $t
killall -9 sox
exit 0

PHP cURL

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 18:45:12 +0000

A useful PHP snippit – cURL is a multi-protocol server communication library. The code below grabs the data of a url and stores each line in an array.

^?View Code PHP

$url = "http://google.com";
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 60; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$rawdata= explode("\n", curl_exec($ch));
curl_close($ch);
unset($ch);

Export MySQL Data to CSV File

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:49:36 +0000

Just an example of using INTO OUTFILE for dumping sql data directly to a CSV file including column labels as the first row. Because I tend to forget these things over time, I’m posting this for future reference.

^?View Code SQL

SELECT 'Firstname', 'Lastname', 'Email', 'Company', 'Title',
'Address1', 'Address2', 'City', 'State', 'Zip', 'Phone1'
UNION
SELECT users.firstname, users.lastname, users.email, users.company, users.title,
users.address1, users.address2, users.city, users.state, users.zip, users.phone1
INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/dump_users.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"' ESCAPED BY ''
LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n'
FROM users;

potatoeskillme

TI-86 Intervalometer for Canon XTi

MintTv

PHP cURL

Export MySQL Data to CSV File

Vintage Computer Pictorial

1939 - Atanosoff Berry Computer - ABC

1941 - Konrad Zuse's Z3

1943 - Whirlwind at MIT

1944 - Colossus Mark II

1944 - Harvard Mark I

1946 - Argonne Version of the Institute's Digital Automatic Computer - AVIDAC

1946 - Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer - ENIAC

1948 - IBM Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator - SSEC

1951 - Leo I

1951 - UNIVAC I

1951 - Whirlwind at MIT Complete

1952 - Grace Hopper with UNIVAC I

1956 - ElectroData 1

1956 - RAMAC (first moving-head magnetic hard disk)

1964 - IBM 360

1964 - IBM 360 Controller

1965 - UNIVAC

1965 - UNIVAC