Macro on Monday - Guess What

One outright winner for a correct guess last week. Congratulations and the virtual gold star go to Glo who guessed it was a wasp. I will admit that it was far from easy to say what sort of winged insect it was.

It looks to me to be one of the many varieties of ichneumon wasp.
Amazing the size of the compound eyes compared with the rest of its body.

iPhone with mini microscope attachment

My thanks to all who gave it a whirl and had a go.

On to a new Guess What.
Not a micro or macro shot this week but the whole object for a change:

A four second exposure

No prizes. Just for fun. Answer next week. All guesses will be kept hidden until then.


Goodness me how I do rabbit on. I though I was getting somewhere near the 1000 posts mark and a quick count shows the total is now 1013. How quickly four years have flashed by. To think that when I finally got the project off the Round Tuit pile I wondered what I would find to write about and how long the enthusiasm would last. Ah well, me thinks you will have to put up with my ramblings for a lot longer yet. Writing this blog and perusing the many informative and entertaining blogs out there is firmly entrenched as part of my daily, or at least weekly, routine.

Friday at the Flicks - Nest Box - Last Rose of Autumn

The Great Tit was roosting in the camera nest box again last night. This bit of video was taken yesterday morning as she (probably) was waking up: (No soundtrack on this one)




Still experimenting with the Turntable, lighting and cameras. I have added to its versatility as it can now be switched between two choices of use. First is continuous rotation to use with video capable cameras. This has also been speeded up a bit so a full rotation now only takes about 35 seconds. Second is like my first turntable where it pauses after each step and fires a still camera. My calculation was wrong regarding the number of steps for a full rotation. I had based that on the published data but in practice the stepper motor takes 512 steps to go through 360 degrees. So with a still camera that will mean 512 photos!


This shows a rose flower cut from my dwarf standard rose. Virtually the last bloom which will be seen on that plant this year. Lighting was two LED lamps, one multi LED above and a single off to the left at rose level to fill in some of the shadows. This was filmed with the Panasonic Lumix TZ7:



This time I made sure it was saved in 720p HD.

Have a great weekend and keep an eye on the wildlife around you.

First Sign of Roosting

Put the nest box camera on last night for the first time for quite a while and was cheered to see a Great Tit using the box as an overnight roost. Staking an early claim?



No signs of Hedgehogs last night so they may well be starting their hibernation period. Not in my hedgehog house unfortunately.

Macro on Monday - Guess What + Turntable / Camera Experiments

Finally got round to it, running a bit on the late side today.

Adrian and ImaBurdie indicated that last week's Guess What was part of the Arduino so deserve the Gold Star this week with an honourable mention for Jan who wasn't able to narrow things down to the right part of my rain gauge project.



   


On to the new Guess What:



Don't expect you to narrow it down to an exact identification, just the general thing.
It was stuck to the outside of my kitchen window for a few days.

No prizes, just for fun.


Turntable / Phone Experiments

Partly running late as I have been trying different cameras with the turntable and waiting for video files to upload to YouTube and even longer for them to process things.

What really surprised me was the iPhone4 could focus so close and produced sharper video than the cameras I had tried so far. It does get hot though when filming for a minute non stop. The iPhone had to be clamped in place, between some soft rubber. The line across the iPhone screen is a reflection not a scratch or crack in the glass.

 

 No soundtrack on this video:




Also I wasn't expecting the TZ7 to make a such reasonable job of it but once it had picked a focus spot it seemed to stick with it.



I don't know why YouTube didn't recognise it as HD so the full quality doesn't show on their copy. It is a little grainy as I used a single bright white LED light plus what little was coming through the window on a very dell day.

Autumn on the Turntable

After fixing everything for the Arduino / stepper motor driven turntable to a board and tidying up the wiring I experimented taking a few videos. The first batch were again with the Panasonic but although I got it to the best I could with the manual focus I was constantly disappointed with the results. Then I got out the Canon XL2 not really expecting it to be able to focus close up. Was I wrong? I was really surprised just how close I could get to things so I set up a few bits gathered last Autumn. The result being:




Much better and with some more care over lighting and background I could grow to like this form of presenting some items.

Dewy Morning

A very heavy dew this morning so all the spiders' webs were showing up a treat. Interesting to see different styles depending on where they are built. On some trellis nearly every section was filled with an orb web:




Down at grass level the style of web looks much more haphazard. On my lawn this morning I gave up counting the number of small webs just like this one when I reached fifty:



You wouldn't think there was enough insect life about to feed all those spiders every day. Just shows how many tiny creatures live under our noses (or feet) without our noticing.

Heath Robinson Meets Arduino

For a while I have wanted a slow rotating platform to film small objects. The one I built at least a year ago had the disadvantage that the stepper motor made large jumps for each step and was only suitable for taking a series of stills which then had to be put together to make a video.

Recently I spotted  some very cheap 5V stepper motors which are often sold complete with the driver board. These motors are small and have a step angle of only 5.625 degrees. That means it will take 64 steps to rotate a full circle. All it needed was wiring to an Arduino Nano (any model of Arduino will work) and loading the sketch (program instructions) which was freely available on the web.

Here is the setup:
Left to right: 5V power regulator  -  driver board  -  Arduino Nano



Upturned turntable cut from a spare piece of uPVC window ledge showing the stepper motor:



A hastily rigged up Heath Robinson set up to test whether it was any use for making videos:



The first results filmed using a Panasonic SDR-H80. The most difficult part was having to use manual focus which is hard to judge on the small LCD screen.



Now it needs tidying up and mounting in a framework.

As for the other project - rain gauge - I've been giving the latest real time clock a 'soak' test and am pleased to see that it seems to be keeping good time. When I programmed it it was 1 second fast (hard to get it exact as you have to guess how long it takes for the program to compile on the computer and download to the Nano) and it is still only 1 second fast.