Storage prices have dropped drastically since I built my Gamma Camera array. As I mentioned a little while ago, I’m interested in USB storage for the next iteration. In gammacam P6 I have 6 Raspberry Pi 4B nodes. The microSD card holds the OS and also the imagery data. I have heard that microSD card speeds are slower than USB options. And lately I’ve noticed that prices for some pretty fast storage options have been falling.

Three things from this week. This week I’ve got three little progress updates on the next gammacam build. Updating the sensor head I thought I was going to need to change the design of my camera head a bit to fit the Raspberry Pi GS camera module.It turns out that the sensor head will work fine as-is. The plastic cover on the back of the GS camera module is easily removable.

Three things from this week. Raspberry Pis are showing up in stock more often. So I have to get to work and start building the next version of my Gamma Camera rig. I’ve been thinking about it for so long that I’m afraid of falling into second system syndrome. I guess it’d be seventh system syndrome in my case… I’ve got a lot of half-complete thoughts about what I want to put into the next rig so here are three of my best ones.

Three things from this week. While I was on vacation I was taken by a notion that I really wanted to be able to make some of the music in my head come out of my fingers. I’ll often get some tiny fragment of a song in my head and I don’t usually know many lyrics to go with it. So I just have a little ditty running around in there.

Three things from this week. Here are three things I learned this week. They are not related. Embeddings Vicki Boykis generously shared her research on “What even are embeddings?” in 80 pages of PDF written at just the right level for me. I’d highly recommend it if you too are tinkering with ML models and feel like you have some jargon gaps to fill in. Since I was on a plane a couple times I was able to pay attention long enough to read the whole thing and run some of the sample code.

Three things from this week. Still travelling through Scotland this week so you get to see three more things this week that I saw. The Isle of Skye is full of stunning landscapes. I loved hiking the easy part of the Quiraing. I was confused by the Old Man of Storr. I was recharged visiting the rushing waters of the Fairy Pools. The Quiraing name (or Cuith-Raing in Gaelic) comes from old Norse languages and describes the folded structure of the land.

Three things from this week. I’m on vacation in Scotland this week so here are three pretty things I’ve seen that you can see too. This is the Carraig Fhada Lighthouse. We walked there from Port Ellen then contniued on to The Singing Sands beach. The beach is also known as Traigh Bhan in Gaelic. Lagavulin distillery has named a few scotch whisky bottlings after Traigh Bhan. We tasted #3 and #4 and they were both delicious.

Three things from this week. Buildroot can be a really nice fit for lots of embedded Linux applications. I’ve used it off and on over the past few years and it’s taking me a while to get an idea of what idiomatic Buildroot looks like. This week I was really happy to set up a project using Buildroot so the three things from this week will be example packages in Buildroot.

Three things from this week. There’s a genre of book that excitedly catalogs gee-whiz factoids about the unbelievable activities going on in the animal world. Tigers that can leap 20 feet straight up and ants that lift 50 times their own body weight. Blue whales are the biggest, giraffes are the tallest, cheetahs are the fastest, and camels are the coolest. I loved learning these little bits of trivia when I was a kid.

A Global Shutter Camera for the Raspberry Pi started shipping a few months ago. There have been other global shutter camera modules for the Raspberry Pi but this one comes from Raspberry Pi directly. So it should be well supported by the mainline software including the camera driver and libcamera. Here’s a little summary of some official Raspberry Pi camera modules with the details I care about: Name aka Sensor Pixels Shutter Lens Camera Module 2 v2 IMX219 8M Rolling Built-in Camera Module 3 v3 IMX708 12M Rolling Built-in 75° Camera Module 3 Wide v3 IMX708 12M Rolling Built-in 120° High Quality Camera HQ IMX477 12M Rolling C/CS High Quality Camera HQ IMX477 12M Rolling M12 Global Shutter Camera HQ IMX296 1.