Gadgets

Receiving Electrical Discharges from within a Faraday Cage in 360º

Hi there,

this one is from 2013, more precisely from July when I’ve been to FISL, the International Free Software Forum in Brazil. One of the things that most called the visitors attention was this giant Tesla Coil. The most interesting things about it were that we could receive the electrical discharges from within a Faraday Cage and the discharges produced melodies, like Sweet Child o’ Mine, from Guns n Roses, the National Anthem and others. The forum happens yearly and is already going to its 15th edition now in 2014. It is always at a university in Porto Alegre, south of Brazil.

At the panorama below you will be able to watch the video in part of it, but only in FLASH devices. Unfortunately I was not able until now to enable it for HTML5 devices like Apple ones (iPod, iPad, iPhone, …).

I had published an external panorama of the same place before and also a small online video of it playing our national anthem.

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Bobina Testa - dentro da gaiola em 360º
Testa coil from inside the cage in 360º
Vídeo na Internet
Online video

Technical Datasheet:

The challenge here has been to put the partial video stitched with the panorama. Until now I was not able to do that with Apple devices, but I think it is possible. The problem is that sometimes you spend so much time on something that you better realize that the optimal might be enemy of the good, so, after many months I realized that maybe I could never publish this panorama if I waited to achieve that.

See you, Cartola.

My short recipe for making pictures for a fullsphere panorama with the DJI Phantom quadcopter

Hi everybody,

as usually, sorry for my English, as it is not my native language.

Here I am just going to share my workflow for making a full sphere panoramic picture (a 360º photo) using my quadcopter, a DJI Phanton, with a gopro hero 3.

I don’t have a gimbal. Until now I am using the water case that came with the gopro fixed in the standard support that came with the Phantom.

Another good advise is that a fullshpere panoramic picture can get complex itself, mainly for the ones that never did one, so, if this is your case, you better try to make one made with a more stable support than a quadcopter. You can read this other article I have published before. Notice that without rotating using the axis that passes through the NPP (no parallax point) one can have a lot of parallax errors. Here an equipment that can minimize this problem. Even without it, if you can put the gopro in the vertical and fix it closer to the center of the Phantom it will help.

  1. As a first step I put the gopro looking at 45º down
  2. Set it up to make timelapse with one picture at each 2 seconds and made it start them – this will make many useless pictures, but ok
  3. Flight till the desired point and counted until 3, trying to count 3 seconds
  4. Rotated 45º and counted again until 3, repeating it until finish an horizontal line of pictures
    • With the camera in the horizontal position and depending on the scene I do another horizontal line of pictures with the camera looking to the horizon (0º)
    • If the Phantom flies high enough and there is no object at the same high of it, this will probably not be necessary
    • When I have to do this I put the Phantom down, move the camera and put it up again. This usually generates a lot of parallax problems.
  5. After all (could have been before) I took a picture of the sky from the ground, to stitch with the aerial ones

Here are two examples made using this workflow

Notes:

  • This kind of shooting can result in a lot of parallax problems that usually can only be removed in a post processing editor like GIMP or other advanced image editor that has tools like clone, healing, different selection tools, rotate selection, move selection, feather selection and maybe a little more features. Here some tips on removing parallax errors in post editing with GIMP.
  • As the gopro doesn’t have manual exposition, color difference can also appear between images. Usually the stitching software will be able to deal with it, but if doesn’t you can also correct it in an advanced image editor. Feather selections is a key feature for that. I have made a video tutorial here, but unfortunately it is also in Portuguese.

 

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