• Update December 24, 2013: Mokus refined his code so that the distribution is now well-behaved (nearly normal) and the PSD no longer turns up at high frequencies). The plots and post have been updated to reflect this change. He will…

  • For a project I wanted to make an LED flicker like a candle. I searched for the signal statistics of candle flicker, and I found no data. One student web site suggests that candle flame flicker is a 1/f-type random…

  • I tested three new writing media for the backs of photographs. I recently went through some 2 or 3 year old pictures I had marked with Higgins Black Magic. In exactly one case I found one photo that had picked…

  • This afternoon I made hot-smoked salmon in my father’s MasterBilt smoker. The Web did not provide me with good resources on smoking salmon in a MasterBilt. Or rather, it provided many different and vague recipes. My result was excellent but…

  • I made smoked ribs yesterday and tested out a new measurement system based on an Arduino, data logger shield, and a Sharp GP2Y1010 dust measurement unit. I didn’t have a long enough cable to get the smoke measurement unit inside…

  • It is inevitable that you will want to write the degree symbol to your 16×2 character LCD once you have it wired to the Pi. My son wired it up, and then wanted to display the degree symbol. In the…

  • I am working with the freetronics microphone module, which is described as having a sensitivity of “-40 dB typical”—let us assume it is dB (SPL) referenced to 20 micropascals root mean square (rms) at 1 KHz. When I think of…

  • The Arduino Uno is not the ultimate signal processing machine, but it can do some light duty work on burst data. I had trouble finding the maximum sample rate the Uno can support, which is totally critical for most kinds…

  • Last summer I assigned my son, then six years old, to do an “inquiry.” Inquiries are guided studies of something, and empirical inquiries are like mini science fair projects. At the time I asked him to pick a topic he…

  • This article begins with a story from my life, my fatherhood, about the time I was most afraid. The story ends happily with the birth of a healthy baby girl. The article, on the other hand, ends with an analysis…

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