@Leavingoldhabits - eviltoast
  • 7 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: April 29th, 2024

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  • Hi!

    I’ve only ever managed to get the lide30 to play nice. I have destroyed one 110 and two 220-scanners in my efforts to build a more versatile rig.

    What happens if you drop the prism back in?

    I’ve also speculated about there being som calibration and automatic gain control going on in these newer models. I believe it could be used to normalize the values coming off of the individual sensor segments.

    On my latest attempt at a 220 scanner, I actually built a small dimmable LED circuit that I attached externally to try and influence the calibration I thought was happening, but there was a disappointing lack of results. Come to think of it, I still have that rig laying around somewhere, and the experiment may have been flawed, I’ll have a look next time I’m at my workshop. I’ll let you know what I find.

    I know that rig is at least functional, as objects placed directly onto the glass renders crude shadows on the scans.

    That’s the long answer, the short answer is no, I don’t have any tips, maybe aside from working on fooling the possible calibration somehow.




  • Thanks!

    Cabbage covered a bunch of the process below. In this case, I had a neutral grey background and laid on my back, sticking my hands into the view of the camera. And while watching the scan progress on a screen I moved my hands around until I got this.

    It’s a fairly cumbersome process, as each scan takes a couple of minutes and any unintended motion gets captured as well. Out of the 40 or so attempts, this one is the cleanest, both with regards to unintended motion, and with the pose coming out the way I wanted it to.




  • Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.

    As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.

    The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.

    A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.

    All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.

    Into hydrochloric acid.

    While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.

    The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.

    The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.




  • Thanks! I appreciate the feedback. I don’t crop shots done with this camera, I want to preserve the organic borders and learn to live with what is captured without messing too much with it.

    However, I halfway agree with your observation, on a small screen this really could do with a tighter framing, or maybe bringing the model closer to the camera. But in a larger print (this is one of two shots Ive printed in 80x80 cm), the airy composition works really well.

    I refuse to ignore you!










  • I haven’t really considered that, I’m assuming the (in this case) vertical sampling is ‘global’, as in the values at each sensor site is locked at the same time and then read out from the serial bus.

    If there was a delay, stuff like fluorescent lighting would read as a moire pattern, but I’ve only ever encountered streaking/linear distortion in those circumstances.

    I think the ‘griddyness’ or general sense of direction in the water is purely a function of how water moves and not a result of readout delay.

    I’d love to be proven wrong, though, so if I can do some experiment to determine either way, I’m all ears.