A series of short skits made by Marcos Heurta and I to poke fun at life as a graduate student at Rice University. Each skit is about 30 to 90 seconds long and inspired by the This is SportCenter commercials. The footage was recorded on a standard DV camcorder and the editing was done using iMovie and Adobe Premier Pro.
The IDL Reference Widget is simple Dashboard widget for the Mac OS X operating system that allows quick access to the reference guide for the Interactive Data Language or IDL produced by ITT. The code used to make this widget is a modification of original code written by Andrew Hedges for his PHP Reference Function Widget. The widget is fairly simple to use, just download it at the link below, unzip and double click the file to install. You must have Mac OS X 10.4 or later for this to work.
The AMRAAM video rocket is my first attempt at flying a rocket with a video camera. It consists of a AMRAAM-2 rocket kit from Public Missiles Limited and an onboard wireless X10 camera. The X10 camera, which can be purchased for under $70, comes with a built in transmitter and a seperate reciever which makes it quite a deal. To record the video, I used a laptop with video capture capabilites, but any camcorder would also work. To power the ground reciever, I used a 12V motorcycle battery, which also doubled as the power source to ignite the rocket engine. The onboard transmitter was powered by a 9V battery which at 150 mAh should give about 30 minutes of usuage.
Construction Details
Building the rocket took about 40 hours, with the electronics and launch systems taking most of that time. The detailed PML instructions that came with the AMRAAM kit made building the rocket itself rather straight forward, but the electronics were another matter. Click below to see the construction details and an itemized equipment list
First Flight – 3/16/03
The first flight went well, although the camera wasn’t securely mounted, allowing it to come loose right before launch. This also resulted in the camera being dislodged when the parachute deployed.
Onboard video
Ground Video
Second Flight – 3/30/03
The mounting problems from the first flight were solved by a center board to which all of the electronics were attached (see the construction section for more details). This gave a better camera angle allowing for more of the ground to be seen. Unfortunately, the rocket flew out of range and the signal was lost at apogee.
Star Trek vs. Star Wars Video
This is a short Star Trek “episode” that my brother, Dale Kocevski, and I created to get some experience with video editing and production. The entire video is about 7 minutes long and is about a hypothetical encounter between the Enterprise-D and the Empire from the Star Wars universe. The video is composed completely of captured footage except for a few rendered objects
A very nice webcam situated in Yosemite Valley. This is turning out to be a great resource to determine what the conditions are in the park before going up.
AMRAAM-2 Video Rocket
Construction Details