Monday, October 28, 2013

NIR Raspberry Pi Camera

I am excited to read that one can now buy a near-infrared Raspberry Pi camera. The regular one  can be modified to measure NIR light but the process is futzy and error prone. I destroyed 2 cameras trying to get the damn thing apart. This new camera has the NIR filter removed so one is set to go right from the start.  Adafruit has them in stock (as of this morning but I’m fairly certain they will sell out quickly). 

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1567

My efforts to build the RPi multispectral camera are now made much simpler: http://www.evobeach.com/2013/09/a-raspberry-pi-based-multispectral.html 

Friday, October 18, 2013

Remote Sensing with UAVs and eCognition

PLoS published an interesting new article about the use of UAVs to track invasive weeds in maize fields using UAV imagery and remote sensing techniques. This is a good example of an article that uses remote sensing and UAVs in an analytic sense and not just "camera in the air." While elevated camera angles are cool, they do not really take advantage of the technology nor offer much in the way of actual research. This article points to how this kind of work can be done (and will be a good article to use for our REU program). http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077151

Monday, October 14, 2013

Giant Human Sized Salamanders

Every couple of years when we lived in Wisconsin, the woods around us would be invaded by different kinds of newts and salamanders. Although I never did figure out what caused these events, I assume that those waves of critters were related to population booms or some conditions that resulted in 1000s of them running across the driveway and into our garage. I would have loved, however, to see a plague of these guys: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/10/absurd-creature-6-foot-salamander/?utm_source=tumblr&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=tumblrclickthru#slideid-285261