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Last weekend I went to Austin, TX, for the Makers Faire. There, Pat, David, and I make a crap load of custom ice cream scoops. The process involved filling a dixie cup with whatever ingredients you wanted, including fun stuff like chayanne pepper and BBQ sauce (some people made normal ice cream, too), and then instantly freezing it with liquid nitrogen. The kids loved it!

Just as a note, this was a promotion for Pat’s just published book, the Hungry Scientist Handbook. The book is meant for foodie/geeky types — I’d definitely check it out if you self identify with either of those groups.

Anyway, I made a timelapse of the setup. Here, you can see us getting ready and serving for about half a day (then my battery died).

After discovering CHDK, I’ve started messing with timelapses. Here is how I created the above timelapse:

• Installed CHDK on my Camera
• Added this script to my CHDK/SCRIPTS directory
• Set it to take a picture every 15 seconds, and run it until the battery runs out
• Copied all the resulting photos off my SD card into a folder on my computer
• Ran the following command (requires mplayer): mencoder "mf://*.JPG" -vf scale=640:480 -o timelapse.avi -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -lavfopts format=avi

And tada! You now have timelapse.avi.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Computing.