Monday, January 18, 2010

Vizier of Weather Systems

(Crackles knuckles) Here we go.

Being a final year student, the thesis titles brought up to the attention of the Electrical Engineering (EE) students are somewhat watered down to suit the students' capabilities. Like I said before, we are all seriously underestimated by some of the lackadaisical lecturers, so let's just say that I measure students' barometer by the level of pride they put in their work in their thesis projects. It doesn't need to be 'fanciful' (the type with acronyms of techno-savvy stuff with superfluous words... oh you'll get it when you get there), but being meaningful is what this is all about.

My thesis supervisor (beautifulmind's as well) went for a technology convention in Geneva 2005 (check out for a smart cane for the less capable) and out of 1300 exhibits, his innovation came out Number ONE. How did he do it? In my own words, I say "An idea which is expressed with authenticity and meaningfulness is always favored over the ultra-complex fuselage of engineering enigmas which is not unknown" ..

So, my interests has always been about being a hacker in electronics amalgamated with structure and with a dash of moderate programming (ask my fellow bloggers) so I googled for low cost sensors for the scrooge and found out about low cost humidity sensors using scraped carbon film resistors, then the next two months' worth of Googling, a solid idea came through: An electronic weather station featuring mobility, solid state per se, fully constructed and improvised by a Vortex Electrica member!

I can't spill out the details now, remember it is a patented thesis, (or so I was informed) but I'll be glad to share the rest of the circuitry, the electronics, and the structural integrity which is essential in the construction, all in this blog after the submission of my dissertation. Some are original discoveries, some are improvised, and some is the icing on the cake, so to say.

I truly spent a lot of time gathering information on this, so see the pictures with the knowledge I spent nearly a year building it. This project is due for exhibit for the MTE 2010 in Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur between 4-6 February



Here are the pictures of my work:

Figure: CRAE Solid State Weather Sensor System

Figure: Some of the electronics


This system is designed to measure:

a) Ambient temperature
b) Barometric Pressure
c) Humidity
d) Rain precipitation
e) Wind Speed, and
f) Wind Direction

The cost of the electronics is around RM100 as opposed to the commercial weather transmitter, WXT510 which is around USD 3000 (around RM10000). If this may replace the current model, oh my. The discoveries (Bi'iznillah) with Allah's guidance include the wind sensors improvisation which helped me complete a solid-state wind sensing system.


Figure: Commercial Weather Transmitter WXT510, priced at USD 3850 (Weatherzone.com)

The rest of the details will be uncovered in four months time, InsyaAllah.

That's all for now. See you again!

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

The Swizzler Download

[edit: The Swizzler now has it's own blog! Check it out at: Digital Dreams in HD: The Swizzler Blog]


Ever wanted to apply high quality special effects to video in real-time instead of pre-rendering effects?

The Swizzler (currently version 0.1alpha [edit: not really alpha, this version is stable and working quite well. It was named alpha due to being the first release. version 0.7 is coming soon! check out Digital Dreams in HD: The Swizzler Blog]) is a GPU accelerated windows media player application capable of applying special effects to high quality video (up to full 1080p HD video has been tested to run smoothly) System requirements are windows, .NET framework 3.5 sp1 (installed if you have the latest windows update). It is now available for preview download here.

Some screenshots:



















































The screenshots quality have been lowered due to upload limitations.

Some of the effects included in this software are:
- Color Correction
- Brightness and Contrast
- Edge Detection
- Banded Swirl
- Pixelate
- Light Streak
- Toon Shader
- Directional Blur
- Emboss
- Color Emboss
- Grayscale
- Invert
- Sharpen
- Color Threshold
- Outline
- Zoom Blur
- Edge Fade
- Vignette
- Erode
- Watercolor
- Splitscreen
- Splitscreen flip
- Swirl
- Pinch

Effects can be stacked (you can apply different effects simultaneously) and many of their parameters may be adjusted using the controls on the fly. The interface is simple and straightforward.

This application is brought to you by the power of WPF (windows presentation foundation) and will only work on windows XP, Vista and 7. A dedicated GPU is not required but is highly recommended as the effects are quite graphics intensive. Integrated graphics cards will work as long as they support pixel shader version 2.0 (which most do).

Thanks for taking the time to try out my software = ) If the above link doesn't work, or you didn't find it. Click here: http://ifile.it/iu31ql0/The%20Swizzler.rar

Not all of the shaders were written by me. Some shaders were taken from the Microsoft DirectX shader library and some from Shazzam, a great tool for pixel shader programming. The video used in the screenshots is Coral Reef Adventure HD taken from the Windows Media HD content showcase.

There are many more features to come. I appreciate any feedback and comments. Please feel free to contact me with bug reports, suggestions, errors, etc @ fakhruddin087 at gmail (thats zero-eight-seven). Thanks for trying out my software ;)


This program was written and published using Microsoft Visual C# 2008.
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