Personal Projects

Online meteo station

HomeMeteo

Project of distribuited meteo stations, based on the ChipCap2 sensor and nodeMCU development board. Data is pushed with an html post to the IST web server and saved on a mySQL DB.

This project has innitially developed to monitor the (high) humidity in my apartment. With it, I can monitor the temperature and relative humidity at home on two different timeframes (minute and day).

The code was designed to be expandable, i.e. to have many client meteo stations feeding a single database. While I never implemente more than one station, this flexibility allowed me to easily use the station for work purposes, without interfering with my house monitoring data.

3D printed project

Spicer

I could not find the kitchen solution I was looking for -- to have my most used spices in the same jar. I decided to make it myself using 3D printed food grade PET and an acrylic tube.

Covid data analysis

covidPlots

As with many, I could not resist doing my own data analysis during the Covid pandemic. Most of the analysis did not reach any visualization that was not freely available elsewhere. However, during the vaccine rollout, I generated a visualization I found particularly interesting.
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Composite video frame exposure

Exposure

Created a script to merge frames from a video into a single composite image. When applied to films, it can generate surprisingly artistic images that capture its essence. The original idea is by Jason Shulman, whose creative work I read about in an interview. I was intrigued by the idea and decided to implement it. From the data-acquisition point of view this project is a playground: should I merge all frames or only a selection? Which frames to discard? Should the result be normalized to its absolute color value or each channel by itself. Does the reds of a film tell a different story than its greens or blues?

By collecting every frame one obtains a blurry chromatic abstract of the film such as in this example of Amadeus (1984), while exposing less frames captures with sharpness distinct random scenes that remind us of the film as in this example of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Dr. Strangelove (1964). These compositions are great for PC or phone wallpapers!

Python timeline generator

Friso Coronológico

My first project in Python. In fact, I earned Python with and for this project. I wanted a program to generate timelines to visually contextualize the lifespans of historical personalities and events. Back then, I was deep into 19th century music and literature. Independently I had knowledge about this period, but lacked integration between fields and even between nationalities. We tend to study the history of countries separately, which inhibits our ability to understand the influence of the underlying arts and thought movements and schools. The project was built from scratch on python 3 and SQL Alchemy for database. I was positively surprised when I painlessly managed to revive such old code in 2022 to make a French Revolution timeline to help contextualize a podcast on the topic.

André Torres