Atronach's Eye 2026

Wait, I thought this got finished? Yes, so this year it was time to build a second, better one. I didn't change the mechanical design much; it has some minor improvements I had already worked into the 3D models after finishing the last one, but it's the same in substance. What I really wanted was a chance to try out one or two of my new cameras. Given the way the eye is assembled, replacing the camera is a fairly big deal. So instead of pulling apart the mostly-functional eye I already had, I made a whole new one. This has the added benefit of giving me a demonstration model that I can take places, while I leave the flagship one parked on my living room wall.

The original eyeball's camera is a "300K pixel USB 2.0 mini webcam," like this one. At $7-$9, they're cheap enough to buy in bulk, AND they come in a small enough case to fit comfortably inside the eyeballs. Unfortunately, the image quality you get for that price seems pretty poor. The low resolution isn't the real issue (there's no need for megapixels when you're only doing basic motion detection). It's that the output seems just plain noisy, especially under lower-light conditions. I also wanted to try a wider field of view. It's very easy for the existing eyeball to completely miss a person in the room because it's all the way over on one side of its range of motion staring at the side wall, or even because the person walks through its visual range too fast.

My two new cameras are an ELP-USB30W02M-MHV120 (120 degree FOV, 640x480 pixels, $28 now but I got it for $14) and another ELP model with a fisheye lens that seems to no longer be available (170 degree FOV, 1080P, $27.50 - this one is similar but more expensive.). They're both what I want to call "card cameras," consisting of a naked square circuit board with the lens sticking out of one side and a cord coming out the other. In that sense they're similar to the card cameras sold specifically for use with Raspberry Pis, but they have USB cables instead of short ribbon cables - important for compatibility with the eyeball's interior layout. It also made the cameras easier to try out with my laptop when I first got them.

And in initial tests, the output from both seemed significantly cleaner. I could run background subtraction without seeing a whole lot of imagined "motion patches" created by especially noisy regions of the image. Without as many noise problems to deal with, I was able to reduce the OpenCV MOG2 background subtraction algorithm's "history" parameter and get rid of the running average I was applying to my computed center of motion value. This made the motion tracking less laggy and more responsive.

Printing and assembling a whole new eyeball from scratch took much longer than I'd anticipated. I added features to the previous one gradually, and that left me with a poor grasp of how complex the build is when started from the beginning. Each motor now has a gear pair for a little more torque, which is helpful at the edges of the range of motion. A small downside is that they seem to make the eyeball noisier.

It was all so much work that I still haven't had time to wire and install the limit switches! So the new eyeball is operating by "dead reckoning" of where it's pointing at the moment. But I got enough of it put together to test the motion tracking, and I think it's finally working reliably! It certainly performs better than the original. I was even able to activate the up/down dimension of motion without issue. That's disabled in the original eyeball, because it was too prone to get stuck staring at the ceiling and whatnot. The expanded field of view is also a big help.

So I still have to finish up the last bits of the construction, but on the whole I'm very pleased. A decade ago, I never believed that following motion would be this hard ... but that's what I get for cheaping out on the cameras, I guess!

Until the next cycle,
Jenny

Dreams of the Frontier

Something a little different for today: as part of the process of obtaining my new job, I was asked to write an essay on why spaceflight is important to me. So I'm reusing it, because why not? This is a major side of me that doesn't find its way onto the blog very often, thanks to a shortage of publicized launches associated with my old job (I'm hoping that can change). It's shorter than my typical essays here, because I'm not trying to present research or convince anyone of anything, just talking through my personal thoughts.

At a time when many feel disillusioned by current events, a mission to send four astronauts around the moon has emerged as a kind of light in the dark, an unexpected source of encouragement and togetherness. In my opinion this only begins to illustrate the power of spaceflight and what it could mean for our common future.

Expanding the human presence in space has exciting practical implications. We may find rich new sources of minerals and move polluting industry to barren heavenly bodies, reducing the strain on earth's biosphere while upgrading current living standards. But this will only be feasible if the math checks out both economically and environmentally. The more efficient access to space becomes, in terms of both cost and resources used, the more likely we are to make damaging our own backyard with mines and hazardous waste into a thing of the past.

Broadened access to space is also a necessary defense against power monopolies. One of the best ways to ensure activities in space are conducted for the benefit of earth is to get as much of earth as possible involved. This is true at the national and cultural level; allowing only one political body and its favored ideologies to capture space would be an immense danger for anyone it views as an enemy. For the US and its allies to rest on their laurels while (for example) China becomes sole proprietor of humanity's inheritance in the solar system would be a great strategic failure. And a similar principle applies at the corporate level. I have been pleased to see competitors rising to challenge SpaceX, because no matter how much the latter reduces launch costs, it does not necessarily have an incentive to minimize prices without at least one rival to outbid it.

However, I must admit that while these practical motives for opening up space may justify my personal interest, they are not its source. Space exists at the frontier of both our territory and our technology, and the lure of that frontier is ultimately what draws me. It is the lure of novelty: not only going places we have never been, but doing and creating the unprecedented in order to get there. And it is the lure of the Other: a way to reach beyond ourselves and our ordinary lives to discover the awe-inspiring and foreign. For me, space travel is more a matter of the soul than the body ... not merely a tool of survival, but one of those things that help make survival worth the effort. This, I think, is the main benefit the recent Artemis II mission has given the world. It has had no material effect on most spectators' lives (yet), but has offered them inspiration and hope, if only by demonstrating that people can work together to accomplish something stunning. Robotic probes, however useful, do not seem to have quite the same effect. Humans in space help other humans feel connected to the mission.

Experience with other frontiers reveals their unpredictability. Who could have foreseen the applications of the internet when it was nascent? It needed millions of people acting on millions of ideas to make it what it is today. And so, when all has been said, we cannot fully know what people will gain from access to space until we give it to them.