[time-nuts] beaglebones, time, web services

Mike Magin mmagin at lowerarchy.com
Sat Jul 4 14:55:57 EDT 2015


Somewhat new time-nut here (had one of the Samsung-branded Z3805s for a
few months as a house 10mhz ref, but it really got out of control when
I acquired a Wavecrest DTS, multiple frequency counters, an old Astron
1250a, a Lucent RFTG-u pair, etc.), thought I should finally de-lurk
since I can perhaps offer some useful opinion on this.  Comments inline.

On Sat, Jul 04, 2015 at 06:13:06AM -0700, Jim Lux wrote:
> I've got a project I'm working on to make a sophisticated sundial
> with moving mirrors.  I've got a batch of Arduinos that move the
> mirrors to the appropriate places, given the current sun angle, etc.

I guess you are making a human-readable sundial, I was thinking recently
about building a computerized mean-solar-noon tracker, just to see what
sort of accuracy I can get.  Haven't decided between a cheap fisheye
camera behind a dark filter (welding lens?) versus a sort of slot-lens
(like a pinhole, but to tolerate the seasonal change in north-south
elevation) with a wide-range light sensor (CdS or a modern ambient light
sensor IC).

> I've got a beaglebone that runs some python code to calculate sun
> angle based on time
[...]
> Or are there libraries that make this more cookbook? (the little
> "getting started with beaglebone" book talks about flask)

In a previous contract job, I did some work with Flask, it's pretty
nice, especially for the basic case of "make this subset of the URL
space be handled by this function".  

I haven't set it up from scratch, but the Flask documentation seems pretty
good, and if you're already familiar with Python, I'd highly recommend it.

Mike


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