Mike O’Connor

@mikeoconnor.bsky.social

585 Followers 442 Following

By day - Machine Learning. By night - Amateur photographer, tinkerer, drinker of IPA Website - thoughtsofmike.com 🇺🇸 in 🇳🇱

Video of my replica of the Daft Punk helmet worn by Thomas Bangalter, with working LEDs
3d Printed helmet with one module of LEDs placed inside the visor. The helmet you might recognize as the same design worn by Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk...
A semi circular PCB with red LEDs eliminated on the edge. The LEDs light up slowly from right to left.
A clip of my nine month old son walking in the kitchen on his own.
A baby sitting in a pram at a crosswalk, as viewed from above and behind. The top of his head, and his little feet are visible. The crosswalk is in the UK, and has “<- look left” written on the street so that pedestrians know where the traffic comes from.
Photo of the distribution block for my floor heating system which sends hot water to different parts of the house. The hot side is above, with labels corresponding to each of the rooms served by this circuit. There are thermistor probes zip-tied to the hoses. I later insulated them so that they more accurately measure the inlet and outlet temperature of each loop. The flow gauges on top of the hot water manifold indicate the volume per minute of water moving through the system. Water is precisely 1kg per liter, which makes it very easy to estimate the mass flow rate of the system. All I need to compute the heat dissipation is the specific heat of water, which is easy to obtain.
Bare black PCB in my hand, with component footprints visible in the silkscreen. The board is titled "Raspberry Pi Pico W Thermocouple Multiplexer"
Time series chart of the freezer ambient temp as well as the water temperature. The water remained at the same temp from 9:30 until about 1:15, and has finally started getting colder again.
Screenshot of the temperature history of 2 thermometers. One in yellow is taken from an ambient air temperature sensor inside my freezer. It reads about -10 degrees, and the cyclical pattern of the compressor is visible in the trace of the temperature line. The other, in blue, is the temperature I'm measuring with a probe in an ice cube tray. The temperature dropped steadily until it hit the freezing point of water. It has since plateaued at that temperature while the latent heat of the liquid water is abosorbed by the freezer. Eventually, when it crystalizes, the temperature will continue to drop. but until then, this horizontal line serves as an excellent reference point for 0°C.
A photo of the front of my van. Its racing stripe runs from the front to the back.
450 grams of blackberries in a bowl on my kitchen scale.
Screenshot of my LinkedIn header, with my new title as Machine Learning Engineer
White paper with black and blue ink depicting the city of The Hague.
A pen-plotter drawing of the city of Haarlem in The Netherlands. It's drawn on blue paper, reminiscent of a blueprint. The ink used for the bodies of water was gold metallic, highlighting the Spaarne river running up the right side of the image in a lazy winding pattern. The north embankment of the city forms triangular points, indicative of the city's old fortifications from centuries past. The handful of canals in Haarlem are also gold, and frame the outline of the old city in bright color against the blue background. The city itself is drawn with a mixture of white and black pens. The white outlines of every building in the city create a mixture of geometric and organic patterns, depending on the age of the neighborhoods being mapped. Black roads and bike paths are dark against the deep blue paper, only barely visible in comparison to the white house outlines. The rail line that passes through the north side of the old city cuts across horizontally, and is drawn in silver. The paper this was drawn on is 50x70cm and there is a visible margin around the outside where the pen plotter stopped drawing its lines. I'm really proud of this piece of art.
The pen plotter in action, this time with fewer pen retractions to increase the amount of time the pen is actually in contact with the paper.
Black construction paper on a white table. The construction paper has a line drawing of a father and son. Their foreheads are touching, father‘s eyes closed. The pen is silver, and stands out strongly against the black paper background. The robot used to print the images visible in the margins of the photograph.
My robot, making its first coordinated moves
A photograph of three tubs of Reese’s pieces stacked on top of each other. Each tub is 1.75 kg. There’s an empty wine bottle standing next to them for scale. The wine bottle is dwarfed by the tower of Reese’s pieces.
Picture of a washing machine, with the option to preorder it. The ad copy says the following: "Bespoke AI Washing Machine Enjoy a smart way to wash with AI Home, an intuitive control center. Personalise your washing by remembering your habits, plus, after the washing is done, it provides a laundry report."
Video of a metal part sitting on my desk. Next to it is my laptop with the 3-D scanned model of the part which I pan and rotate in view of the camera. The part is about the size of a deck of cards.
Linear rod and bearing for the gantry
Two bracket prototypes, one in white and one in gray ABS-GF.
Video of a pocket door opening, revealing a hole drilled through it unintentionally.
A screenshot of the aforementioned share buttons.
Unit price: 471 euros
Screencap of a 3dBenchy, sliced and ready to print inside of Orcaslicer.
Picture from in the hammock, looking out the window
Screenshot from fast.com before I got fiber optic Internet. The maximum download speed was 37mbps, upload was 7.7, and the unloaded latency was almost 40 ms.
Screenshot of a Home Assistant graph illustrating the relative humidity inside the filament storage box I use for my 3-D printer. There are two spikes up to approximately 35%. Those spikes correspond to moments when I opened the box to put new material inside of it. The rest of the time the humidity inside the box stays at or below 10%.
Sped-up video of a photographic print developing in a dark room under red light. The photograph is of a wave washing up onto the sandy shore of a beach in the summertime.
A photo of all the things that I described.
Black-and-white photograph of a conical beam of light aimed directly at the camera lens. The room is totally black, except for this beam of light. The center of the image is the brightest point, and the expanding cone illuminates smoke floating in the air. It adds a texture that gives the light shape and makes it feel solid, even though you can walk right through it.
My wife holding my son, printed in black and white and sitting in the fixer bath at the end of the development process.
Video of an image developing under red light in my photography lab
Photo of a Lego Star Wars set.
Black and white photographic print of a fig tree that I shot on my Olympus half-frame camera, and enlarged in my darkroom.
Photo of the thermometer. Brisket is at 84 degrees C
Photo of the thermometer sitting at 70 degrees C
Vegetarian version, with oyster mushrooms, cilantro, red onion, and konjac noodles served in a bowl on my kitchen counter.
Black-and-white photograph hanging to dry in my loft studio. The photo is of my wife’s hands, fingers interlaced and resting against the table. The image has lots of contrast, and her fair skin stands out against a dark wooden table top. The ring that I gave to her when we got engaged is highlighted on her left hand, a splash of light against the dark background.
Photo of a new-to-me Olympus Pen FT sitting in the palm of my hand.
Thermal camera image of my kitchen, with the floor heating loops visible as orange lines running through the cold purple of the tile floor.
Photo of a roll of medium format film, shot in 6x7 format, laying on a light table next to the scanning mask. The mask itself is narrower than the 3 frames visible on the first strip of film. So the user has to set up the first two, then adjust and set up for the third before moving on to the next strip. This means, for a roll of 10 exposures (3, 3, 2, 2), there are 6 setup steps instead of 4. That adds a significant amount of time to the scanning process, and means I have to handle the film more.
Negatives hanging in the window
Photo of a roll of black and white medium format film hanging to dry, with the dated wrapper pinned next to it by a tiny metal clip.
The recording venue is a nightclub on the outskirts of Utrecht in the Netherlands. They had the whole room decked out with musical instruments, lights, carpets of various shapes and sizes, and the audience chairs interspersed among the musicians. There was no separation between the performers and the people watching them.
Two framed maps of the world, depicting ocean and wind currents. The paper that they’re printed on is visibly old with the patina acquired from more than 100 years. They’re mounted in matching dark wooden frames with a cream colored mat.
High resolution paper map of France and neighboring countries with the individual wine growing regions, highlighted in various colors. Corsica, Bordeaux, and burgundy, all have more detailed insects framed to the left side of the map.