A few months back while searching for solutions to automate the observatory’s roof, I came across a small shop on Bulgary that sells USB and Serial relay boards, in various configurations. At the time I bought a couple of USB One Channel Relay Units and they sitted around for a while, while I finished some other small projects.

Today I finished the assembly of the board. I got a small plastic box, that turned out to be a tiny bit smaller that it should, forcing me to chop off a few millimeters at the corners of the PCB, cut a slot on one end for the USB port and power cable, and got a cheap triple extension cord from the local hardware store to make the thing useful.

The final result was this, with a unused board on the side:

To control it, I made a small C# application (.NET 2.0, Windows only), that presents a simple form with a button, and can be controlled from the command line. You can download it here (zip, 5Kb) if it’s useful for something.

To change the COM Port, you should edit HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SigmaPower\COMPort on your registry (the key is created on first run)

To use it from the command line, you should pass it a single parameter: “ON” / “OFF”, or “1″ / “0″. Ex:

c:bin>SigmaPower ON

This one should be installed on the observatory by tomorrow!

Last week I visited with some friends a abandoned building in Lisbon, to explore the photographic possibilities of the place (old, decadent, industrial). There, I asked Joost if he would help me with my first assignment for the Strobist Boot Camp II.

Joost is a freelance photographer that has walked half the world (actually, half of Europe, Asia and Africa) shooting for magazines, newspapers and for himself, and he’s much better qualified than me to run the controls of a DSLR. Even so, he kindly agreed to place himself on front of the lens, and with the help of two strobes, a small umbrella, and a Lumiquest Big Bounce, I managed to get my first real portrait:

My thanks for Joost, and Sonia, my assistant for the shoot