Blinding satellites with lasers

I'm working on the ECOsat project at UVic right now (no website link right now, whoopsie...) and specifically my work involves the turbidity payload. Wait wait, that's a lot of buzzwords, I'll back up.

Some Canadian space tycoon (as I understand the situation) launched the Canadian Satellite Design Challenge a few years back, and the first round of it is still going on. This is a satellite competition, it can afford to take a few years. Last December I discovered that my university (which I have been attending since before the competition began) has a team. We are the only team in the competition from a school which does not have a space or aerospace program, which is widely seen as a bold move.

I've studied digital signal processing, which included some computer vision coursework, and I found it really really neat. Once someone knows what DSP is, they generally do. This lead me to volunteer to figure out the image processing module of the ECOsat, which it turns out is the primary payload. The folks working on the other payload, OSCAR, may disagree of course, but that's just because they think radio communication is more interesting than image processing. Bizarre, I know.

So I've been researching my butt off, trying to learn how satellite imaging works, in hopes of feigning competency when interviewing industry and academic experts whose help I need, and my latest problem has been that just about every imaging satellite that isn't in this world (that is, the successful ones) use linear imaging arrays.

Anyways, gtg. Here's a paper analyzing chinese potential to harm american imaging satellites with... lasers!!!

LaserHarp Progress Report 1 of 2

The first LaserHarp project progress report is due this friday. In preparation I have made a few plots, of which this is currently my favourite:

• Target values shown: [x y z] = [ -207 -180 2257] 
• Made by reaching for my floor lamp 5 times while the kinect recorded.
• I assembled the plot with octave.
• Next I added some functions to LaserHarp to detect a hand within a radius of 100 units of the target, and I attempted to play a note using Marsyas. 
• I haven't got Marsyas and openFrameworks playing together nicely, but perhaps tomorrow :D

ofxOpenNI Setup

I'm working on a final design project for my B.Eng, a virtual reality project using a Kinect RGBD camera. I'm going to built my user interface system on Ubuntu 11.04 using OpenFrameworks, OpenNI, and Marsyas (created by my project supervisor, George Tzanetakis).

I will be keeping an installation script which loads everything I've been working on, for the convenience of my team and so I can come back and see what I was up to a few years from now.

The script installs:

1. openFrameworks w/ CodeBlocks
2. the latest unstable openNI 
3. Primesense's skeletal modelling addon for OpenNI
4. avin2's modified SensorKinect drivers
5. gameoverhack's version of the ofxOpenNI addon
6. Marsyas and ofxMarsyas addon

Names beginning with "ofx" are Open Frameworks addons/extensions.

Below are some old notes, which are probably all misleading and out of date. Beware!