Monthly Archives: August 2009

Progress on the blue canary night light project

A little while ago I embarked on a search for a blue canary night light for my daughter. After not finding one, I decided to make one. Several prototypes later, I’m almost ready to sell them (at my site, bluecanarynightlight.com).

Today I got some new LED night light bases to try. They aren’t going to work for the final sale models, but I was finally (with the aid of a plug rotater) able to get a blue canary night light set up by the light switch in my daughter’s room:

The final model won’t have legs, and will be bigger (as is the current prototype), but I was glad to be able to make use of this older prototype. I think I’ll be able to get better light diffusion with the final models as well — they’ll be dyed instead of painted.

If you want to hear the story of how I moronically made sparks shoot out of my wall installing the combo switch/receptacle today, let me know in the comments.

First CardioSolv Simulation Manager Demo

Today I’m really excited to finally show you something that’s been in the works, both in implementation and in the planning stages, for a long time. The CardioSolv Simulation Manager.

Running cardiac electrophysiology (and mechanics) simulations has traditionally been really complicated. It involved learning a bunch of UNIX command-line tricks, dealing with queuing systems and their associated script files, and so on. Furthermore, there are many, many options in a sophisticated cardiac simulator, and the novice user (and even the expert) can easily get lost in all of the choices.

We’ve taken years of experience setting up, running, and analyzing simulations to build a really cool (excuse my excitement) web interface that handles all of the dirty work, and guides the user through the important choices when running simulations.

The video below is my first demo. In it, I demonstrate how to create a plane wave moving across a sheet of tissue, then create a spiral wave, all from the web interface.

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