We published a new paper on estimating clear sky energy across the entire skydome. Wide spectrum sky energy is useful for many downstream applications, including PV building energy modeling, panel alignment, rendering, etc. This is a data-driven technique, using regression models on measured sky data. We validated the method with holdout data and with libRadtran,…
Tag: computer science
UCF Graduate Research Forum
Participated in the UCF Graduate Research Forum this year. Hundreds of graduate students presented some of their research in poster format, in a ballroom at the student union. Judges came by and delved into the topic with each participant. It was really nice to see so many budding scientists and so much interest work taking…
New Mid-Range PC
Built a new mid-range PC for ~$600 for my dad for his birthday. He mostly uses it for video streaming, the Internet, and office work, so… no separate video card 🙂 I could have saved money on a few things, but wanted high quality parts. The case for instance was pricey, but he wanted something…
Takeo Kanade @ UCF
Think like an amateur. Do as an expert. – Takeo Kanade I got a chance to see Takeo Kanade talk today at UCF. He was fantastic! Takeo Kanade is one of the highest ranked/cited computer scientists on computer vision and robotics. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon University. He talked about various projects he worked on…
Pumpktris Project
This year for Halloween, a few of us attempted the popular Pumpktris instructable. Pumpktris is a version of Tetris playable in a pumpkin 🙂 Nathan Pryor (HaHaBird) created it. Here is his version in all its glory. It got a lot of interest, from other instructables to local news coverage to BoingBoing. Nathan also made…
OSX Scripts
Disclaimer: I am OS Agnostic. Please don’t send me hate mail about operating systems. So for the last 4 years I’ve been using this MacBook Pro as my main laptop (OSX Mountain Lion through macOS Sierra). I’ve also run Parallels Desktop for various flavors of Windows, Android, and Fedora. I can honestly say I’ve thoroughly…
Edit UNIX Shell History
On a UNIX system (using bash, though this probably applies to other shells too), the history command not only displays your shell history for you, but it also comes with a suite of options for manipulating it. Though I’ve used UNIX systems here and there for years, I never really knew about this command, and…
Python Version Toggling
If you’ve used Python quite a bit, you know that sometimes the module you want to use is not supported in the version of Python you have installed. Sometimes you can get around this by using a different module. Other times you are forced to install and maintain a completely different version of Python. At…
Nicky Case
Not Neko Case (no disrespect). Nicky Case, and the quality of their work, passion, and humanity. But let’s just say if the world was ending and we could only choose 100 living people to represent Earthlings, I’m pretty sure I’d like Nicky to be on that list (after me, because I don’t want to die)….
Mech VR Simulator
A team of 3 students in our Simulation & Visualization degree here at Full Sail University created a Mech Warrior / MadCat simulation using: Unity3D, VR w/ Oculus Rift, Moog 6DOF motion base, custom CNC routed console, Arduino, LEDs, digital scent technology, etc. I got to check it out the other day during a live demo…