This is a link to a chart showing the scale and levels of radiation from various things. It is good to put things literally in proportion when considering the effects of events such as the reactor problems in Japan.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

I have been investigating Blender and it seems like a great tool to create various scenes to show on the monitors in the Spaceroom. With some game logic it would be easy to select the various videos to show on the screen. The videos could easily be incorporated into some of the main program windows.

Here is small sample video from Blender with a little audio track added using Sonar X1: http://www.spaceroom.org/video/Vujag.wmv

or for those who do not have Windows: http://www.spaceroom.org/video/Vujag.mp4

It has been a while on posting here. Primarily there have been many other projects that taken time away from the Spaceroom work. However I have always been looking for interesting things both in hardware and software that could contribute to the system.

The latest (and perhaps the greatest) find is the Arduino board. It is an Open-Source hardware and sofware platform. One can construct the board from scratch or buy implementations from a variety of source for less than $40. There is even an virtual Arduino development environment that allows designing and testing projects before you even have an Arduino.

What can you do with an Arduino? Seems to be almost anything. There are many sites with projects that are just a Google search away.

We are going to look at a couple of projects and post the progress here.

Lots of cool info about aurora solar storms, etc... Would be good to integrated into some of the supporting screens.

Noaa Space Weather

One of the challenging things has been to find a way to light up lights and respond to buttons that located around the ship. This looks like a possible way to simplify the output. Certainly a MIDI file could do some cool animated lights and servos. Unfortunately it only supports MIDI output, (and THRU) so it cannot be used to gather input.

MIDI Decoder

I found a set of Open Source components that support MIDI for Delphi which can be found here.