as the year is coming to a close it seems very fashionable to compress 365 days into lists of 10.  here's a list of my favorite 10 albums from 2010.  each has a link to one of the best songs on the record.  

so it's been a hot minute since I made a mix and sent it out to you good people.  so long, in fact, that it seems silly at this point to send cds to everyone.  in an attempt to spread the gospel of what I think are some pretty great summer tunes, I present to you a summer mix for your enjoyment!  most of the music is from the last year or so- tracklist is below.

Hello all. Welcome to my newly re-designed website-- a place to find all things both digital and baltus. I put a bunch of content up from previous projects and musical endeavors. Take a look around and enjoy. If you have any questions or comments let me know!

Also, check out the awesome pic above that I got from my rooftop, of Park Slope at dawn.

A rough mix of a track from the upcoming light & sound album. We are finishing up a few songs and should be set to mix the record in the next month or so. Take a listen and let me know if you have any comments. Feel free to spread the word, especially if you are going to make us a million dollars, but not if you are going to claim it as your own. That would be uncool. Keep you posted as the album finishes up!

light & sound - ny love by mbaltus

Amongst my random jobs, I work for a company that makes extremely precise digital microscopes intended to measure machine tools for the aviation industry. I know, it's a face full. Anyway, I work in the image processing algorithms and the general programming of the device. It's actually a lot of fun in a very, very, very nerdy way . You have to really enjoy the Sobel operator and three dimensional matrices. I digress.

On several occasions, we have had some trouble with a US Digital encoder box that converts a signal from some encoders on our machine to serial for the computer to read. We use this info to know where the microscope is in space. Anyhow, the drivers for this box are a POS and frankly the box costs like 10x more than it should. I decided enough was enough.

After a bit of research, I found out that our encoders (and many on the market) use quadrature encoding as a means of describing position, be it lateral or rotational. This is a very well-documented method involving two offset square waves and should be very simple to decode if I just had something to decode it with.

Enter Arduino Duemillanove- that's also a face full- and actually a kind of cool name. Apparently duemillanove means 2009-- a likely story. Continuing onward, the Arduino is a microcontroller that is popular in DIY circles because of its versatility and ease of programming (no shifting bits around on this bad boy). You can see it in the picture above where I made mr. potentiometer control the color of mr. rgb led. It took me like 5 minutes to setup and program- no joke. Back in boring encoder land, I don't even need any additional components, just hook up the 5v, the ground to the power section and connect the two signal lines to a pair of digital inputs. A few lines of code later and I replaced the $700 box with a $30 microcontroller. Oops, I did it again.

Moving forward with the project we are going to try to improve on the original by adding room for more encoders as well as a few features. The first is communication via bluetooth instead of USB. Apparently bluetooth is a serial connection. Who knew? The last little bit is to add a temperature and humidity sensor for calibration purposes. Waiting for all that stuff to come in the mail now. I'll keep posting as the project develops.