Pics of soldering connectors

Zach,

This might be redundant coz of a forum-belated email I got saying you were
having trouble connecting up the wires. If so, just ignore...

When I was wiring Darwin, Adrian showed me how to get the connectors onto
the wire. I took some photos of him doing it (I nearly put the camera on
motor drive he was so damn quick) and have just put them on the wiki for
you.

[www.reprap.org]

If you can make my pictures smaller (and then tell me how) I'd really
appreciate it!

Cheers,

eD
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Looks real good, eD.

yeah, i'll upload them via flickr, which auto-resizes images. then i will just link to them directly.

this way seems simpler than my way for sure.

eD,

[Disclaimer: I am not a graphics wiz at all... this works for me. It may well not be optimally efficient!]

I resize JPEG images the "old-fashioned" way, using the GIMP (under Linux and Windows, it is a useful FOSS tool, see [www.gimp.org] ). There is a Mac OS X version too, making GIMP at least as platform-independent as our RepRap host software. I currently seem to be using GIMP version 2.2.15; I recommend you use whatever 2.2.x version is current, or (on Linux) whatever your distribution supplies via its packaging system.

I don't know what the official way to do image resizing is, but I tend to:

(i) Open the original .jpg file (File -> Open).
(ii) Click Image -> Scale Image... from the menus
(iii) Make sure the little chain linking Width and Height is solid (if broken, click on it to make it solid, so that you scale X and Y by the same amount)
(iv) Divide the width by 2 or 4 (depending how much scaling you want). Type in the new value and hit TAB. Watch the Height change to match.
(v) Click the Scale button to apply the change to the in memory image
(vi) Click File -> Save As , type in a new filename. I usually add a -small suffix to the original filename part, so whatever.jpg becomes whatever-small.jpg
(vii) Click Save. A Save as JPEG dialog appears.
(viii) Just click OK. (You can mess with the Quality slider for more compression and loss of quality if you want; I find that 85% or 90% is fine for me).

The above is way easier and quicker to do, than to write down the steps for!

Notes:

1. You can repeat the entire sequence if necessary; I occasionally end up using -small, -smaller, -smallest suffixes to get a tiny image (-smallest) which when clicked on will display a somewhat larger one (whichever of -small or -smaller I prefer).

2. Sometimes you can get enough file size reduction by just doing step (i) and then steps (vi) through (vii) -- just open the file, and then file save-as, because the JPEG compression alone can reduce image size significantly. But in general, for resizing pics from a 5 or 7 MP cheap digital camera (Canon A550 here) for web use, I find I want to scale the pixel count down too, hence the more complete set of steps above.

3. Lastly: If you know ahead of time you only need a low-res image for web use, consider just setting the digital camera to take lower res pictures in the first place, and save time and effort resizing on the PC later! Personally, I generally don't do this... because if I do, I am likely to forget to reset the camera resolution back up, and then the next set of pics I or my wife take, that are not for web-only use, get taken at low res by accident :-( But, *if* you can remember to set the camera image size back up, this is a very easy way indeed to get low res images :-)

I hope this helps, and real graphics people with better / faster approaches (that use only FOSS cross-platform tools) reading this, please speak up!

Jonathan

On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 06:21 +1200, RepRap Forum Mailer wrote:
> yeah, i'll upload them via flickr, which auto-resizes images. then i
> will just link to them directly.

Er, that prevents developers in China from seeing the images. Flickr is
blocked.

Vik :v)

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Using Flickr (and Google Spreadsheets, and the various video sites, for that matter?) may also make it harder to easily create a snapshot of the entire Wiki for distribution on CD-R or DVD+/-R or similar media. There may at some stage be Reprappers who have only very slow or very expensive Internet access, for whom such a distribution medium could be very desirable.

A fun little experiment along similar lines: try browsing [www.reprap.org] using a text mode browser and see how much you miss :-)

Jonathan

That's really helpful, cheers Jonathan!

eD

--On 14 June 2007 17:12 +1200 RepRap Forum Mailer wrote:

> Author: jmarsden
> Username: jmarsden (pool-71-103-170-244.lsanca.dsl-w.verizon.net)
> Subject: Re: Pics of soldering connectors
> Forum: Developers
> Link: [forums.reprap.org]
> Approved: Yes
>
> eD,
>
>
>
> I resize JPEG images the "old-fashioned" way, using the GIMP (under Linux
> and Windows, it is a useful FOSS tool, see [www.gimp.org] ). There
> is a Mac OS X version too, making GIMP at least as platform-independent
> as our RepRap host software. I currently seem to be using GIMP version
> 2.2.15; I recommend you use whatever 2.2.x version is current, or (on
> Linux) whatever your distribution supplies via its packaging system.
>
> I don't know what the official way to do image resizing is, but I tend to:
>
> (i) Open the original .jpg file (File -> Open).
> (ii) Click Image -> Scale Image... from the menus
> (iii) Make sure the little chain linking Width and Height is solid (if
> broken, click on it to make it solid, so that you scale X and Y by the
> same amount) (iv) Divide the width by 2 or 4 (depending how much scaling
> you want). Type in the new value and hit TAB. Watch the Height change
> to match. (v) Click the Scale button to apply the change to the in memory
> image (vi) Click File -> Save As , type in a new filename. I usually add
> a -small suffix to the original filename part, so whatever.jpg becomes
> whatever-small.jpg (vii) Click Save. A Save as JPEG dialog appears.
> (viii) Just click OK. (You can mess with the Quality slider for more
> compression and loss of quality if you want; I find that 85% or 90% is
> fine for me).
>
> The above is way easier and quicker to do, than to write down the steps
> for!
>
> Notes:
>
> 1. You can repeat the entire sequence if necessary; I occasionally end
> up using -small, -smaller, -smallest suffixes to get a tiny image
> (-smallest) which when clicked on will display a somewhat larger one
> (whichever of -small or -smaller I prefer).
>
> 2. Sometimes you can get enough file size reduction by just doing step
> (i) and then steps (vi) through (vii) -- just open the file, and then
> file save-as, because the JPEG compression alone can reduce image size
> significantly. But in general, for resizing pics from a 5 or 7 MP cheap
> digital camera (Canon A550 here) for web use, I find I want to scale the
> pixel count down too, hence the more complete set of steps above.
>
> 3. Lastly: If you know ahead of time you only need a low-res image for
> web use, consider just setting the digital camera to take lower res
> pictures in the first place, and save time and effort resizing on the PC
> later! Personally, I generally don't do this... because if I do, I am
> likely to forget to reset the camera resolution back up, and then the
> next set of pics I or my wife take, that are not for web-only use, get
> taken at low res by accident :-( But, *if* you can remember to set the
> camera image size back up, this is a very easy way indeed to get low res
> images :-)
>
> I hope this helps, and real graphics people with better / faster
> approaches (that use only FOSS cross-platform tools) reading this, please
> speak up!
>
> Jonathan
> _______________________________________________
> Developers mailing list
> Developers@reprap.org
> [reprap.org]




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I'm fond of ImageMagick, a standard old *nix/OSX/Win toolset for processing just about every kind of 2D image. It has a gui, but I allways use the command line. ImageMagick is extremely useful for basic and not-so-basic tasks.

Installation on Debian:
# apt-get install imagemagick

Homepage:
[www.imagemagick.org]
Basics:
[www.imagemagick.org]
Resizing:
[www.imagemagick.org]

Usage example:
(what size is it?)
$ identify image_big.jpg
image_big.jpg JPEG 120x120 DirectClass 4kb

(resize to 60 pixel width)
$ convert image_big.jpg -resize 60 image_small.jpg

(check that it's smaller)
$ identify image_small.jpg
image_small.jpg JPEG 60x60 DirectClass 1kb

ImageMagick works extremely well with your scripting language of choice if you have multiple files to resize. If your files are _backed_up_, you can also just use this one-liner with mogrify instead of convert, which will overwrite your originals:

(resize all files in this directory)
$mogrify -resize 60 *.jpg

(verify that it worked)
$ identify *
file001.jpg JPEG 60x60 DirectClass 1kb
file002.jpg[1] JPEG 60x60 DirectClass 1kb
file003.jpg[2] JPEG 60x60 DirectClass 1kb

(Note that the _backed_up_ part is really important. For example, if your camera is clever, and saves as files portrait/landscape depending on orientation, and then you resize everything to a smaller fixed width size rather than a smaller percentage size, some of your images will be too small.)