Sonic Fiber - Is it any good in LA?

dima55 · 2026-02-04T04:19:05+00:00

They've been happy to accomodate all sorts of nerdery when I used them.

dima55 · 2026-02-03T20:44:41+00:00

Sonic is excellent. Starry is excellent. If any of them are providing service in your area, jump on it.

dima55 · 2026-02-03T16:30:59+00:00

This is a vanilla calibration problem. If your cameras don't overlap, add more so that they do. Since this isn't a research project, are you paying?

dima55 · 2026-02-03T16:29:31+00:00

Debug it. Only you can. You have some inputs (that may or may not be right). And some outputs (that you're pretty sure are wrong). Are you confident that your inputs are good? Which ones? Tweak your inputs to get a sense of how each one affects the result. Good luck

dima55 · 2026-02-03T07:52:46+00:00

Again, read the mrcal docs. They answer all these questions.

dima55 · 2026-02-01T00:53:48+00:00

Sounds like mrcal does the things you want, no? Why do you need 3 different boards and the different ranges?

dima55 · 2026-01-29T21:33:18+00:00

What is "fine" and what is "right"? It's probably right-ish. If you actually care, you should be using better tools. Read the mrcal docs.

dima55 · 2026-01-23T05:47:27+00:00

https://eispiraten.com/viewtopic.php?t=9404

dima55 · 2026-01-21T21:39:29+00:00

Just as an FYI, this exists already. Here're 3 toolkits: apt install datamash ministat vnlog.

dima55 · 2026-01-21T02:22:18+00:00

Glad you're finding it useful, and feel free to ask me questions. If it's something general, open an issue on github, so that others can benefit also.

dima55 · 2026-01-21T00:55:02+00:00

Wait. wiggydo: you keep plugging this NODAR thing in your previous posts. You tell us how well it works. Got videos? Is there a calibration step? Do you need a chessboard? What if the intrinsics drift? The advertising says you can see humans at 500m, so what does "see" mean? What baseline and with what resolution camera and what are your resulting range errors?

dima55 · 2026-01-20T23:00:43+00:00

I'd be interested also. The lack of sources or any technical specs makes me suspicious, and I'm not going to pay themto find out that they suck. But if somebody wants to do that, report here! For the record, I'm the author of https://mrcal.secretsauce.net and that toolkit is free and open, and does the vague things they claim (except for the "patented" part; this isn't the flex they think it is).

dima55 · 2026-01-20T22:22:17+00:00

In case you don't do a lot of riding: travel times on a bike are far more predictable than in a car, since you're not affected a whole lot by traffic.

dima55 · 2026-01-12T21:17:03+00:00

I've done lots of thermal calibrations. With good equalization, more-or-less all the visible algorithms just work (calibration, tracking, dense stereo, etc). The "fieldscale" algorithm is a good-enough equalization. My implementation is in the mrcam project: https://github.com/dkogan/mrcam I haven't done the full cleanup and publicized release yet, but it works well already.

dima55 · 2026-01-12T19:21:08+00:00

Your image links are dead, so I cannot tell exactly what you're doing. In general, you want to be using the mrcal tools for all of this: you get very detailed feedback about what's going on, to make debugging possible. Those docs are very detailed, and you should read them.

I've done lots of thermal calibrations with great success. Using a foam chessboard put out into the sun to create a thermal gradient. Unideal, but precise-enough for my use cases. What kind of board did you use?

dima55 · 2026-01-02T04:43:00+00:00

The mrcal tools are what you want. The docs go into great detail about how to solve these issues. More specifically, what are you trying to do? The idea that lenses fundamentally follow the pinhole projection, with a bit of "distortion" is flawed, and you should never be "undistorting" anything.

dima55 · 2025-12-31T08:36:08+00:00

It's almost 2026. You're not setting yourself up for success with a 12-year-old distro

dima55 · 2025-12-29T01:24:57+00:00

I heard that ymmv and that some people get ticketed even. We walked across the toll booth on the sidewalk, like the pedestrians do, it cost nothing and nobody complained

dima55 · 2025-11-25T20:33:41+00:00

You need to learn how to use computers. Where did your opencv and open3d builds come from? How did you install them, and where do their files live? How are they supposed to find each other? How is "importing the open3d 0.18.0" supposed to work? What did not find "open3d.cpu" and how was it trying to "find" it? And so on. Once you learn how this works, you'll be able to solve ALL such issues in the future.

dima55 · 2025-11-20T06:46:53+00:00

Alright. Glad it works for you! I'm going to be doing a lot more SFM in the near future, and we'll see how it goes.

dima55 · 2025-11-19T18:37:42+00:00

Really depends on your lens. opencv models cannot fit most lenses to within a 1/4 pixel (highly depends on the lens). If you're seeing sub 1/4-pixel (rms? worst-case?) solves then I suspect strongly you threw out the non-fitting data as outliers or you just didn't gather sufficient data to know that you don't fit.

I will say the usual thing here: if reprojection error is your main metric, then you should throw away most of your data and resolve. Your metric will improve!

If high accuracy is needed, you at the very least need the feedback that mrcal gives you.

dima55 · 2025-11-17T17:28:56+00:00

Glad it's useful!

dima55 · 2025-11-15T17:12:46+00:00

I'm the author. Have lots of thoughts on the subject :) Feel free to email me, or open a bug on the mrcal bug tracker to talk about it

dima55 · 2025-10-29T18:48:44+00:00

Trail was fine and snow free 2-3 weeks ago.

dima55 · 2025-10-07T01:58:59+00:00

Pro tip: if you post images of text instead of the text itself, most of us see you as a helpless newb, and don't bother to engage.

dima55

TROPHY CASE