Free Goodies for Students

There are lots of great things about being a student. An unlimited number of drinking partners, the chance to eat what you when you like and the freedom to work for 24 hours without sleep if you fancy it. And some students even get to go to my lectures. Lucky people.

And how students can also get their hands on some rather nice free goodies from the GitHub people. Their Student Developer Pack offer gives you free space on their system for your projects, access to the Unreal engine and a host of hosting goodies. Find out more here. 

You can also leverage your student status to get goodies from Microsoft, including a free copy of Visual Studio Professional 2013 via their DreamSpark programme. At Hull we have signed up for the professional version of DreamSpark, which makes even more goodies available. Find out more here. 

Arduino Rather Useful Seminar

I always take a picture of the audience. For tax reasons....

We had our first Rather Useful Seminar today. It was all about hardware, made slightly more interesting by the way that hardware, in the form of my Bluetooth keyboard and mouse failed me right at the start. 

But thanks to the loan of spare keyboard we managed to get going and play around with Arduinos. I showed how easy it is to write programs for the platform and how many amazingly cheap components you can find on eBay. (In fact I ended up spending around 5 quid doing "research" for the presentation when I bought a 1.8 inch colour screen and an SD card interface)

Anyhoo, it went well enough and folks seemed to have a good time. If we have enough interest we might start a Hardware Fiddlers club of some kind in the department. You can find my slide deck and details of future seminars here. 

Mugs Game

I actually got to see one of our 2014 mugs today. As a way of saying welcome in August we sent out a bunch of mugs to all our new students. We're going to do this every year, and of course they are numbered with the year of entry. One of our first years brought his into the Festival of Daring and Excitement and I managed to grab a picture.

We had the mugs printed and posted by those lovely people at JaCee Print and I'd never actually seen a "real one" until today. 

And they do look rather good, which is nice. (Oh, and if you were a late arrival with us and you never got your mug, get in touch and we'll sort you out with one). 

Dates for your Diaries

I've been sorting out dates and stuff for the next few weeks. Here are a couple highlights of the things coming up soon:

Rather Useful Seminars

Rather Useful Seminars start this week with a session about the Arduino device, and why you should buy at least one. You can find details of the seminar program at www.ratherusefulseminars.com

Anyone at Hull can come along, they are always at 1:15 on a Wednesday afternoon in Lecture Theatre A on the ground floor of the Robert Blackburn Building. If you fancy giving all, or part of a seminar on something you find interesting and other folk might like to know about, get in touch with me.

Three Thing Game

The date and time for the next Three Thing Game has been set as overnight on Halloween, from 31st of October to 1st November. Microsoft and MonoGame will be coming along to take part and MonoGame will be doing a special, spooky, session about the new features they have added to the framework. You can get extra prizes by using these in the games that you make during the competition.

The itinerary for Three Thing Game is at www.threethinggame.com

Registration for the competition will open next week. 

Day of the Ultimaker Heated Bed Upgrade

Two owls with very shiny bottoms

Less and less of Una, my Ultimaker 3D printer is how she was delivered. Since I first built her a couple of years ago I've replaced the print head, filament feed, power supply fans, print head fans and the drive pulleys. Great fun. Like Lego but with rather more chance of burning your fingers. 

Anyhoo, I've just completed my latest upgrade and added a heated bed. This is actually a rather exciting development as it means I can print large items without them curling up at the edges as they cool.

I ordered the kit a while back and it arrived last week. So this morning I covered the floor with bits (there were a lot of bits) and got to work. Unfortunately a couple of things were missing from my kit (I think I must be pretty much unique in this - nobody else seems to have complained). I was short of the cable that links the new heated bed board with the controller, and a replacement micro-switch that makes contact with the new platform. 

Fortunately I'm a resourceful kind of chap. I found a cable with the connector that fitted and extended that to fit. Then I discovered that by sticking a USB plug cap on the back of the print bed I could make it engage with the old microswitch and so I was in business. 

Building the new bed and fitting it, along with making my own custom bits, took around the whole day. But I really like doing things like this. At the end of all the effort I now have what looks to me like exactly the same print bed as the Ultimaker 2. It is much, much nicer than the old print bed (which I didn't construct very well anyway).

As part of the upgrade you get a replacement stepper motor and drive thread which is much more positive than the original one. And the new bed is made of rigid metal, rather than the somewhat heavier and more "flappy" wooden one. 

I've done some large-ish prints with it and there is now no warping at all. Plus, by printing on glass I can get a lovely smooth surface on the printed items. 

The upgrade is a tad expensive, at around 250 pounds once you've paid for carriage, but I think that if you have an Ultimaker it is something you really should consider. 

Festival of Daring and Excitement

The Calm before the Storm

Some time back we were discussing the first week of the new semester. One of the things that we talked about was the very first weekend that new students spend away from home. We thought it might a good time to do something social. So I suggested a Frag Fest. Everyone thought it might be fun to try one, and so Adam set to work preparing a whole bunch of things to do. 

I gave the event a name "Festival of Daring and Excitement" and got entry forms and tickets printed. The basic structure was a bit like an all day Christmas Bash, with PC games, console games and board games spread around the department. 

I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested, but then we sold around 110 tickets and so I thought we might be on to something. We ran the event for 12 hours, from 10:00 am to 10:00 pm. At 10:00 a few folks turned up and by mid-day the top floor of the Robert Blackburn building was buzzing nicely. Some folks turned up, signed into their favourite game and settled down for the long haul. Others formed a posse and went from room to room, trying PC gaming, Xbox 360, Xbox One and a totally crackers game called "Gang Beasts" in one of our Lecture Theatre. And some played board games. 

A tense moment in "Cash and Guns"

By 2:45, when the pizza arrived, the place was pleasingly full and we got rid of 38 pizzas in a good time (but not beating the record set by Three Thing Game last year). I left around 4:00 in the afternoon (had to go and do some "Real Life" things ) and I could see a lot of fun was being had. 

We called this place "The Steam Room" for reasons which should be obvious.

Thanks to go Adam and the Platform Expos crew for bringing all their lovely hardware. 

Thanks also to MechaCrash for bringing along the most stupendously awesome arcade machines.

I'm going to send out a little survey to find out if folks enjoyed it and whether they want another one sometime. I think the answers will be "yes" and "yes".

I took a few more pictures of the event. You can find them here.

Friday Lab

I was alone in the house with these last week, and didn't eat one. Such willpower..

We had our first programming lab today. I was popping in and out as I had a bunch of other things to do (including writing some briefing notes for our first ever "Festival of Daring and Excitement" which is tomorrow. Everyone seemed to be getting on fine, which is nice.

Car Trouble

I managed to get this stepper to turn, which was more than I did with my car engine...

I've not had a car let me down for a very long time. It happened today. I was moving at speed, heading for the C4DI Hardware Meetup when I pressed the button to start the engine and nothing happened. 

Nothing.

So I checked all the obvious things, changed the battery in the remote and finally called the RAC man. He arrived in very good time, took one look at the car and said "I got called out to one of these a while back. Couldn't get it to work".

And so it turned out. The car is presently awaiting  transporter awaiting a trip on a transporter to the garage for diagnosis and hopefully repair. The fault seems to be with the steering column lock (which is at present unlocked but might lock when we start turning the wheel). 

I'd put the notes for the C4DI stuff on the web (we were playing with stepper motors, you can find the stuff here). Hopefully everyone did too.

Royalty at Hull

This is HRH Prince Andrew, Duke of York, with Prof. Ken Hawick, our head of department

I've not thought that much about royalty in the past. I like collecting small paper pictures of the Queen, or as it is more commonly known, money, but beyond that our paths have not crossed much at all. Until today, when His Royal Highness the Duke of York came to see us at Hull.

Prince Andrew stopped off in the department, where we showed him some of our new toys and what we were doing with them. Then he moved on to a meeting at C4DI which had been organised by the Yorkshire Post Business Club to bring industrialists, educators and local government together for a roundtable debate on apprenticeships, education and vocational learning. It was very interesting. Prince Andrew showed has obviously thought very hard about the issues and had a lot of sensible things to say.

Two things came out of this for me. One was that as the Duke of York he has a very deep interest in Yorkshire (I'd not thought of this aspect of the title before) and the other was that in our department we are doing a lot of the things that he thought were essential to get business and industry going in the area. I said as much (I hope I didn't interrupt him) and I mentioned that I'd been talking to our First Year about just these issues that morning (I had).

In my talk to the new students earlier in the day I'd said that you should regard your time at university as least in part as an exercise in brand building. I'm very keen that folks make sure that when they do something rather good they get the maximum benefit for it. This includes publishing things (both in the marketplace and shared source), blogging, taking part in forums and giving talks. If you get it right they call you, not the other way round.

As he left the prince called out to me "Good luck with your students..", which was rather nice. 

First Year Welcome Party - With added Carbonite

We had our First Year welcome party today. In the olden days we used to have cheese and wine. We don't do that any more. Nowadays we have Occulus Rift powered racing, 10 player Xbox mayhem, Wii U, Digital Scalectrix, Xbox One and Rocksmith Guitars. Plus we will also embed you in carbonite, just like Han Solo at the end of Star Wars, courtesy of our Kinect 2 sensor and Ultimaker printers. 

We had quite a few customers for the 3D scanning. In fact we have a whole bunch of models to print off later in the week.

We had two seats set up for racing, with force feedback steering wheel, and Occulus Rift for the view. Great fun.

Thanks to Platform Expos for the use of their console setup.

Rachael came along with her big camera and took some video. The party did get very busy, we had to get some extra tables out when the time came for the quiz. To my eternal shame I didn't get pictures of the winning teams posing with their Nerf gun prizes. Oh well, maybe next year.

I was testing a new version of the TagOMatic to handle the drinks and it seemed to work OK, apart from a few "rogue" tags that seem to have found their way into the system. I'll be using the TagOMatic as the basis of an Arduino talk in the first of the new season of Rather Useful Seminars next week. 

I've put some more pictures up on Flickr, you can find them here. 

Flat Out from Smashed Crab Studios

Later this week I'll be doing my talk to the new First Year students. I'm going to mention Three Thing Game. This is our game development hackathon that we hold each semester.  Teams have three "things" that they can use as the basis of a game. We have a 24 hour development session, followed by the judging, followed by sleep.

It is always fun. Last time the team "Rusty Spoons", who have taken part in pretty much every Three Thing Game during their time at Hull, ended up with "Mayhem", "Puzzler" and "of Fun". They made this really neat game which involved linking colours and then flying through them. You can see a rather shaky video of their entry here. 

Their game has metamorphosed into Flat Out, which is now on sale in the Android and Windows Phone stores. And getting good reviews too. The team have now graduated, which is nice, and formed a game studio, which is even nicer. 

I make the point that Three Thing Game can be the start of something big, and that we see the trajectory as one where you start with a silly idea and end with an application in the marketplace. It's great when you actually see that happen. 

Hacking Electronics

I like Simon Monk. He writes the kind of books that I wish I'd written. They are sensible, instructive and above all practical. I've read some of his Arduino texts and found them very useful. He's also written the a book that you'll find useful if you want to get into electronics. 

Hacking Electronics is a great guide to getting started with components and computers. It gives you a good grounding in the basics, teaches you how to solder and then gets you making genuinely useful/fun things. Some of them have computers in (usually the Arduino). Others are just circuits. This is very nice to see. I think of electronics as "programming with hardware". You can write a program to make a light flash, or you can make a circuit that does it.

In software you change what happens by adjusting the value of variables inside the program. In hardware you change what happens by altering things like the resistance or capacitance of the components themselves. 

If you are looking for a book to give an inquisitive 11 year old (and then have fun together burning your fingers and "letting the smoke out" of devices) then I reckon this would be a very good one to go for.

Completed Destiny?

No, I've not completed Destiny. But I have bought a copy and I watched Number One Son get to the closing stages when he came to see us. I'm still fighting way back at the start of the game, standing around admiring the scenery and getting shot in the head. 

I like playing it. Just like I liked playing Halo. In fact, if you'd sat me in front of it a while back I'd have thought it was Halo. Even the way that the music kicks in is very reminiscent of the Master Chief.

It will be interesting to see how the multi-player aspects go. The game is gorgeous to look at (although not really fourth generation enough for me - it looks a bit PS3/XBOX 360 in places) and if you liked Halo I reckon you'll love it.

If you are looking for something that will change the face of entertainment and provide the next level in massive multiplayer gaming I reckon you might have to wait a while. But you never know, the studio and the publisher are in this for the long haul and they now have the sales to back it up.

Ultra Cheap Arduino WiFi

Embedded devices get really interesting once you connect them together. There are a few ways to do this, you can use the same kind of modules that I used for my Wedding Lights, or you can use Bluetooth. Or you can use WiFi. WiFi is by far the best way to link an embedded device to a surrounding network, but up until now the cheapest WiFi  hardware for a device like the Arduino would cost around 25 pounds.

But now we have the ESP8266 chip. This is tiny (as you can see) , costs less than five pounds, and puts your Arduino on the local WiFi network. 

A few health warnings: The device needs a high speed serial connection to the host computer, and so you must use the proper hardware serial port on your Arduino, not a software one. Also they are not very good at address discovery and so you will probably have to hard-wire the IP address. This is fine if you are using them at home but might make them a bit tricky to deploy on a corporate network. They will let a program connect to a TCP socket on a remote machine and send packets backwards and forwards, but that is about it for the moment. Fortunately that is just about what you want from such a device. 

Peter has been playing with them and getting then to work I've bought some (and put them in envelopes in my little boxes) and I'm looking forward to having a play with them.

Organising Components

While I was up town recently I noticed these rather stylish boxes in Tesco that you can get for a reasonable price. 

I'd been looking for some way of storing my increasing collection of electrical components. I have this worrying (but, fortunately not very expensive) habit of searching ebay for the word Arduino and then being completely unable to resist buying things I find at amazing prices, post free from China.

My plan was to fill each box with envelopes containing particular components.  I stole the idea from the excellent Arachnid Labs blog. 

It works really well. When I want something I just have to flick through the envelopes to find it. The Computer Scientist in me will probably sort the envelopes into alphabetic order at some point, but for now I've not got enough devices to really make it necessary.I don't have any anti-static envelopes, so I just used ordinary stationary ones. 

Ultimaker Heated Bed Now Available

Ha. Within a couple of days of me changing over to the BuildTak print surface Ultimaker have announced a Heated Bed kit for my printer. Oh well. There may be some second hand printer parts going up for sale soon.

I've always wanted a heated bed for my printer. Una, my Ultimaker 1, does a lovely job on very small objects, but on larger ones there is always some warping as the printed object cools and contracts, lifting the corners and turning any rectangular object into a cushion. 

A heated bed solves that. It also gives you a smooth glass surface to print on so that you get lovely shiny prints. The upgrade replaces the entire print assembly, which is also cheering for me as I made a bit of a botched job of making the original, giving Una a rather lopsided appearance. The new bed should put that right and so I've ordered one.

BuildTak Printer Surface

While I was at the 3D printer show a while back I picked up a sheet of BuildTak to put on Una, my Ultimaker printer. Up until now I've used 3M blue masking tape underneath all my prints, and it works quite well, but I've never been able to get a smooth finish because of the gaps between rows of the tape. 

The surface that you print on is actually quite crucial, in that the heated plastic must stick to it well enough to allow the item to be printed but not so well that you can't get the darned thing off the bed afterwards.

BuildTak manages to do this very well. If you're like me, and you've not got a printed bed for your printer, then you might like to have a play. I'm much happier with the quality of the surfaces that I've printed on the BuiltTak bed. They have a slightly rough texture but it is much better than the one provided by tape. The company says that the surface should last for a while, I've done quite a few prints now and it seems to be holding up well. 

Pro top: if you are printing lots of the same thing, move each one slightly on the print bed so that it spreads the wear on the surface. Also, if you want maximum quality, move the print closer to the back of the printer. This is because when the printer is moving at speed the print bed (which is only supported at one end) will tend to waggle and leave ripples in the printed surfaces. 

Put Yourself in Carbonite with Kinect

If you've seen the movie Star Wars 2/5 (The Empire Strikes Back) you'll know that things don't end that well for Han Solo. He finishes up entombed in "Carbonite". Now, thanks to the magic of the Kinect Sensor and 3D printing we can all get the same treatment.

I've written a little program that takes the output from the Kinect Depth camera and renders it into an STL model that can be 3D printed. It uses some fairly simple averaging and filtering and seems to do a perfect job of rendering all of my chins in lifelike detail. Oh well. 

Above you can see the program in action, pointed at my less than tidy office. You can set thresholds for the front and back of the 3D region to be rendered, and also control the width of the printed item and how strong the relief is. You can even take selfies. 

I've popped the whole thing on GitHub, you can find it here. 

We are going to set the system at the Freshers Party next week so that we can print out little frozen models of all our new students..... 

Update: Rob (great name that) Relyea has pointed out that the Kinect Fusion tool does a great job of capturing 3D objects and will export STL files, It works very well, and the way that you can move the sensor round and add detail is very impressive. You can find it via the sample browser once you have installed the Kinect for Windows 2 SDK.

However,  I wanted to find out just how far you could get with a single sensor and fixed viewpoint. I also wanted to produce solid print ready output very quickly on a large scale, which is what my program does. I'm very impressed that with just a bit of averaging you can get such good results just from the depth sensor. 

Update: We used the system at the First Year welcome party. It worked rather well. You can see some of the prints here.

A Strong Need for an EPROM Programmer

Some days (not many it is true) you suddenly have a strong need for an eprom programmer.

For me, today was that day. 

Lots of thanks go to Ian for happening to have one.....

Thoughts on Tidying Up

Why is it that when you decide to tidy something up, the first steps always involve creating an even bigger mess.

Or is it just me?