Today I showed some kids at our Control Freaks event some HullPixelbot devices.
They all wanted one. Which was nice. I'm working on ways we can get some of the kits made. If you're in Hull and have some 3D printing time spare (or just want to show off with your printer) give me a yell and we can try to put something together.
I didn't take this picture at the cafe. But I'm still very pleased with it.
A while back we went to the board game cafe in London. We had a great time there and so today we went out to the one in Bristol. Just as much fun. In fact it was even better because we had more time to play, with no train to catch this time.
We had a proper go at the Thunderbirds board game. And by proper I mean that we played it long enough to lose. Oh well. As with the one in London, the service and knowledge of games was first rate and the food was excellent.
By the time we left the place was filling up nicely and what sounded like an uproarious session of Cash and Guns was going on in the back. Next stop, the cafe in Hull.....
Took the big camera with the fish-eye lens for a walk around Bristol today. We climbed to this tower. Next time I hope we have time to go to the top and take some more pictures.
From a user interface point of view I reckon our satnav could be better. I'd much rather it said "After three hundred yards, turn right".
Rather than "Turn right...(sudden lurch and squeal of tyres as we hurtle into someone's drive)...after three hundred yards".
I've reached the point in 3D design where the hard part is not expressing the design. It's deciding what the design should be. I regard this as progress. Above you can see the new pixel mounts for the HullPixelBot that we've been playing with at C4DI.
Each bot will have two pixels. One at the top between the wheels to make it easy to do persistence of vision photography. And one at the back for other HullPixelBots to find and follow.
I unveiled the new design to an awestruck audience at the hardware meetup tonight. Unfortunately I also unveiled a rather nasty power issue where the robot motors cut out when the lights were turned on. Oh well. It might be that we need extra volts for the pixels...
Anyhoo, I'll be posting the new designs in a little while, once I'm sure that it all fits together properly.
I gave away a couple of 3D printed kits to new folks who had come along. If you want to come, get some parts and have a go at building your own robot (it won't cost you more than a tenner to build) then sign up for our next meetup on 18th August. All are welcome, young or old, experienced or not. Sign up here.
Una, my four year old, hand built, 3D printer, just got a lot better. I've just downloaded the latest Cura slicing program and used it with the default print settings. And Una has produced some of the best looking prints I've seen for ages. Well up to the standard of the Ultimaker 2;s at work. The new Cura defaults are a lower temperature than I normally use, with a cooler heated bed too. But they work really well. There looks to be quite a few changes in the way that the slicer works and the user interface is now very slick.
The only thing I'm missing is a way to tell Cura that the print head on Una is a rather strange shape, and not the default. If I can't do this it means that its hard to print multiple objects on the platform because the fans will crash into parts already printed if I'm not careful. However, it's a small price to pay for such lovely print quality.
The great thing about Cura is that it is free and it works with a huge range of 3D printers. If you haven't got it, you should get it. If you have got it, you should go for the latest version.
If you know what this is, you'll want to go and see it. If you don't know what this is, you really should go and find out. Click through the image to more pictures.
Jim Austin is a Computer Science Professor at the University of York. He has a lot of computers. A lot. I've got one or two. He's got all the other ones. Today he was kind enough to give us a guided tour of the barns where he keeps them all. We were there for several hours, but it felt like several minutes. And I'm sure that all we did was scratch the surface of what is there.
Jim has computers going right back to the start of computing. Persistence and being in the right place at the right time with a lorry has meant that he has mainframes, mini-computers, micro-processors and everything in between spanning the entire computer age.
He takes the view that this is heritage stuff and I think he is so right. These machines have totally changed the way that we live our lives and the way that they have evolved is quite breathtaking. It is very strange to see so many things that were state of the art in their heyday, and I remember watching them on TV science programs in the past being celebrated as the future.
In a perfect world we'd have all this set out for mass public access. York has a fantastic railway museum that tells the story of how the railways revolutionised the world. We need something similar for computers. Last year I was lucky enough to get to visit the Living Computer Museum in Seattle. The stuff that Jim has deserves to have a setup just the same. Only bigger.
You can find out more about the museum here. If you live in the Hull, York area you should see if you can get a chance to see what is there. If you live anywhere else in the world you should also try to get to see the stuff. And I don't think you'd regret the trip.
The idea behind HullPixelBot is that it is a roving pixel robot. From Hull. We've got the robot part working quite nicely now, with motors and wheels and everything. But we've been missing the pixel bit. So today I spent some time crafting the holders for the pixels mounts.
The plan is to have two pixels on a robot.. One on the top, directly between the two wheels. We can use this to "draw with light" and whatnot. The other pixel is mounted on the back of the robot. On the front of the robot we are going to put a light sensor so that a robot can find and follow another robot with a particular coloured pixel on the back.
I'm going to spend the next day or so fiddling with the design and printing test versions to make sure it all fits together. Exciting stuff.
Â
It turns out you can have a lot of fun failing to get something to work. Number one son has bought an RC2014 homebrew Z80 kit. At the moment it is not doing much, so we had a go at finding out what the problem might be. The kit has a backplane board that brings out all the signals from the processor and then you can plug in a processor board, clock, RAM board, ROM board and serial port. It really took me back to the days when you could print out the entire circuit for your computer on a single sheet of paper.
If you really want to discover how a computer works you could do a lot worse than get one of these. Although in our case what we discovered was that it doesn't work just at the moment.
Fixing problems like these is always a matter of working through each part of the system, checking it and moving on. By the end of our session we'd proved that the serial data was getting from our terminal into the UART, the processor clock was running and the Z80 was trying to load things from the bus. It still wasn't working, but we had a great time anyway.
I can't post any pictures of the puzzles or the room, but they did have this rather nice Tesla in one of the arcades in Leeds..
Went to Leeds today for another birthday treat. We had booked a go at Tick Tock Unlock, a locked room escape experience where you have an hour to complete a mission which involves puzzles, cooperation and some really cool padlocks.
It was great fun. There were five of us and I like to think that we turned into a well-oiled puzzle solving machine. We managed to get out within the the allotted hour and the chap in charge reckoned that we did really well, only needing three clues. (but I bet he says that to all the groups).
The setup is very smooth and well organised and the puzzles themselves are nicely paced so that you get plenty of things to do as you piece together the clues that will get you past the final door.
If you are looking for a novel experience which is great fun then you should have a go. We'll certainly be having a go at another one.
So we're staying in this awesome flat in Bridgeport Chicago and I notice that the ceiling light is rather neat. So I tip my camera onto its back and take the above picture.
And a huge lump of dust drops off the back of the lens onto the camera sensor.
So now every photograph has a grey dot on it (you can see it on the shot above to the right of the centre).
Now, the rational part of me knows that this doesn't matter at all in the great scheme of things. Really. But the other, stupid, part of me will focus and obsess on this little grey mark, panic that the camera is now broken and it will never be right again.
Eventually I did the right thing. We wandered down to Central Cameras in Chicago (an amazing camera shop) and I bought a rocket.
I don't know who's idea it was to shape this dust blower like a rocket, but it works for me. The good news is that a couple of puffs at the sensor from this wonder machine and the dust has gone completely. I held the camera upside down while I did this, so hopefully the dust has dropped off completely. At least I've managed to convince myself that this has happened.
I've now formed the habit of dusting the base of a lens before I attach it to the camera. And the word on the street is that the sensor in a digital camera is actually quite well protected, certainly not just a naked piece of silicon, and cleaning it is reasonable (and not particularly dangerous) thing to do.
The Groove music player on Windows 10 is getting better with each release. It now has a feature that creates playlists for you based on your record collection. It used to have a fantastic list for me called "Ramshackle Rock" which had picked a few riotous sounds from my collection.
But now it has vanished. And I wish I could remember the tracks that were on it. Sad face.
However, there are some new playlists popping up all the time and some of them are good too (at least from my point of view). What I really want (are you listening Groove folks?) is a quick way of taking one of your neato playlists and persisting it. It turns out that I can select all the tracks from "Now Playing" and then save them into a list, but you have to know that you need to do this.
Oh, and all of the albums in the image above are awesome. If you've not heard them, your're seriously missing out.
So the Windows 10 upgrade on my Sony Ultrabook worked fine. Rather too well. Some time back I had to disable the touch screen on this device because the hardware has failed somewhere and detects two finger presses all the time. Which made controlling the machine rather tricky.
Anyhoo, of course the Windows 10 upgrade turned the touch screen back on. Thanks for that.
However, I've discovered that if I press down lots of points on the screen it kind of overloads and stops recognising things, so I can use the keyboard and mouse. But it did make some interesting gymnastics as I kept as many fingers as I could on the screen while opening Device Manager and disabling the touch screen driver.
It works fine now. Kudos to Microsoft for a very smooth upgrade on both the ultrabook and my twisty tablet.
The Windows 10 free upgrade stops being free on Friday 29th July. Which means that, what with my flair for forward planning, I've been digging out old machines and upgrading them this week because it would be daft not to. One of the machines that I found was my Packard Bell twisty tablet of a few years ago; Still works fine, but I'd forgotten the password to log in. The machine was keyed to my Microsoft account and I've changed my password several times since I last used it. And I can't for the life of me remember the old ones.
Idiot me (although actually a knack for forgetting old passwords is a useful thing to acquire as it stops you using the old one by mistake). Anyhoo, I found a YouTube video that showed a nifty way to break back into a Windows 8 system. The video was a good start, but I had a few issues. For a start, when you run the command prompt via your USB booted copy of Windows 8 the system drive you have to tamper with might not be drive C: (in my case it was drive e:).
Another problem is that the hack doesn't seem to let you fix the passwords of accounts linked to Microsoft. But you can create new local accounts, including ones with administrator privileges, which gets you going. The wise amongst you are probably saying "Why didn't you just attach the machine to a network and let the passwords catch up?". Well, two answers. Firstly I think the mechanism has changed since my machine last ran. And secondly the clock was placing the machine somewhere in 2013, which meant that all the secure sockets stuff was broken. And of course to put the clock right I had to log in.....
The machine is presently at 92% of the upgrade process. If you've got machines that you want to keep useful I'd advise having a quick check around the house to see if you can get them going and update them. I'm probably going to pass my machines on once upgraded, but they'll be a lot more useful if they are running Windows 10.
What with all the sub-woofer excitement yesterday I totally forgot to mention that Robot Wars is now back on the telly. Big, and brash and bolder than ever. The competition never really went away, it just stopped being on the telly for some reason.
Which means that all the robots that we know and love of old, plus a few new ones, are now back with a whack. We watched the first episode yesterday and it was as wonderful as I remember. Well worth seeking out on iPlayer.
A sub-woofer is a great way to give your sound system a bit more "oomph". I'm a great believer in having a sound like the house is falling down if the movie shows a house falling down. Ditto cars, rockets etc etc.
Today I discovered something about sub-woofers which I thought I'd pass on. On the back of the sub-woofer you frequently find a tiny little switch labelled "phase". This is changes whether the speaker moves in or out when the sub-woofer makes a noise. It's important. If the sub-woofer is moving in when all the other speakers in the room are moving out the noise it makes will tend to subtract from the sound rather than add to it.
So, you might think that you just leave the phase switch in the standard setting and never touch it. However, there's a bit more to it than just speaker cones pulling and pushing. Different positions of the sub-woofer will introduce different phase distortions as the various sounds all bounce around the room. So it might be that flicking the switch will make the bass sound better. It did when I flicked the switch on mine, and it's certainly worth a try.
Saturday, and it's my birthday. And I'm up town with an unfamiliar lens. It happens.
Anhyoo, the weather is rather nice and I decide to seek out a few moths. The "Moth for Amy" art initiative celebrates Hull lass Amy Johnson who flew a Gypsy Moth plane all the way to Australia, the first female to do this.
There are lots of moths scattered around the Hull area, including a "Stealth Moth" almost directly underneath my office window at the university campus. I've no idea which moth this is to be honest, but it looks lovely. And it was a nice test for my lens.
Here's another one. What with the photography, the cake and the presents I had a rather awesome day. Which was very nice.
So, I'm having lunch in the library cafe at the university (a most excellent place) and I happen to glance at the ceiling. And it confuses me. I looked at the arrangement of the lights and it seems that the person laying the black trunking to the light fittings has done things in a sub-optimal way. It seems to me that if the "cross piece" was one section further to the right, the wiring could have been a bit shorter and there would have been no need for the connections running across to the near and the far lights.
If you see what I mean.
Anyhoo, I pondered this for a while and came up with two possible explanations:
Personally, I really hope its the "artistically valid" explanation.
Got together, built a robot, talked technical and made some plans for the future.
Just another hardware meetup at C4DI. The next one is in two weeks, You can sign up here. It's free and anyone can come along. It's going to be a rather special meeting. It's when we put the pixel into HullPixelBot.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
