Another one bites the dust...

My loft is now officially called “The Place Where Rob’s Gadgets Go to Die”. My lovely Hitachi digital 8 camcorder is broken. It tries very hard to work. You can hear the motors struggling and then it finally gives up with an unhappy pop. I managed to make it record something but what came back were just flickering lines. I’ve got tons of old tape I was planning to import into a computer and now all I can do is look at the boxes.

I might take it to bits to try and fix it. With a bit of luck it might be something mechanical that I can mend, but I’m not that hopeful. Oh well, I suppose it is over twenty years old….

Twisty Cube Puzzle Thing

I’m very fond of hand-held electronic puzzles. This one is rather neat. It is rather like Rubik’s cube, but rather than make sides the same colour you have to make the colours on the two moveable elements line up with an arrangement shown on the four in the middle. You do this by flipping them and rotating them.

The blurb for the device goes on about the educational benefits of the toy, but I’m not particularly convinced about that. I just find it fun to play with.

Chromebook 11 for 99 pounds - well worth it

So my “mistakenly cheap” Chromebook 11 arrived this week and I’ve been playing with it. I’m actually very impressed. It just works. The keyboard is OK (although it is missing a row of function keys at the top) and the trackpad is useable and responsive. The screen is a bit of a weak spot, in that it has a big thick bezel and the contrast could be better, but the browsing experience is good. The battery life is very good, especially the standby time.

I’ve not added any programs to it just yet, but I did have a go at using Chrome to talk to a Connected Little Box processor (an ESP8266). To my surprise, it mostly worked. I can use the terminal program to talk to a device and the program uploader runs to completion, but the uploaded code doesn’t seem to stick. It is probably something to do with the way that the browser disconnects from the device after upload. I’ll have to take a look.

For the price I paid (99 pounds) it was a steal. It looks pretty sturdy and would be a great first machine for school use. It seems to run my Begin to Code with JavaScript (available at the end of the month - order your copy here ) sample code just fine. If it could run Visual Studio Code it would be completely perfect. Apparently it is possible to install Edge (my browser of choice) on the machine, but this involves setting up a trial version of the Linux environment which I’m a bit too lazy to do just now.

I can’t see how anyone involved in selling this machine can make a profit, which means that it must somehow be part of Google’s world domination strategy, but if you want something you can just throw into a bag to take away with you, and you don’t want to have to worry too much about losing/breaking it, this would fit the bill perfectly.

Apple TV in less needy shock

Yesterday I got a nice new remote for the Apple TV. Today I noticed another improvement to the Apple TV user experience. The new remote has a prominent power button. You can use this to turn your Apple TV (and anything else connected to it) on and off.

You might think that this should not be news. It is after all what a power button should do. You are correct, but the thing is that in the past the Apple TV has always been a very “needy” device when I’ve used it. Previously, if the Apple TV was turned on and had HDMI control enabled it would to grab the foreground at every opportunity. Even if you didn’t want the Apple experience at that precise moment you seemed to have it thrust upon you.

The new device is much more relaxed. The Apple TV is happy to sit in the background until you wake it up.

Apple TV Remote

I’ve had an Apple TV for a while. I like the Apple TV. I hate the remote that came with it. The very first Apple TV devices had a lovely little silver remote that had just enough buttons to be properly useful. It was very well made and worked a treat. The next Apple TV that I got had this horrible black thing. It looked like it had actually been designed so that you couldn’t tell which way up you are holding it, so that using it involved a lot more messing around than it should. It also had a touch pad that was as useless as it was unnecessary. In short, not good.

Then, a while back, Apple announced a new Apple TV remote. As I use Apple TV a lot, i thought I’d get one. It is annoying to have to spend lumps of cash to get to a situation where you should have been at the start, but the new remote does a good job of making amends. The buttons are nice and clicky, the design makes sense and it works very well. I’m now a less unhappy customer than I was.

Thrustmaster TCA Officer Pack Airbus Edition

I first ordered the Thrustmaster TCA Officer Pack Airbus Edition last year, when the idea of flying away from everything was even more attractive than it is right now. I’d taken the precaution of ordering in good time, which I thought was a great idea, particularly when I saw the price of joysticks go through the roof. Unfortunately, the people selling me my joystick were also watching these prices. Their claims about my order status became more and more outlandish, at one point the order was marked as despatched, but then they cancelled it completely.

So that was that for a while. But, ever persistent, a few weeks ago I noticed that Scan computers were claiming to have them in stock. I thought I’d test these claims, and today the joystick arrived. Just in time for our Monday evening flying session.

It is very nice. Not the real thing of course, but good enough for me. It works beautifully with Microsoft Flight Simulator. The joystick response is very smooth and there is plenty of movement in the throttle. It even has nifty reverse thrust settings which you can use to stop your Airbus from plummeting off the end of runways that turn out to be a lot shorter than you expected.

I never had many plans for my long term future, but one of the one that I was pretty sure would come to pass is that I would always be playing with silly plastic toys. And so it has turned out.

Dedicated clip key

I’ve just discovered that my lovely new ergonomic keyboard has another fantastic feature. It has a dedicated key to start the screen clip program. This. Is. Awesome. No more Shift+Windows+S for me, just press this one key and you can clip and save what you like. Not life changing perhaps, but certainly “life making a bit easier”.

In praise of wired keyboards

I’ve been buying keyboards again. My latest one has two things I really like. Twenty pounds off and a wire. I think some things really need a wire and keyboards are one of the. I’ve used a Bluetooth one for a while on the desktop and it works mostly fine. Except that when you first try to use it your keypresses get ignored as it sets up the connection, and all the indicators are barely visible because of battery worries.

This one is a Microsoft Ergnomic design which seems pretty much perfect. It even comes with a great riser which means that i can rest my elbows on the chair arms, my wrists on the padded keyboard front deck and then just let my fingers do the moving around.

It has all the keys in the right places. The left hand shift key is a bit small (only normal key sized) and there is a rather pointless Microsoft Office key at the bottom taking up space that I’m sure could be better used. But all the function keys are full size and the extra keys along the top are mostly useful. And the action is very pleasing to type on.

At the moment the price is very attractive I reckon. One of the smartest things I did around twenty five years ago was to get into ergnomic keyboards. I think that if I hadn’t I’d not be typing as freely as I am today.

Akai MidiMix

A long time a ago Andy, a very wise friend of mine, explained why so many computer people were also into photography. “You see” he said. “All computers do pretty much the same thing. Once you’ve bought a computer it is hard to convince yourself to buy another one, since it will do the same stuff as the one you already have. But photography is different. There are no end of lenses, tripods, filters, case, straps flashes and whatnot that you can hanker after”. He was right too. But I think I’ve found something even worse than photography. It’s called music.

For me the crucial difference is that I can do photography (a bit) but I can’t really do music. So I tend to hanker after new music kit just to avoid facing the awkward truth that I can’t actually play any of it.

Anyhoo, enough of my neurosis for now. I’ve just got myself an Akai MidiMix MIDI control surface that I can use to twiddle the settings in my synthesizers. It turns out that you can get an awfully large number of knobs and sliders (and even a few lights) for what seems a pretty reasonable outlay. And I’m going to investigate what else I can control using MIDI messages. Which should keep me off the piano keyboard for a while….

Amazing AI Enabled Camera

This is an amazing device. A while back I had some fun with a very impressive AI enabled camera which is very neat, and around 60 quid. I’ve just got one another AI enabled camera which is a mere 17 dollars. You can program in in Python straight from your PC over a USB port. It exposes a GPIO port that you can use to send commands to another device.

The SDK is a free download and M5stack (who make the device) even seem to have some help for you creating your models and training them. And it has holes in the back that let you fit the camera on Lego models. This is completely awesome.

M5 Atom is absolutely tiny

A new computer arrived at our house today. The postman just popped it through the letterbox. The Atom is a tiny new microcontroller from M5Stack. It contains a button, a multicolour led and an accelerometer. It has enough pins to be useful along with a Grove socket.

It’s a little bit bigger than the top of my thumb, it contains an ESP32, it can run MicroPython and hang off Azure or Bluetooth. And you can buy them for six dollars apiece.

I know that the world today is a right old mess, but there are still some amazing things to be found.

Sorting out my cables...

I spent very happy while doing this with all my Dupont cables today. I think it really was time well spent.

USB Power Supply

This is a really useful device. You feed it power from a USB socket and it puts out a range of voltages from around 14 volts down to two or three. You can also set it to limit the current supplied and it has a nifty display of current and voltage. Great for testing simple circuits and well worth the price.

I got mine here and the customer service was excellent. My first device arrived with the perpsex covers smashed. I messaged the supplier asking if they could supply a couple of spare covers as the electronics worked fine, but they sent me a complete replacement. Good product and good service. Thanks for that.

Note: One thing to be aware of is that the device arrives with the output voltage set to maximum. Make sure that you adjust this down to your required voltage before you plug it into the device you want to power with it.

I've made a cube

It looks like I’ve made a cube. Although it occurs to me that I could have just joined three squares together, since you’ve no way of seeing the back from this photograph. After a week or so of pretty solid 3D printing and assembly I have learnt two things:

• it looks really cool

• it’s very hard to photograph

I was going to make it into a totally portable cube that could be passed around. However, I’m re-thinking this for a number of reasons:

• it will be rather hard to fit all the electronics and the battery into the cube interior

• the battery life will not be that great

• somebody might drop it

So, I’m thinking of just mounting the cube on a plinth and turning it into a rather cool light.

Update: Change of plan (as if you care). Anyhoo, I’m going to make the full fat, chuckable cube and then fashion a base which I can use to turn it into a lamp.

Tiny Sony Speaker

I picked up this tiny Sony speaker today in HMV in Hull for not much cash (even less than Amazon are selling it for). I’ve been looking for something to use with small musical instruments and this looked like it might fit the bill. It has Bluetooth connectivity and even contains a tiny microphone so that you can use it for handsfree phone calls. However, it also as a 3.5mm jack socket that you can use to connect any audio source that you fancy. It’s battery powered and also waterproof (as long as you remember to put in the rubber plug that seals the connectors.

The sound is much nicer than you would expect from such a tiny device. I wasn’t expecting floor shaking bass, but what is there is very clear. And the rest of the frequency range is very well catered for as well.

If you are looking for a slightly beefier sound than you get from your phone it is well worth a look.

Playstation Controller Back Buttons

Number one son is in town for the weekend. We went shopping today and he bought something rather interesting. Back buttons for the PlayStation 4 controller. They are a nifty moulding that fits underneath between the controller sides. By cunning use of a moving plug they wrap themselves around to make it look as if they are part of the controller. They provide two extra buttons that are really easy to press with those fingers that normally wrap around the controller to hold it. They are configured using a tiny OLED screen and a single button. You can get them to produce a button press that is mapped onto any of the other controls.

For example, you might replace things that are rather hard to do, like pressing in the thumbsticks, with rear button presses. And some actions, for example change up and down the gears in a driving game, are crying out to be put onto controls like these.

They work with all existing games because as far as the game is concerned there is nothing new happening. The game is getting the control inputs it is expecting, but they are being triggered in a different way.

I’ve been told (quite rightly) that I don’t play games at the stratospheric level for such add-ons to really pay off for me, but if you want to do things like shoot when jumping or easily change gears, they are worth a look. Apparently in the UK they are being sold exclusively by Game.

Python Ruler

I now have a ruler that will run Python. My life is complete……

Actually it is quite useful. Probably. You can program it to show up as a keyboard device and you can get your program generate keypresses when you touch the panels. The default settings are as shown above, but I’m going to make it generate the backslash character which I always have difficultly finding thanks to my liking for American keyboards.

It runs Circuit Python which means that you can just drop your code into the usb drive it mounts when connected. The only thing I don’t like is that you have to plug the ruler into an external power supply to get it to work. If it had a little battery it would be perfect.

Bye Bye HiFi Walker

I’m not having much luck with my high resolution music players. My first one, a Sony, decided to destroy its battery (and then destroy the replacement battery that I bought) by shorting it out. I suspect the charging circuitry. That went to the tip. And now my second, which had the wonderful name “HiFi Walker” has had the display fail. So, despite there being no obvious way in, today I tried to fix it. I was hoping that upon the removal of the back I’d see a dangling socket I could just reconnect to tumultuous applause.

Unfortunately that’s not how it has worked out. After using the hair dryer to loosen the glue I got the back off to find a perfectly assembled circuit board with no obvious flaws. So it was time to double down and remove the processor board completely from the case and check the display connections. Which of course all looked fine to me, even though the display was obviously still broken.

This is the a genuine “blue screen of death” in that it is all that is displayed. Oh well. At least I tried.

Measuring Power Consumption

You may be wondering how I can be so sure about the power consumption of my various devices, what with the amounts being so tiny. Well, I’m using one of these. It is supposed to be used for testing batteries and power supplies, but it gives a rather useful four digits of power consumption information. I’ve made up a special connector from an old USB cable and I’m getting depressingly accurate readings.

In case you are wondering about the device at the top, that is something you can use to apply a hefty load to a USB power source. If you do decide to use it, remember that the resistors (the two green things) will get very hot.

Old game boys never die

There must be about twenty quid’s worth of stuff here….

A couple of weeks ago we went to Comic Con in Birmingham. As I remarked at the time, | didn’t buy much. One of the reasons was that I already had lots of things for sale on some of the stalls. Today I happened across a bag full of bits and bobs, including my beloved Game boy Color and printer. Amazingly it still had some of the pictures in the camera memory. The printer still works too, although the thermal paper seems to have given up the ghost. I wonder if you can still get paper for it?