The colour for this year is yellow
Every year around now Yorkshire Water come down our street, take a look at the drain outside our house and notice it is broken. Then they paint a cross on the drain (last year it was blue as I remember) and go away for a year. I wonder what colour it will be next year.
Last time I went to the Electromagnetic Field Festival I took along a converted Polaroid camera that produced Fujifilm Instax Wide pictures. This time I’m going a bit bigger. I’m making a Raspberry Pi powered camera that uses a Canon Selphy CP400 dye sublimation printer. These printers produce super high quality prints which are around a third of the price of the Instax ones. And you can pick them up for around twenty quid on ebay. They work fine on Raspberry Pi (and Windows 11 PCs) too. The downsides. They are quite big. They run on 22 volts DC. And they are quite big.
I’m designing the camera box and I have to leave room for the printer and the battery pack. The Pi and the electronics will be at the top and I’ll have room for quite a big screen. I’m using a new design technique (to me). Rather than try and place fixing and access holes in the case that I have designed, I’ve instead created a model of the printer and all the cut-outs and mounting holes that it needs.
The long thin bits are the mounting holes
This is the printer cutter. I just design the box, position my model inside it and use cut to remove the printer from the box.
This is the box with the cutter cut out of it. You can just see the mounting holes at the bottom. All I have to do now is print it and hope that my model is correct….
The last few days have been a target rich environment from a photographic point of view. In the morning I took a camera around Cottingham Show. I was hoping they would have some old motorbikes and I wasn’t disappointed. At the moment I’m getting back into analogue photography in black and white.
I developed the pictures this afternoon and I’m really pleased with the results. The only problem I had was that the temperature of the developer is supposed to be 20 degrees centigrade and at the moment the water coming out of the taps here is at 22 degrees. Rather than fetch some ice cubes I just developed the film for a bit less time. The camera I used is older than me. I think results are pretty darned good.
Every year Analogue Wonderland organise photo walks all over the country. Last year we went to the one in Hull. This year we headed for Leeds. It was great. Howard was the walk leader and took us around a few bits in Leeds I’d not seem before. The weather was lovely, the company was great and the photographs will be back from the developers in a few days.
I’ve found two different birthday cards bearing the inscription:
“Surely, not everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.”
I quite liked the first one, but when I saw the second one I was less impressed. Are we really that short of good lines? Perhaps they should give me a call.
As I write this Hull is the only place in Great Britain without an extreme weather warning. It is still jolly hot though. But not too hot for Lego.
This is a splendid build. When you turn the crank on the right hand side Mario and Yoshi run along in a very well animated manner.
Building it was great fun. I liked the way that pixels map onto Lego tiles
We had a very select gathering at the Hardware Meetup tonight. But fun was still had. I managed to get my robots moving forwards rather than backwards (always a good thing) and Simon was preparing FreeCAD designs for 3D printing at the MakerSpace.
Incidentally, I’ve set up a Discord server for the group where we will give out details of meetings and chat about hardware and whatnot. If you’d like an invite get in touch (hardware at robmiles.com) and I’ll send you one. I’d put the invite link in a blog post, but that ways lies madness and an awful lot of spam.
I already know what the bedroom looks like
We’ve upgraded to the latest AI version of Alexa (Don’t judge me. It was free and I like new toys).
Now screens about the house offer to “Write a Haiku about how your day is going” or “Describe your surroundings”.
Is there anyone in the world who has ever needed a Haiku writing about their day? And if I’m standing in the kitchen holding a mug of tea, I don’t really need a device to say “I can see bloke in a kitchen holding a mug of tea”.
My home made Pi camera now has a case. All it needs now is a lid.
I’m planning on getting all three
Had a really good day today. The weather was just the right temperature for a barbeque. I got a book I’ve been after for ages. I got to do some Lego, got a super-interesting book about the 6502 microprocessor (among other things). I also got to play with a camera, go for a walk and run a film off and then come home and develop it. Good times.
I’ve mentioned the Canon Selphy CP400 before. Although that time I got the name wrong. Its a really nice little dye sublimation printer which works a treat. And the paper and the ink are nice and cheap too. As part of my portable Pi Camera project I thought I’d get one to make a portable printer that works with the camera. I had a bit of fun getting the Selphy to work with the Pi but eventually I figured it out. You have to re-compile the Gutenberg suite to knock it back one version because the latest one breaks the paper size recognition. But I expect you already know that.
Anyhoo, I found a printer being sold for a fiver. In the original box. So I made the purchase, paid 6 pounds for postage (mutter mutter) and the printer arrived today. Turns out that “in original box” is not the same as “working”. Who knew? I got out my original one to make sure that all the drivers were in place and, sure enough, the five pound printer was getting stuck half way through a print.
I wandered downstairs for a disconsolate coffee and then, since I had not much to lose, I went back up to the office and took the lid off the printer to see if there were any wires dangling loose or bits of paper in the way. It looked OK so I tried to print again. And it worked. Yay! I popped the lid back on and it kept working.
So I went downstairs for a celebratory coffee and then returned to the office to tidy up. And I discovered that I’d taken the lid off the wrong printer, and I’d been testing the one that wasn’t broken. Can you see a pattern forming here from film fun on Monday? I’d be a bit concerned about incipient mental decay if I didn’t know that I’ve been doing this kind of stupid thing for the last sixty years.
Anyhoo, I took the lid off the broken printer and it worked fine. But only with the lid off. At this point I was too annoyed with the universe to do much more. So I put the new printer back in its box (it seems to like it there). The good news is that the plan is to move the printer into a custom case with a battery pack and whether it has a lid on it doesn’t make any difference to that application.
In all seriousness, these are cracking little printers and beautifully made (as you can see above). The only thing missing really is Wi-Fi. But you could add that by just attaching a Pi.
I’ve just shipped an article. Go me. To celebrate we went to York. It was very nice, although it did get super-busy after lunch. One of the attractions of York is York Camera Mart but today they didn’t have anything I fancied/could afford. Oh well. I don’t have to buy a camera every time I go out I suppose.
A while back I started working on a home made camera powered by a Raspberry Pi. Today I went back to discover just how much of a mess I’d made of it. I’ve done some tidying up (i.e. made it work), added a user interface and got it mostly working. I want the camera to have a voice interface and let you edit the images by telling the camera what to do. It’s kind of a homage to this one, but portable and with less Lego.
I’m using an LCD touch screen which I’m driving “by hand” (i.e. not through a graphical desktop). This means you should be able to use it on low-powered headless devices which don’t have a GUI installed. The camera itself won’t do much thinking, it will pass the images and the instructions off to a server which will do the heavy lifting. The next thing I need is a box.
Folks had been saying how good the Disclosure Day movie was. Tonight we went to see it. Oh well. I can imagine the scene during the movie’s creation.
“Take a pinch of ET, throw in some Close Encounters and a bit of War of the Worlds flavoured with Indiana Jones”.
“How about adding a bit of Star Wars too?”
“Wrong franchise.”
… and so on. The acting was terrific. The set pieces mightily impressive. The baddy was English (so no surprises there) but even he had the possibility of redemption (so no surprises there either).
Anyhoo, I don’t regret going but an event movie it wasn’t. Worth a trip if you liked any of the above films and are good at expectation management.
Looking at a PICO with a Pi
I’ve been playing with digital microscopes. These are kids toys which are surprisingly advanced for cheap, disposable devices. You can get handheld ones or ones with stands. They have lcd screens, can take pictures onto a MicroSD card and you can even plug them into a computer and display their output on the big screen. If you want something that gives you a close-up view for a surprisingly small outlay search your favourite sellers for “coin microscope”.
You would think by now I would have run out of stupid things to do. But no, I continue to advance the field of incompetence in new and interesting ways. Yesterday, after the Camera Faire we went to a car show in Leeds. I’d taken along a very old camera and I used it to take shots of very old cars. Today I had the pictures developed. They were all blank, which was upsetting, but part of the analogue photographer’s lot. Every now and then you (or at least I) load the film incorrectly, get the camera settings wrong or just leave the lens cap on.
I was sitting at my computer musing on this when I noticed a film cassette on the desk which looked remarkably like the one I had used yesterday. Which I had just had processed. After a bit of thought (always a good idea for me) I realised that in the morning I put one cassette on the desk and then picked up another. For a while I’ve had a cassette on my desk that had got wound all the way back in, and I was planning to find a suitable tool to recover the end of the film so I could use it in a camera. So the reason that the film was blank was because the film was blank.
I shot back had the correct film processed. This went a lot better. And I’m really pleased with the results (although I need to work on holding the camera straight).
The camera I used was made nearly 100 years ago. I think it does a pretty good job. When I get the right film processed. Kudos to the folks at Max Speilmann in Beverley who got the second film processed in record time.
Went to a Camera Faire today. Nearly bought 3 cameras but I ended up buying none of them. But I did get a “new to me” camera bag which is probably around fifty years old. It’s an original Billingham bag from the 1970’s (I think). Billingham kind of invented the soft camera bag when they noticed that their fishing bags were being used by photographers in New York. They are still around today and making bags in the UK, which is nice. One day I might be able to afford a new one…
These are amazing. The first thirty seconds after you pop one in your mouth are pretty memorable. The outer coating is super sour. But once that’s gone you are left with a really nice lemon flavour. We got them when were on holiday.
You can track them down in the UK but they get a bit expensive once you add shipping.
this picture was also not made with AI
Today I wanted to finish off the menu system for my tiny navigating program for the PICO. I could have spent some time writing a prompt for Claude AI to use to create the code. But today I thought I’d spend around the same amount of time actually writing the code. It was awesome.
I didn’t have to spend any time figuring out what the code did since I already kind of knew. And bug fixes stuck because nothing else in the code changed when a fix was applied.
And I really felt that I owned what I had built, which was nice too. AI is great and can do amazing things, but I’m trying hard not to forget how to do it myself.
I’ve made a tiny route finder which runs on the Raspberry Pi PICO and uses Dijkstra’s algorithm to find routes. SatNav it isn’t but it does work. I’m using the lovely PICO GFX display from Pimoroni and a really nice 3D printable case from TheFlyingKipper.
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.
