The latest issue of Raspberry Pi Magazine is now available. I’ve got a couple of articles in this one, both featuring one of my old cameras. The first article is about 3D printing film holders for old cameras. The second article is about using Python in FreeCAD to produce mosaics including one of an old camera.
There’s lots of other good stuff too (he said implying that his stuff was good) including some great ideas for making music with your Pi.
Today has been a good day.
Can you tell which is the broken one?
A while back I broke one of my Apple Newton eMate devices just by opening it and closing it. A hinge fitting broke in a way that caused it to pierce the ribbon cable that links the display to the main board. I’d give you more details, but I don’t want to talk about it at the moment.
Anyhoo, I ordered a replacement cable and last week it arrived in a huge box. At first I was sure the box was empty, but eventually I found the cable nestling in the middle of a big wad of padding. After spending a chunk of yesterday totally failing to fit the darned thing I thought I’d have another go this morning. It’s a bit fiddly. You have to wrap the cable around one of the hinges in exactly the right way, otherwise I’d have been ordering another replacement. Once I’d got the cable in place the rest of the device went together without incident and I now have 3 fully working Newton eMate devices. The next thing to do is complete upgrading the rechargeable batteries with ones that, er, recharge,
And then, just to build on my success I finally got Forza Horizon 6 working on my PC. I’m not sure what I did. Actually I am sure what I did. What I’m not sure of is why it worked. I plugged the PC into a different monitor. Forza sprang into life on the alternative screen and looked super. So I plugged the original monitor back in and it kept working. And off I went.
The game is fantastic. It follows the previous game pattern pretty closely, but you can now crash through scenery in a much more impressive way. I can’t find a Nissan Cube but they do have this really cute little van.
Jimmy
We didn’t have lunch there really. But I never let the truth get in the way of a good headline. Last week we walked with some alpacas. The weather was perfect. The alpacas were great fun and very characterful. If you live in Hull and want to have a go, you can find out more here.
Last night we discovered a big chunk of ice in our fridge freezer. You might think that this is the right place for it to be, but it was not. It had formed around the drain tray and along the bottom and was stopping condensed water from making its usual way out of the back of the fridge. Instead the water was pooling in front of the fridge. No fun.
After a bit of chipping and scraping we got rid of the ice and discovered that a little drain hole was blocked. Attempts to clear it with warm water and 3D printer filament failed so I ordered a kit of freezer drain hole unblocking tools (it’s a thing apparently).
Then later in the evening I discovered that the hole had unblocked itself. I’d obviously scared it into submission. So I consider the kit as six pounds fifty pence well spent.
Sumo going well
We had a special Hardware Meetup last night. We had some special guests and the idea was to have them writing programs that would allow two robots to sumo wrestle.
It didn’t quite work out that way though. My software was a bit more buggy than I thought. Mind you, most first versions of software don’t survive their collision with real life. I left with a lot of things to fix and a determination to not let out any wobbly software ever again. I wonder how long that will last?
A rat on a spit
I love Hull Makerspace. I particularly like the way that it lets people take an idea and a big chunk of determination and then make something amazing. One of the folks that looks after the place fancied building a “rat on a spit”. So they did. This was the cue for laser cutting, circuit building, mechanical construction, 3D design of a rat, painting, finishing and finally a working artifact. If you’ve got any ideas that you fancy making real, you should take them down there.
The Olympus Pen-FT is lovely little camera that makes a super everyday carry. It takes 72 pictures on a 36 exposure roll of 35mm film. It does this by the cunning trick of taking pictures half the usual size. One side effect of this trick is that pictures have the “portrait” aspect ratio rather than the more common “landscape”. Another side effect is that when you get them processed you find that they are handled as a single print holding two different pictures. This can make for some nice juxtapositions. I can’t claim to have planned any of the ones came out, but I did form a habit of taking three pictures that might fit together on the principle that one of the pair will come out together.
This is a “single lens reflex” camera which means that your view when taking the picture is through the same lens that exposes the film. You can check focus before you take a shot. You can also remove the lens and pop a different one on, if you fancy a change of viewpoint. Although alternative lenses are a bit expensive and hard to get hold of.
A nice thing about the FT is that it has a built in exposure meter that displays a needle in the viewfinder. The needle indicates a number which you then use to set the lens. It’s not completely automatic but I really like that because it forces you to think about what shutter speed and aperture you are using. I exposed a reel of film and was delighted to discover that the exposure seems to be pretty much accurate too, which is nice.
If you are looking for a cool little “daily carry” analogue camera this would fit the bill very nicely. You can get it for a reasonable price if you are prepared to lurk around sale sites for a while. Make sure you get one with a working meter though, as this adds a lot of value.
We went to see Charlie the Wonderdog today. The title pretty much says it all. It is a competent computer graphics presentation which passes the time just fine. For me the most telling point was the way that the President of the United States was depicted as a money grabbing simpleton. The assumption that people in power are corrupt and only in it for their own ends is now very mainstream indeed.
Actual film pictures of the game. I lost.
What a lovely day for a barbeque and some “micro-croquet” in the garden.
If you happen to find one they are a wonderful kit
A while back I bought an MDrawBot kit. It is like high-quality Meccano but with stepper motors and an Arduino controller. You can use it to make four different drawing robots. The Arduino robot controller is connected to a Python program running on your PC which decodes SVG files and lets you draw them in a variety of ways. You can make a mobile robot with a pen in it, a drawing robot arm, a robot that draws on eggs and my favourite, one that hangs on the wall and can draw really big pictures.
All the robot code is in a GitHub repository but unfortunately it is now a few versions behind the current Python revisions. I’ve made an updated version of the library here and added some implementation notes.
You roll the ball to direct your shot. Not always successfully as it turns out
Today we spent a very happy morning at a retro games popup event in Leeds. Amongst lots of arcade machines, consoles and even a BBC Micro they had a copy of the Golden Tee Arcade Classic Golf game. I must have missed this first time around. You use a trackball to direct your shots and it all works rather splendidly (within the limitations of the 1989 vintage graphics). I managed to play an entire round (unfortunately the scores are not available) and it was super fun.
Update: I’ve since discovered that the game I played is a re-issue in a new cabinet. You can buy them for home use. After a lot of internal wrestling, and measuring up space in rooms I’ve decided to go for the Nintendo Switch version instead though.
Guess how I took this picture….
When I was a kid one of the coolest toys you could have was a pair of walkie talkie radios. These contained tiny transistor powered transmitters and receivers and sometimes had a range of up to twenty feet (although you could always hear the other person talking directly as well).
Things have moved on a bit now though. The devices above contain little colour cameras and screens. They also work over much larger distances and contain rechargeable batteries that won’t go flat or leak. They even have space for some video annotations and voice changing features.
They create their own point-to-point WiFi connection. They are paired at the factory, so there is no chance of a four-way conversation if you bought two sets. And you can buy a pair for around 18 pounds. That’s around the price of a meal out and a drink. The modern world is an amazing place.
I’ve been trying to pay the latest Forza Horizon 6 on my PC. It has not gone well. Seven frames a second is not conducive to good car handling. I’m going to have to do some digging. At the moment the primary suspect is my slightly elderly monitor. Or perhaps the cable.
The game does look very good though. Just not when played as a slide show.
If you want to learn how to write MicroPython for the Raspberry Pi PICO I might have just the thing for you. I’ve made a website you can find at clbteaching.com. The idea is that you open the web site, plug your PICO into your computer, click CONNNECT, pick an exercise and off you go. Each exercise has step by step instructions and sample code. You can deploy code into your device and run it directly from the browser, with no need to load anything onto your machine.
There are two levels. The first level is simple input/output and getting used to running Python, the second level is using the Connected Little Boxes framework to create devices with complex hardware interactions. There’s even a button you can press to load all the framework code onto your device so you can use it. Then you can load managers into an application and start making things. You can find the actual code behind the site here. The actual Connected Little Boxes site (where you can find out all about the framework) is here.
To get started you just need a Raspberry Pi PICO running MicroPython, which you can find here. You also need to be running a browser which supports serial communications, for example Edge or Chrome.
It is a work in progress at the moment. There are place holders for some images. The buttons are not very well organised. But I think it works well enough to be an Alpha release. I’d love for you to have a go and let me know what you think. There’s a large red FEEDBACK button you can use to raise issues.
I’ve enjoyed building this, so I’m already ahead of the game. I’d love to think of it as being useful too. I’m going to be adding more labs and refining the ones that are there.
We’re going to be working through the content at our Hardware Meetups. I’ll let you know how we get on. If you fancy coming along to a meetup and having a go yourself, our next meetup is next week on Wednesday 27th May in Hull Makerspace in the Hull Central Library in, surprise, surprise, Hull. Starting at around 17:00.
I was in for a dental check-up today. The dentist looked into my mouth and said “What is that structure at the back with the sails and the bags of corn outside?”. “Oh” I replied “That’s just the Mill on the Floss”.
Back in the day we used to spend time convincing ourselves that we were doing useful work waiting for compilers to finish. Today we spend time convincing ourselves that we are doing useful work waiting for AI to finish writing the code.
I saw this on Amazon by mistake and now I really, really want one.
Had a rather enjoyable evening watching Eurovision while playing Donkey Kong on the Switch2. While the performers were giving it their all on the stage I was busy winning boss fights.
And I thought the UK entry was splendid. Sure, he’s no Sam Ryder, But can Sam Ryder make a Furby organ? If you’ve not watched any Look Mum No Computer videos you really should.
Failed to buy a camera today. I got outbid at the very last second. Oh well. It probably wasn’t meant to be. And it’s not like I’m short of cameras.
Can you spot the crook?
“Cosy crime” is all the rage. And people like sheep. So why not have talking sheep solve a murder? This idea is stretched over a movie that just about gets away with it. The animation is pretty impressive, the human characters are suitably shifty. And there is even some analogue photography (which is also all the rage). Worth a trip if you are prepared to manage your expectations appropriately.
When I was learning physics I found my flexi-curve invaluable. Every now and then I did an experiment to prove something or other. Proof of a successful outcome was usually a straight line of readings plotted on a graph. Of course, this hardly ever happened to me. But by bending my flexi-curve carefully through my points and drawing a nice thick line I could give the impression of something mostly straight and that was usually good enough.
I was reminded of my flexi-curve today as I was writing something about bSpline curves which do this kind of line bending for you. I had a look around and it turns out you can still buy flexi-curves. Although this particular product doesn’t have a very good review (but the review is worth reading for a giggle).
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.
