Imagine Cup Briefing Day

This was the view from our hotel room this morning. The Imagine cup World Finals are being held in the building on the left of the picture. And no, I didn’t add the rainbow on afterwards.

Today we are setting up the competition and briefing the judges.

This is the judging team for this year’s Software Development Challenge. A great crew of folks. We spent a big chunk of this afternoon making sure that everyone knows what to do, and that the way the judging works is right. I suppose you could call it a meeting, but it was a fun one, if such a thing is possible. Thanks for your help folks.

All the flags around the bay are Imagine Cup branded. Very impressive.

The competition rounds start tomorrow. Really looking forward to it. 

Imagine Cup Australia Flying

This is football on display at Singapore Airport during our stopover

Since I can’t actually tell the difference between yesterday and today, this might as well be the same blog post. Except for this bit of course.

Imagine Cup Australia Flying

This is football on display at Singapore Airport during our stopover

It turns out that Sydney Australia is a very long way from Hull. In fact, to travel further than this you’d probably need a larger planet.

Heading off to the Imagine Cup World Finals

Spent a few hours gadget packing and a also threw a few clothes into a suitcase. We are heading off the the Imagine Cup World Finals in Sydney, so no more 3D printing for a while…

Microsoft MVP for another year

I got an email last night telling me that I’m an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) for another year. Which is rather nice.

Fixed IP Addresses in Hull

Now, here’s a little known fact that I only found out about a while back. If you are in Hull using Kingston Communications (or KC as they are more trendily known) for your broadband (like you have a choice) and you are stumping up for their “Pro” account, you can have a fixed IP address as part of the package.

This is really useful if you want to run services at home but don’t want to have to fiddle about with dynamic DNS services and stuff like that. I went online and asked them about it and I was fixed up with fixed in no time at all.

Embedded Text Printing using Autodesk 123D and Ultimaker

I’ve already had one go at printing text using the Ultimaker, when I used Autodesk 123D to print out my name. Next I thought I’d try making text that “stuck into” the surface. My theory was that it might look better than stuff that stuck out. And it sort of does, see above.

The biggest problem was persuading Autodesk 123D to let me put the text into a surface. I’ve figured out a way to do it now (and the program itself is growing on me as I’ve also found out how to dimension things after I’ve created them). Anyhoo, if you ever want to embed text into a surface (and so I don’t forget for next time), here is the sequence:

1. Make a new surface that is going to hold the text.
2. Create a sketch on the surface that contains the text you want to embed.
3. Extrude the surface. For some reason the text part doesn’t extrude and so you get an embedded effect.

I’ve no idea if this is a bug or not meant to happen. It actually looks really good in the designer…

You can just export and print as usual. As you can see at the top, it doesn’t look too bad. Each character in the picture is about 1cm high. I’m going to experiment with larger text and different fonts.

More Twitter Printing Fun

South Holderness Technology College came to see us today. Emma organised everything excellently and I was first man in this morning, as I then had to zoom off to Doncaster for an Exam board. I was printing my tweets again, and everything worked splendidly. (This means that I am probably due a session where everything fails in the near future…)

They were a great audience, and I promised some references:

You can find out more about the Gadgeteer here: http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/

If you fancy buying some hardware you can get the kits from Cool Components.

If you want to make your own 3D printer like Una you can get a kit from Ultimaker.

Charlotte told me about a competitor to my Twitter printer (or perhaps my Twitter printer is a competitor for it). The LittlePrinter puts things onto paper, and will have a mobile client that you use to configure it. However, everything is pushed from a cloud based server which is supported by the hardware supplier. When they go bust you lose everything, and it is hard to see how they can make money once they have got the profit on the hardware. That has already happened to my Chumby and my Nabaztag rabbit. My plans for my Twitter printer include a web configuration page so that the user can always control the device directly, rather than any kind of on-going requirement for support.

Book News

Two bits of interesting book news today. O’Reilly are having a special offer on all kinds of great books for the next week, up to 5th July. One of them is my XNA book (the one on the left above). Follow this link to get your hands on this, and any other titles that take your fancy (but buy mine first…)

http://oreil.ly/LFXgno

Also, Start Here! Learn the Kinect API! is coming out soon, I think some folk have already managed to buy a copy. One clarification, just as we went to print Microsoft released version 1.5 of the Kinect SDK. The book doesn’t cover any of the new APIs provided in version 1.5, but all of the content will work fine.

Gadgets at St. Bede’s

This is the audience, thanks too much for to the volunteer who helped me build the camera.

Did a school visit today. For the last couple of years we’ve been doing talks at St. Bede’s about computing and good stuff, Today I was showing some of the fun and games that you can have with Gadgeteer and 3D printing.

This is the output from my “Tweet Printer”. It connects to the internet and prints out my tweets. And it works.

These are the working components, a FEZ Spider, WiFi board and custom printer connector, based on the only plug and socket that we had in stores, which is probably a bit big (and would sound really funny if you plugged headphones into it…

Another view, at the bottom you can see the hole for the GHI 7 led display which shows the progress as the device finds a WiFi network, connects to it, sends a web request and then decodes and prints the tweet.

It even works by using my Lumia 900 in Internet sharing mode, which means that I can see my tweets immortalised on paper everywhere I go. If I fancy doing something different, for example a printed weather forecast or shopping list, then I just have to change the software. All I need to do now is print a lid for the box. And find some smaller plugs, and make a new printer box with room for the power supply socket.

If you were at the talk and want the slide deck, you can find it here.

Lonely Windows Phones

I’ve got a couple of Windows Phones in my office that are a bit lonely. They are Nokia Lumia 710 models and rather nice. If you are a continuing Hull Student and have a Windows Phone project in mind, tell me your idea and if I like it I’ll get one posted out to you for you to play with. There are only two rules:

• You must blog the progress that you make over the summer.
• You must put something in the Windows Phone Marketplace before the end of summer.

I’ll send the phones out on Monday next week to the two best ideas.

Windows 7 Pin To Task Bar Trick

I like pinning things to my Windows 7 task bar (well, everyone needs a hobby I suppose). It provides quick access to the programs that I use most often. However, I found a snag with doing this, which was that it was hard to start a second copy of the program pinned on the task bar. If you press the icon on the task bar once the program is running you get sent to the open program, it doesn’t start another one.

Then, by mistake I found the answer today. If you right click on the icon in the task bar you get a menu the option to run another copy of the program. Very useful.

Making Boxes for Gadgets with an Ultimaker Printer

Ultimaker and Gadgeteer would seem to be a match made in heaven. Gadgeteer gives you a bunch of hardware devices that you can connect together and program using .NET and Ultimaker gives you a way of making a box to put them in. I’ve spent today finding out just how easy it is to do this, and just how much fun. I spent some time last week printing my name, which was fair enough I suppose, but today I wanted to get started making some boxes for gadgets.

I started off using the AutoDesk 123D software but in the end I gave up on it. It is a great program for making ornaments and trinkets, but didn’t seem to make it easy to create engineering type drawings. I wanted everything to be just the right size and correctly positioned, and the program didn’t seem to make it easy to do this. So I switched to FreeCAD, following up on advice from Andy in a comment on the post last week. This has the feel of a proper CAD program (although I’ve never used a proper one, so I don’t have much to compare it with). Finally I figured out that the best way to make something complex was to use the Sketch view to draw something on a plane, and then extrude that into the model. That way I could cut quite complex shapes.

This is the view of my finished product, It has mounting blocks for a Sytech processor, power connector and button. The blocks are all individual components which I can assemble on a grid any size. The nice thing about the Gadgeteer devices is that they are all based on a grid mounting, with everything happening on 1cm boundaries. This makes it very easy for me to create some pins that I can use anywhere. The design above needs a little work, as the round mounting pillars are a bit too wide for the Gadgeteer standard, but for most of the devices I’ve found they work just fine.

Once I had made my design I had to convert it into an STL file (no problem, FreeCAD just does this) and then make the set of printer instructions. I used Cura for this. Finally I put my design on a memory card and turned the Ultimaker loose. I’m slowly getting the hang of 3D printing. Now that I’ve fixed all the leaks my problem is that sometimes the very first layer is not sticking to the printer bed. This means that the printer just extrudes plastic into the air and nothing gets made. I think I know how to do it now though, you have to adjust the print head so that when it is closest to the surface there you can just about pull a single piece of paper back and forth underneath it. And you have to make sure that this is the case across the entire printer surface.

These are my early prototypes. For the first one, on the right, I tried to extrude pillars that I could just drop the board onto. I had a theory that I could just tighten a nut down onto the pillar and it would just self tap a thread into the pillar. Didn’t work. The pillars are not that strong and they snapped off. But for me the really amazing thing was that the Gadgeteer board just fitted onto these pillars. All the dimensions I had carefully put into FreeCAD were being reflected exactly in the finished article. Kudos to the Ultimaker crew, they have made a printer that prints things exactly the right size. If anything had been even slightly out of whack nothing would have fitted. As it was, once I’d cleaned off the excess plastic, I could just drop the board on.

Version 2, which is where I am now, has bolt holes through the plastic pillars which I can then use to screw the boards down onto. I’ve made a three board carrier which you can see above and again, everything just lines up. Astonishing.

I’ve even managed to break one of the golden rules in 3D printing, and print overhangs that let me countersink the bolt heads in the surface underneath.

This is the view from the other side of the board. The heads are all countersunk. the big hole in the bottom is meant to be there, it is a push button. The idea was to make a round button to fit into the hole. Unfortunately, being an idiot, I’ve got the large and the small holes the wrong way round, so that my button will just drop onto the floor. Still, I’m very pleased with the results from just a day of playing with the software and the printer. Last night I also made a case for my thermal printer, which turned out rather nice too.

Once I get everything sorted I’ll put the designs on the interwebs somewhere for anyone who is interested. Just a great way to spend a day….

Drill Power

I bought this today to replace my old rechargeable drill, which started to make a funny smell whenever I tried to use it. Who knows what damage I can do with this new one?

Incidentally, I’m a bit confused as to why they call it a “funny” smell. It didn’t strike me as particularly amusing. The only funny smell I can think of is laughing gas. Ho ho.

Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard

Another day, another plug from Rob for some Microsoft stuff. Actually I do buy things from other companies too you know, as far as I’m aware Microsoft do not make Strawberry flavoured milk yet.

Anyhoo, they do make some things that are quite nice. I’ve always liked their bendy keyboards, being fairly sure that the main reason that my fingers have not dropped off/seized up yet is that I’ve been using their Natural Keyboards for many years now. They provide very good wrist support and let you type at a more natural angle. Of course you lose all that when you open up your laptop. Until now.

The Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000, which you can see above, is intentionally bent. It also comes with a somewhat superfluous numeric keyboard which I’ve left in the box as I can’t see the point of it. But the keyboard is very good. I’ve paired it with the Samsung Slate and it works a treat. It is very thin, so it fits in my bag with no problems, and when I’m typing I can feel the difference.

The key action is pretty good for a device of this type. The Bluetooth keyboard that comes with the Samsung Slate has a very nice action, but is not bendy, and for me some of the keys are now wonky on that keyboard, which is a bit annoying. Actually, the mobile keyboard with the best key action is the Apple Bluetooth one, but unfortunately it isn’t bendy – at least not in a way that would leave it useful afterwards.

I picked up my keyboard cheap from Amazon. They have this thing now where you can find used examples of stuff that you want, and for the first time I tried this. It worked very well, the item arrived well packaged and in good time. This is looking like a good alternative to eBay. None of the bidding daftness, and the prices are very competitive too.

Making a Name for Myself with Ultimaker

I’ve been spending more quality time with my Ultimaker 3D printer. Making designs from other people is kind of fun, but I really wanted to design and build my own components. So tonight I fired up Autodesk 213D beta and had a go. Turns out to be quite easy and fun. The Autodesk program is quite easy to drive, although it definitely has the feel of beta software, with the odd crash and lockup here and there. You also have to sign into the Autodesk site and the default is to publish your designs for everybody to see, which worried me a bit, particularly as the first design I did was the one above….

It proved quite easy to draw some text, extrude it into 3D and then connect it to a block. The 123D program can export to STL files and I used the Cura program to create the file of printer commands.

Tonight I actually got around to building up the UltiController part of the system which allows me to print objects without needing a computer. I just put the design files onto an SD card, pop the card in the controller and set it off. The printer is behaving itself at the moment, with no leaks (reaches out and touches convenient piece of wood) and did a pretty good job. My first attempt got the size a bit wrong and tried to print one that was a bit large, but I re-rendered the design in Cura with a scale factor of 0.25 and got the result above, which is around half an inch on the long axis.

The next step is to design and make some plastic components to mend the piano, at which point the printer will probably have paid for itself…..

Hull CS Blogs Application Now Live

If you are a fan of Hull Computer Science Blogs and have a Windows Phone then your life just got even better. Danny Brown has just made a Windows Phone application that provides ready access to all posts on the site, along with Microsoft Marketplace applications published by Hull students, RSS feeds and all sorts. It’s a free download, works a treat and you can get it from the markeplace here.

Windows Phone 8 Summit

Coming to a Windows 8 Phone near you….

Hot on the heels of the Windows Surface announcement, today we had the Windows Phone Summit “sneak peek” at the next generation of Windows Phone. I must admit it looks very nice. Windows 8 phones will be based on the same operating system technology that powers Windows 8. They will be able to sport multiple processors and share driver technology with their bigger brother. They will be able to use Near Field Communication to exchange data with other devices, including Microsoft Surface. Programmers will be able to write games (and other programs) which will be compiled into fast running binary code that executes directly on the processor, with graphics powered by DirectX. There will be support for more screen resolutions. You will be able to upgrade the storage using an SD card. Operating system updates will be sent directly to the phone. And the Start Menu is going to get a bit bigger.

One piece of less good news, for me at any rate. Existing phones will not be upgraded. My lovely Lumia 900 will always be a Windows 7 phone. I can live with that though. When Nissan bring out a new version of the Cube I’m not expecting them to provide a way for me to upgrade my car for free. And actually I love my Cube just the way it is. A new version of Windows Phone 7, version 7.8 (where do they get these numbers from?) will bring some of the UI enhancements to existing devices, which will be nice.

It looks like all my XNA and Silverlight skills will still serve me on the new platform as well as the old one and I can still continue to make a fortune via sales of Cheese Lander on the new device…

All things considered it looks like the phone is on a very good trajectory.

Update on 2012-06-21 14:43 by Rob

Just to clarify, the way I understand it, you can continue to create XNA games for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 using the existing toolchain. If you publish the games in the Marketplace they will be available to Windows 7 and Windows 8 phone users. If you want to use any of the new-fangled options, such as directly compiled C++, then you are just targeting the Windows 8 phones and you will have to use the new SDK (as yet unreleased) to do this. 

I'm very sad that XNA does not seem to have a future in the brave new Metro world. It is a perfect platform for quick game creation and is great for teaching. I'm hoping that Microsoft aren't going to leave a great big gap in their developer offerings that could be all to easily plugged by frameworks like Playstation Suite for Vita, amongst other non-Microsoft things.

Microsoft Surface for Windows 8: Something else to want

I love my iPad. But I don’t find it useful as such. It is great for playing games or consuming data, and should I ever feel the need to paint a portrait or compose some music it might prove useful I suppose. But I like to spend my time creating programs and documents and stuff like that, which the iPad just won’t let me do. But the new Microsoft Surface should.

At the moment I’m loving my Samsung Series 7 Slate, which gets pretty close to the larger of the two new Surface devices. I’ve got my slate running Windows 8 Release Preview and it is a properly useful device. In fact at the moment it is my main computer. I’ve got two docking stations, one at home and one at work, and I now carry my desktop around with me. The machine has more than enough power to do what I want, which is use Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop, play a bit of media and browse the interwebs. It is a bit restricted in terms of built in storage, but I’ve got around 20G free at the moment and a 32G SD card plugged in the side which has got a whole bunch of movies and other stuff on there. Battery life is fine too, with at least 5 hours if I work the machine hard, and up to 8 if I take it a bit easier.

The Surface should be rather like this, but better. It has a case that turns into a touch keyboard, and another that turns into a keyboard with moving keys. It also has a kickstand to make it easy to stand on the desk. The two words that come to mind for me are “want” and “one”. The only snag with the Surface is that it isn’t in the shops yet. But when it is, I’ll be there, queuing up for a blue one.

Hi Toby

Every time I log in to Facebook it seems to have a new feature which I have to engage with. The latest is “Close Friends”. Last time used the web site I was invited to pick people to occupy this cherished category. Unfortunately I seem to have pressed one button too many, and selected a chap called Toby Russell, who is one of our first year students and a thoroughly excellent fellow, but not actually a best friend as such. For the last weekend I’ve been getting updates just from Toby on my phone. I’m a bit worried that he might think I’m doing some kind of stalking, so I’ve removed him from that list now. Sorry about that Toby.