Exploring the Isle of Man

Got some holiday coming up? Fancy somewhere really nice? Go to the Isle of Man.

Never been there before, but I’ve been missing out. It has scenery that will give Yorkshire a good run for its money (which is saying something) and a fantastic coastline. It gives you the feel of being abroad (different money) without the hassle of being abroad (english money works fine too). We got to spend some time today exploring the island. The Isle of Man is a bit too near UK to be guaranteed good weather, but we found a good bit and headed for it. As you can see above, I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This gives the pictures a bit more impact. Sometimes this means they look a bit more like they did when you took them. Other times it means that you can go for artistic effects like these.

I’m using Photomatix Pro to combine three images taken at different exposures. The program has a bunch of pre-set configurations which can be tweaked to get some very nice effects. And the good news is that the forecast is even better for tomorrow.

C# Yellow Book 2012 Now Available

The latest version of the C# Yellow Book is now available for free download. You can get it here, or you can press the spiffy new short cut on this page.

There are a few changes. I’ve fixed all the mistakes that have been sent in (and probably added a few more). The section on Graphical User Interfaces now covers XAML rather than Windows Forms. And the text now mentions “The Wizard of Oz”

Gadgeteer LED Matrix

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to get hold of some LED Matrix modules for Gadgeteer. These give a decent sized array of 64 leds. They are really easy to program, and they use the GHI DaisyLink protocol, which means that they can all be controlled from a single Gadgeteer port. Each device links to the next to make a kind of daisy chain, which is where the name came from I guess. Each of the display modules contains an ARM processor which you can load with your own software (although you’ll have to be a pretty good developer to do that).

One other neat thing is that I managed to power four of them (as you can see above) using a single USB output from my PC. I was worried that having 256 leds powered from a single port might cause problems with the current available but they work fine.

At the moment my program just displays random patterns (like those computers they had in 70’s movies) but I’m going to have a go at displaying scrolling messages and even lo-res pictures. I reckon you could even get a very simple pong game working on a 16x16 display.

Staying with Gadgeteer, if you want to find out all about how my Tweet Printer works, there is a full writeup on the Gadgeteer website (http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/) where it is a featured project at the moment. I actually gave the first printer to the Gadgeteer team, I’m presently building a replacement.

USB3 Need for Speed

This car is presently in the entrance to our department. I’ve no idea why it is here, but it looks great and fits the subject. And I want to have a go at driving it….

Along with my Windows 8 installation I’ve also been working on beefing up my main machine a bit. I take a lot of photos. And I mean a lot. And some of them come out. The rest stay on my hard disk as I never throw anything away. And now the disk is full. Maplin (of all places) were selling a Seagate 3Gbyte USB3 disk for a very good price (less than 130 quids) and so I bought one and then hopped onto ebay (only the best will do) and spent another ten quid on a USB3 card, because my PC motherboard is one year old wildly out of date and doesn’t have the new high speed interface.

I popped the card in this evening. Then I took it out again, because I’d forgotten to remove the blanking plate from the PC case. Then I put it back and off we went. Seems to work OK. One tip, if you install a card like this in your PC and it has PC power supply connector on it you really should connect this up. Otherwise devices might try to draw more current than a PCI Express slot can deliver, which will end badly in any one of a number of ways.

Anyhoo, tests indicate that I’m getting around double the speed of my older USB 2 drive on the connection, up to around 58 MB/sec on the larger files. Not quite the 10X increase that USB3 is supposed to offer, but at around half the speed of my internal SATA drive I can live with that. These numbers come from the spiffy performance display that Windows 8 gives you for file copies:

Seeing as they are not raw speed readings, but rather more “real world” in their usefulness, I’m a happy bunny at the moment. The number above is a bit low because I’m moving lots of small files around, which always restricts the throughput.

London Fun and Games

This is my first attempt at taking a panoramic picture of the lovely new Kings Cross station. I’m sure there will be more in the future.

This morning we woke up late after all the excitement . In fact, we were so excited last night that we didn’t notice that the car taking is back to the hotel delivered us at the wrong place. For a while we sat in the bar having drinks and charging them to a room that didn’t exist. After we had been ever so politely reminded of this issue we grabbed a taxi back to “the other hotel called the Hilton that is in Kensington” for bed.

Today was spent having a great lunch and shopping for presents appropriate for a Pearl wedding anniversary. My suggestion, a Pearl handled revolver and one bullet, was not well received (and potentially dangerous) and so earrings and a watch with a vaguely pearlescent case were purchased instead. Oh, and the earrings were not for me.

Rob on Newsnight

I got an interesting phone call on Friday afternoon from Hannah, a researcher on Newsnight. They were doing a piece about the Imagine Cup and she wondered if I would like to come down to London and take part in a discussion about the competition. After subtly checking to see if it was a wind up by saying “You’re not a student are you?” I decided that it was all above board and agreed to hop on the train on Monday, a situation only slightly complicated by the fact that it was my wedding anniversary the following Tuesday (Solution: take number on wife with me).

And so at 10:30 tonight I found myself sitting chatting with Dame Evelyn Glennie, someone who I have long admired. Such a great person. The subject for the discussion was the project from winners of the 2012 Imagine Cup, Team Quadsquad, who had created a glove that converts sign language into speech. You can see the video of their finalist presentation here. We were debating the value of the technology, and how/if it could be fitted into the lives of the hearing and speech impaired.  For me the best thing about the night was that we were there at all, and that student teams had produced a device which provided the basis for discussion and development of the technology, something that the Imagine Cup is all about.

The whole thing was over in a trice and then we were ushered back out of the studio where I managed to arrange a blurry photograph. We then headed out into the night, Dame Evelyn to go back home and us to celebrate by having a drink in the wrong hotel. Great fun. I think the show will appear on iPlayer at some point in the future. I think the machine at home has recorded it. At least I hope so…

Update on 2012-08-22 11:48 by Rob

Thanks for the link Phil:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01m7zjs/?t=27m46s

Control the Horizontal and the Vertical

I got an email today from a student looking for an interpolation technique to create smooth curves from a series of points. The reason he was after this was that he was making a game. His problem was that the technique looked a bit complicated and hard to implement on the target platform.

My advice in these situations is always “don’t sweat the complexity”. The simplest way to do this kind of thing is as a series of straight line segments. These are easy and quick to implement and should let you get something working really quickly. If the gameplay works OK, just stick with that technique and work with it. Remember that the player enjoying the game doesn’t know that you originally wanted to add curves. Only put the curves in if your game needs it.

If it turns out that lines would not be appropriate for your game theme, just change the game to one where lines do make sense. Remember that games are like “The Twilight Zone”. You control the horizontal and the vertical. The player is entering your universe, so you can define it as you like. Straight lines or curves, it’s all up to you. But start simple.

The Correctifier

 

We found the source of the pinball problem from last night. An extra we had bought had been supplied with incorrect wiring, sending power to one of the opto leds the wrong way. It seemed to survive this mistreatment though, and we just had to add my “Correctifier” (patent pending) which swaps the wires to make them the right way round.

This is the kind of wiring that we are working with, behind the flashing lights…..

Pinball Hacking

The best, in fact the only, good investment I have ever made was in my Twilight Zone Pinball machine. I got it ages ago from Richard, when he went over to the USA. It is huge, noisy and doesn’t always work very well. A perfect fit with me.

Tonight we spent some time playing with the machine in the best possible way. We took it to pieces and added some parts that I got in Australia while over there for the Imagine Cup. I’m always blown away by the sheer mechanical complexity of these things. Anyhoo, we managed to replace one faulty part (the clock you can see above now has four working lights) and break another. So I guess you could say we broke even on the day.

Hello from Windows 8

Windows 8 proved very easy to install. I believe in starting from a clean slate (sorry) so I backed up my entire machine last night and this morning at 8:30 I started the upgrade by booting from a CD, deleting all the partitions from the disk and starting from scratch. I had the machine working under Windows 8 well before 9:00. Looks very good so far. One thing to be aware of (although this might just be me). We have an eduroam WiFi network at Hull which is authenticated using a self signed certificate. When you connect to it you sometimes get a message saying that the certificate is not as secure as it might be, and do you really want to do this. You just have to say OK to continue to connect.

When I first installed Windows 8 this didn’t work. The machine just refused to connect to the university WiFi. It knew that the password was correct, but it didn’t give me the option to ignore the certificate. However, once I’d connected via the wired network, and logged onto the machine with my Windows Live account it worked perfectly. It might be the case (although I’m really just guessing here) that Windows 8 insists on having a “proper” login before it will enable the option to ignore certificate errors like this. I’d love to know if you have hit this problem too, so put a comment on the end of this post if you get problems.

As for me, I’ve installed Windows Essentials and got Live Writer working (hence this post). Next it is on to Visual Studio 2012 and the other stuff.

Bye Bye Live Mesh

Microsoft have released the latest version of Windows Essentials. When you start to install it you get the dialog above. The title “One Last Thing” is interesting, it is a kind of “By the by, we are about to take something away that could break your way of working” statement. I’m pressing Cancel just at the moment.

The writing has been on the wall for Live Mesh for a while. Pretty much ever since SkyDrive started doing the same kind of thing, i.e. let you transparently share files around your computers and back them up in the cloud. I’ve been a fan of this ability for ages. If you take any (or indeed all) of my machines and throw them in the river I won’t necessarily thank you, but I can take such vandalism in my stride because I use Live Mesh to sync all my work. Getting a new machine is quite relaxing for me as I just have to introduce it to Live Mesh and all my data appears as though by magic. The only restriction here is that Live Mesh limits you to 4G of file space in the cloud, but since we are talking about working data here (all the other important stuff is back home spread over a bunch of disks) 4G is fine.

It’s unfortunate that Live Mesh is going. The SkyDrive replacement works the same way, although it only synchronises via the cloud apparently. With Live Mesh two machines would directly exchange files if they found themselves on the same network. Live Mesh also provides a Remote Desktop feature which SkyDrive doesn’t. There have been a few complaints on the interwebs about the demise of Live Mesh. I think this is really a bit unfair. After all, it’s not as if it was a service that anyone has paid for. If someone gave you an apple pie every day for a while and then stopped it would be rather unfair to complain. Particularly if they then offered you a rhubarb crumble instead. If you want a premium service you can go for DropBox, which is excellent but not as cheap as I would like.

As for me, I’m presently copying my files from my Live Mesh folders into SkyDrive shared ones and I’ll press OK as soon as I’ve got all the files in place.

Update on 2012-08-16 07:48 by Rob

There is actually one feature of Live Mesh that I will really miss though, and that is the way that you can only synchronise certain folders with particular machines. On my "disk space challenged Samsung Slate" I only synchronise the files that I really need to have available on that machine, saving precious storage space.

When I switch to Skydrive I'll have to sync my entire Skydrive folder, camera roll and all, which will lose me a few GBytes. On the other hand, Skydrive gives me more space, so I guess we are back to apple pie vx rhubarb crumble again....

IR Blasting

I’m working on content for next semester at the moment. One of the modules that I deliver is a second year course called 08249 Electronics and Interfacing. In this module we get to fiddle around with robots and stuff. Last year we created a controller and a slave robot. To send commands between the two devices we were using wires link the two together.

Next time I want to use infrared instead. This has proved quite an interesting challenge. Infrared is “light you can’t see”. The wavelengths of infrared signals are outside the range of the human eye, although some cameras can see them (as you can see above), where the LED appears to be lit but to the human eye it is off. I’ve actually taken pictures in the dark using an infrared sensitive camera (most mobile phone cameras pick up IR) and “painting” with a TV remote control…

However, f you want to use infrared signals to transfer data you can’t just shine an infrared light at a receiver. This is because sunlight contains lots of infrared. The receiver would not be able to distinguish the remote data from sunshine. So remote controls use modulation to make their signal stand out from the background. Modulate means change up and down. Rather than shining continuously a TV remote flashes the control signal on and off 38.000 times a second. The receiver detects signals which are changing at that rate and ignores any others, so that it can filter out background noise. This is a bit like a sailor who can tell a flashing lighthouse lamp from the light of the moon.

If you buy an infrared receiver device it will have this demodulation behaviour built in to the hardware, which is very useful. Unfortunately you don’t get this when you buy a transmitter. An infrared LED (a light that shines with infrared light) just works as a continuous light source, and so you can’t use it directly. Fortunately the .NET Micro Framework has a number of tricks that you can use to make a modulation signal. So I connected an infrared e-block to a GHI FEZ device and got started. And I found it doesn’t seem to work very well.

The reason (as I found by using my phone camera) is that the infrared led doesn’t shine very brightly. When I took a look at the circuit I found that the IR led is connected directly to the output from the microcontroller. The microcontroller can’t produce much power, and so the light was very dim. This is the same as what would happen if you connected a big speaker to the headphone output of your phone. Because the headphone output can’t deliver much power, the sound produced would not be very loud. They’ve probably designed the circuit this way so that it is fine for short range communications, but can’t produce signals that could travel a long way and affect other devices.

I don’t care about that, I just want more power. So I took a look at the visible LED e-block. This has a transistor to amplify the signal from the FEZ controller and provide more power. I decided that it would be worth swapping the visible LED for an infrared one. So I did this. Actually this part is quite funny. I very carefully took the LEDs off the two E Blocks using a solder sucker and lots of patience, and then, equally carefully, I soldered the infrared led back onto its original board. Idiot. Fortunately I managed to unsolder it again and, as you can see above, it does work and I can send an infrared signal a reasonable distance (although I’d like to send it further).

Next step is to create some kind of message protocol to send commands to a robot. Infrared commands are not very reliable (that’s why your TV remote repeats them continuously when you hold the button down) but I reckon we should be able to send enough to tell the robot what to do. Great fun.

Update on 2012-08-15 15:06 by Rob

Ha. Sorted. I can now send pulses of different lengths to the robot and make it move and stop. Later we can start using pulse position modulation and maybe even serial data.

How to get more Blog Traffic

Danny Brown, one of our students, is celebrating his 10,000th blog reader. Well done sir. I tell all my students to start doing things, and get a blog out there about what they are doing. I seem to remember that Danny had a blog before he came here, but I note that quite a few Hull students are now active bloggers. You can find out what they are up to at http://hullcompsciblogs.com/ There are some really good blogs to follow up there covering everything from Raspberry Pi to video games to Gadgeteer.

I’ve been blogging for very many years and do it for fun. Although it is nice to get traffic as well. If you want some tips for a successful blog, well, here are some of mine.

Track your users. If your blogging site doesn’t provide tracking of hits then install something like Google Analytics. It costs nothing and it gives a great insight on how much activity you are getting. This can be quite depressing, but it is always useful to know when you have done something that attracts interest.

Make sure you have metadata that makes sense. I’m not going to suggest Search Engine Optimisation as such here, just common sense things to help people find you.

Integrate your blog with social media. I use Windows Live Writer (part of Windows Live Essentials) for creating blog posts. That provides plug-ins that I can use to tweet and post on Facebook when the blog is updated. You can use If This Then That (an amazing service that I must devote a proper blog post to later) to do this for you automatically. And remember that comments on your posts will not arrive on your blog posts, they will now often arrive as Likes on Facebook or Tweets.  This means that if you want to have a dialog with your readers you have to go out and look for their comments.

Some content gets a lot less interest that others. The absolute best content you can create is stuff that solves problems. If you make posts that tell people how to do things then you will get a lot of traffic as people find your answer and link through to it. You will also get traffic via search engines. Pick a subject you know a bit about, or are learning yourself, and put up blog posts with answers to the problems that you hit. One reason Danny has had so much success is that he has provided some neat technical answers (with all that a reader needs to solve the problem) along with the other content. Readers might not care about the place you went last week, or what you think about the current government, but they do like being able to solve problems. The only downside with useful content is that such readers are “fair weather friends” who will bump up your traffic for a day or so, before it drops back down again. The way to address this is to put plenty of stuff on your landing page that will encourage them to look around and find other things to read.

Enjoy your blogging, keep it regular and leave the readers thinking that you like talking to them. You don’t need to post every day. Only a fool would do that. But a regular blogging heartbeat is a good thing. If you take a break don’t worry, or feel like you have to “fill in the gaps”, just come back with a good post and it will be like you never went away.

Olympic Closing Ceremony–Wish You Were Here

I wasn’t at the Olympic Closing Ceremony. Wish I had been. I normally hate these kinds of things, seeing them as overblown feasts of self congratulation.

This one was different. It was great. Even the music was amazing. All of it. And when they started with the intro to “Wish you were here”, and then, at the end when the guy on the tight rope shook hands (see 70’s Pink Floyd album cover reference above), well, words fail me.

I’m pretty sure that there will be someone on Radio 4 tomorrow moaning about the way that the whole thing showed “nothing about what being British really means”. (actually I’m very sure, I’m writing this on Monday morning and I’ve just heard it).

What daft thing to say. To me the whole Olympics thing has been about Britain saying “Actually you know, we are pretty good at lots of things. Including putting on a darned good show.” Well done Team GB. At every level.

Bristol Balloon Festival

We went to the Bristol Balloon Festival today. It was probably advertised as “An Event for all the Family”, because all the families in Bristol seemed to have the same idea. My goodness it was busy. We had a bit of a queue to get into the car park, and then a bit of a trek to the balloon launching area. We’d heard on the way that, because of high winds, there was not going to actually be a balloon launch, but we’d already spent such a long time queuing at that point that we thought we’d stick with it and see what there was there.

The weather was great, we did get a glimpse of a balloon (see above) and it was a great evening.

Discount Kinect Start Here! with Moo Cards

It’s the other side of the card with the discount code which is the interesting bit….

I’ve always liked Moo cards. In fact I like them so much that ages ago I wrote a “Moo Card Splitter” program that takes images and makes them into a Moo Card jigsaw on Flickr. I’m not sure if it still works. Maybe I’ll make a Metro version that uses the Windows 8 Metro interface that looks like Metro nothing like anything else that doesn’t resemble a rather cool, Metro-esque interface using the Segoe font.

Anyhoo, Microsoft Press like Moo Cards too. Today I was sent a little box full of Moo cards about my new book. (I never get tired of saying “My new book”..). On the back of each card is a discount code that will get you 40% of the paper version of the book and 50% of the ebook. Now, of course, I’d prefer you to pay full price. The book is certainly worth it. But if you want a low cost way of getting hold of “the premier C# Kinect interfacing book written by a tall bloke with a name that rhymes with “Mob Riles” then I can recommend it. I’m carrying a few of the cards in my wallet, so feel free to ask me for your own personal card if you bump into me. Actually, I’d prefer it if you didn’t bump into me, just ask for the card.

Alternatively, email me with the title “I’ve just bumped into you” and I’ll send you a “Virtual Card” with the discount code on the back.

Update on 2012-08-13 10:36 by Rob

I've just discovered that Flickr has moved on since I wrote the application and now my Moo Splitter no longer works.

Sorry about that. I'll see about making it work properly.

Amazing Pulse Gadgeteer Device

Scarlet put me on to this amazing device that transforms internet data into a graph. It was made using six servos which are driven by a .NET Gadgeteer processor. You can use it to show you the weather forecast, how busy your Twitter feed is, or anything that you can pull from the web and make into numbers.

You can find out more about the Pulse device here.

C# Yellow Book Updates

Spent today working on the next version of the C# Yellow Book. I’ve removed the errors that folks have reported (thanks for that, and keep them coming) and I’m updating the section on Windows Forms interfaces to cover WPF and XAML. It should be available for free download at the start of September.

Tetris Lights

Number one daughter told me that I might like to get some of these lights. She’s right. They’re great. The bottom Tetris piece (the blue bar) is connected to a power source and the others then light up when you stack them above. I spent a happy ten minutes getting them into this vaguely plausible arrangement. I’m trying to get them stacked with the top flat… If you are a Tetris aficionado you might want to seek them out.

Scary Nexus 7

The Nexus is proving quite an impressive piece of hardware. Battery life is shaping up to be very good. I’ve found out how to make the screen brighter (turn on auto-brightness) and got auto-rotate to work (for some reason it is turned off by default). I’ve also found some useful applications, including one that provides access to my Skydrive storage amongst other things. I’ve loaded some films and music onto it and they work very well and look rather good. Then it did something that totally baffled me.

I took the Nexus 7 to work today. Left it in my bag. Didn’t bother connecting it to the campus network. After a while it beeped, so I got it out to take a look. It had received a new email message. Which was rather impressive, bearing in mind it didn’t have a network connection. Then I took a closer look at the WiFi settings. It knew all about the university network, along with a couple of networks at places it had never been to.

Strange.

Eventually I remembered, around a year ago I had a brief fling with a Nook Color, another Android powered tablet. I found the Nook great for reading books (that’s what Barnes and Noble made it for) but a bit slow for anything else. But I did take it to work and connect it to the campus network. And of course I’d registered the device using my Google username. Which means that the Nook had uploaded the WiFi settings to my part of the Google cloud which then made them available to any other Android device that I register.

I’m not sure whether to be impressed or frightened by this. On one hand it is very convenient for me not to have to mess around with SSIDs and passwords. On the other it is a bit scary that Google are holding all my (along with lots of other people’s) network credentials up in their cloud. One of the boxes that I ticked next to a page of licence agreements (does anybody actually read these) probably gave them permission to do this, but I now worry a bit that if I get a security breach on my Google account it also gives people access to my home network, should they choose to register their own device and then stand outside my house, browsing files the other side of my network firewall…

This is a reminder of just how clever and connected modern devices can be, and just how much you have to be aware of the dangers of all this cleverness.