Ultimaker and Doodle3D Offer

This is officially a good deal. 

I've had my Ultimaker printer for a while now. I made it from the kit (a great way to spend a couple of days) and it works a treat. At the moment mine is printing out a rather nice vase based on a Koch snowflake design. 

Ultimaker have released a version 2 of their printer, but I reckon there is plenty of life in the old one yet. Particularly if you pair it with a Doodle3D device that lets you create and print objects really easily over a wireless network.

And now they have a rather nice deal where you can get the printer kit, plus an UltiController and a Doodle3D device for less than 1,000 euros. If you want to get into 3D printing, and want one of the best devices on the market, you could do a lot, lot worse. 

Open Day Ego Mania

We had an admissions open day today. First one of 2014. And it was packed, which was rather nice. I did the opening talk, as I do, and then we split up the attendees to allow the prospective students a chance for a lecture experience and us to have a chat with their parents. And someone asked me a question that I've not heard before, but struck me as a very sensible one. "We've been going round universities and looking at their departments for a while now. What has Hull got that they haven't?".

I could have said we have Three Thing Game or Rather Useful Seminars or Seed Software or Freeside or any number of things. Instead I said "I work here." It got a laugh, which was nice, and then we went onto mention all of the above plus a whole bunch of other things. 

As I was preparing to answer the question I looked across at Mike, John, Brian and Neil from the department and I knew that they were expecting me to say exactly what I did.......

Domain Name Suffering

Turns out these numbers are quite important

Every now and then I do something really idiotic. I try not to, but perhaps there is a "Conservation of Stupidity" thing at work in the universe which means that every half way clever thing Robert does must be compensated for with an action of outright daftness.

Anyhoo, yesterday I was working on www.wherewouldyouthink.com, a little site for use by anyone thinking about university. It has a bunch of bits and bobs about student life and whatnot. And I was re-hosting it all using glorious Squarespace Version 6. To make this work I had to update the DNS settings for the site. And I remembered that I'd done that for this venerable site only recently, so I might as well copy those settings.  So I opened up my doman name hosting folks and made some adjustments. And by mistake I ended up changing the IP address of my two sites to completely the wrong values. This turned out to be a very, very, silly thing to do. 

The IP address is like the telephone number of a host on the internet. It is now part of popular culture. There is usually a point in a crime/spy caper where the evil guys have been posting things on the internet and one of the tech guys says "I've got their IP address, let's go..." Cue onscreen map, squeal of rubber as cars hurtle down ramps and gunfight before end credits. 

We don't like having to remember phone numbers, so we have an address book in our phones that maps names onto the appropriate digits. This saves us work and it is also useful because when someone gets a new handset you can just update their number and stay in touch.

The internet works in just the same way. Normally we don't bother with 198.185.159.135, instead we put www.robmiles.com into our browser. But something has to do the mapping of names to numbers,  and that something is the Domain Name Service, or DNS for short. This is like the address book for the internet. It is very cleverly designed, with a hierarchy of servers giving out addresses for names.

If your computer asks the local network for a host and the network server doesn't know the address of that one it will ask the one above, and so on to the very top of the tree. When a new name is added to the internet it is added to the very top site and eventually the name/address pair percolate down to the all the machines in the tree.

Each server will keep local copies of the address values so that it doesn't have to keep asking the one above it for help. But every now and then it checks to see if the copy it has is up to date. This means that if the address at the top changes it takes a while for this to have an effect. 

So when I broke my DNS settings everything kept going for a while. But then my site started to become inaccessible. And in a very strange way. Depending on which network I used, the site would either work or it wouldn't, depending on whether the DNS data was "fresh" or "old". 

Of course I figured out what had happened very quickly, and fixed it fast. But it still took the best part of a day for things to settle down and return to normal.  Oh well, I'll be a lot more careful in future when I fiddle with those numbers.

Hardware at C4DI

Robin talks radio

Tonight we had our first "proper" Hardware meetup at the C4DI. There were talks from Robin and Mike about radio hardware and one from Robert about robots. With added robot. And I stood up and waved some flashing lights around and talked about our upcoming Arduino sessions. Very, very interesting.

The first two talks, about radio communications, were amazing. It was all about the challenge of using tiny amounts of power to send signals huge distances and of designing and refining analogue circuits.

Analogue electronics has always seemed like a kind of magic to me. I'm very happy with digital signals, where things are either on or off. But analogue signals are all about signals that can take any value. The good news is that the signals obey a bunch of laws, and we can use this to build circuits that process analogue inputs in particular ways. I'm used to writing instructions for programs that tell them what to do with data that comes in. Analogue circuit design is programming with hardware. You use your maths and physics knowledge to come up with component configurations and values that should work. Then you spend ages tweaking the imperfect physical realization of your design until it does what you want.

Robin and Mike described the challenges, but also the deep satisfaction that you can get from contacting people in distant countries using hardware that you designed and made yourself. And this technology also lets you communicate when you can't get any signal bars on your shiny smartphone. 

Robert then took another hardware tack. He'd brought along a robot which contained around 34 lines of program code. Not a lot perhaps, but enough to make it navigate round the room avoiding obstacles. It even backed up slowly (with appropriate warning beeper) if things got too close for comfort. Robert did a great job of explaining how what appeared to be complex behavior was actually very simple from a programming point of view. 

Finally I got up and talked about our plans for future developments. We thought it might be fun to do some Arduino sessions getting to grips with programming the device, and I suggested that the Sparkfun RedBoard Starter kit would be a good basis for our work. Then something amazing happened, Ross Hamilton, C4DI regular and all round good egg, offered to sponsor our sessions to the tune of 10 RedBoard kits. This means that although it would be useful for you to have your own hardware, at a reasonable cost of 36 pounds each (less than the price of a video game) now you don't need to. I've set up a special part of this site  where you can sign up for more information, and I'll post any materials that we produce up there as well. 

The Configurable Joystick Project

Some time ago Simon and I were wondering if you could make a game based around a configurable joystick. My vision for this would be of you flying your trusty spaceship through, er,space, while evil aliens shot off parts which caused your controls to break.  You would be having to plug and re-plug the control elements while you were flying the ship and decide whether you needed a fire button or a back control on the joystick as you limped home. 

We thought it might be a fun little project and so we made it the basis of our Global Gamejam entry. I was to 3D print the case and build the electronics and Simon and crew would come up with a game based on it. 

This is not quite how it turned out. 

What happened was that number one son was consigned to soldering hell, while I failed to print boxes that were the right size to fit everything in. And then at the end, we found a fundamental flaw in the circuitry that rendered the controller mostly useless.  Although we did win a prize for the "Most Ambitious Failure". 

But I've stuck with it. Above you can see "prototype one". And tonight I got it fully working for the first time. Each control element holds a resistor network that allows the controller to decide which socket it is plugged into. The 8x8 dot matrix screen is to be used for status displays. I've got it talking to the PC rather handily now, next step is to integrate it into the gameplay, 

Great fun. 

More Wrestling with Pyhon

Last year Warren, Simon, Robert, Mike and myself did a sequence of 6 sources for local teachers about programming with Python. They were great fun to deliver and we've now started the second sequence, with even more teachers and some new material. 

I've even gone and bought the domain www.wrestlingwithpython.com. This is where we are going to host all the content that we write over the weeks. I've even found a way of using the a new fangled feature of my new blog site. You can sign up for a newsletter and I'll send you alerts when anything interesting happens, python wise. 

The Squarewear Arduino

I'm getting quite keen on the Arduino devices. While they are nowhere near as powerful or easy to program as my beloved .NET Microframework platform  they do come in a huge range of prices and configurations. 

The Squareware 2.0 device you can see here is no exception. It is really designed for use as a wearable device. It has nice big holes that can be soldered into press-studs or connected to conductive cloth. It also has an on-board rechargable battery and recharging circuitry for an off-board one too. There are temperature and light sensors along with a buzzer and I reckon it is a pretty complete package.   It also has a pair of quite beefy drivers so it can switch more current into devices like larger lights or motors. 

You can pick it up from Tindie for 23 dollars, which I think is a reasonable price. Postage is reasonable too, and mine got here in only a week or so from the 'states. 

I've not done anything with mine yet, but I'm sure I'll think of something...

Driving a Hard Bargain. And weddings.

An action packed day today. First we were off to a wedding fair. I'm not getting married, but I know someone who is..... Anyhoo, it was fun. Lots of free cake. 

Then, after lunch, it was on to look at second hand cars. Again, not for me, but apparently I'm the "car expert" in the family, mainly because I used to drive a very old, first generation Mini, and you had to become a bit of a car expert just to keep those kinds of cars going. So it was my job to kick tyres and wear a leather jacket in a knowledgeable way.

Times have moved on a bit. In my time in this part of the market the principle question you had to consider was "How much of this car is actually metal?" as the vehicles of the age tended to turn back into iron ore (or rust as it is more commonly known) really easily. The cars that we saw today, although they were at the lower end of the market, seemed to have all of their metal still present, which is the good news. The bad news is that a modern cars have very expensive engine management systems and other fancy electronic gizmos that are pretty much impossible to fix and very expensive to replace. My Mini had fewer electrical things in it than you could find in the door of a car today.  So rules about low mileage and as new as you can get it still apply in spades.

We  took a car for a test drive. That was fun. The car was being sold as low mileage. As in "freakishly low". As in "we replaced the speedometer last year low". The garage staff had definitely read "Pro-tips for car buyers" Chapter 1, where it is written that "You can tell mileage of a car by wear on things like the top of the gear stick and the foot pedals."  This car had a brand new gear lever and shiny pedals, which shows enterprise on the part of the sales team, but the amount of wobble in the gear linkage and rattles from under the bonnet told a story quite at odds with the number on the dial. 

As we were leaving, promising to think about the purchase, a chap came out with another salesman and examined the car we had just tested. We left with him looking around the vehicle with evident enthusiasm, opening the bonnet, peering inside and looking genuinely interested. I got to thinking that perhaps, if a sale looks like it is teetering on the brink, they get someone to come and do that in front of a prospective customer. But then I am very cynical. 

I only know two things about buying cars. One is that it is a lottery and the other is that it is expensive one way or another. You reach a point where you just have to take a deep breath and take the lowest risk that you can afford. Bit like life really.

More precious than gold...

I was up town today and was surprised to notice a low flying police helicopter overhead. Then a convoy streaked through the streets, escorted by motorcycle outriders with their flashing lights on and sirens blaring. They all stopped outside a local stationary warehouse and two men got out in full body armor and carried a bulky package into the building while snipers on the rooftops provided cover.

Once the convoy had left and the fuss had died down I wandered into the store to ask what was going on. The assistant looked up from her magazine and told me "We've just had another delivery of ink-jet cartridges."

Actually this didn't happen. But I've just bought some more ink for my printer, and from the price I'm pretty sure that this is how they arrive...

Big Graduation Ceremony in City Hall

I was Graduands Marshall at the university degree ceremony today. That meant I had to give a speech at the start to tell people what to do and then make sure that all the graduands (people who have qualified for their degree but not got it just yet) are present in the right order to go up on stage to strut their stuff in front of the Chancellor.

We were in Hull City Hall and the place was packed. I was told that there were only a handful of seats free and the place is big. I did my usual opening speech (with the appalling joke at the start) and it all went very well. I'd taken my own advice to turn my phone off and I've discovered that, lovely though the camera in my Lumia 1520 is, it doesn't work very well when the phone has been shut down.  So no pictures this time I'm afraid. 

Congratulations to everyone who got a degree today. 

Wearable Technology Workshop

I wonder what the Guides will be able to do with this?

A student in our department, Charlotte, is based in Bristol for the year and doing great things to engage folks with technology.

She has set up a crowd funded event with a local Guide Pack, which is a really good idea. But she needs a bit of help funding the event. You can find out more here. 

Departmental Research Conference

We had our annual departmental research poster conference today. With some cracking research to talk about. Unfortunately I had to head off to a meeting after the first hour, but I would have loved to stay and see all the presentations. Great stuff.

Tech@Hull Launch Event

Students have loads of ideas, inspiration and (whisper it) are sometimes capable of working really hard on their projects. Andre Hitchman, a student in our department, is keen to find ways that students can harness all this potential and get going building stuff.

So he has created Tech@Hull, a way that students from the region can get together, share experiences and expertise and make plans for future projects, collaborations, startups, you name it.....

Andre is getting sterling support from Hull Digital and C4DI who are hosting the launch event on Wed 12th Feb, 5:30pm to 7:00pm. You can sign up here. 

I'm going to go along, although I stopped being a student a startlingly long time ago. If you're studying in Hull at any of our many seats of learning, then you should come along. They've got a sponsor for the event, Campaign Monitor are paying for the first few beers.....

XBOX 360 for Education

Now, those of you with long memories will recall that XNA is a C# game development framework that is a great way to teach how to program by writing silly games. It was released way back in 2006. I've used it in our teaching ever since, written three books on the platform and I even spoke at the launch event in the UK.

You could say I rather like it.

Unfortunately, not everyone at Microsoft does (or did) and it was recently "sunsetted" or whatever the trendy name is for "made not really around any more". This was sad, but it would have been even sadder if that had been the end of the story. Fortunately, because of those wonderful folks at MonoGame, the framework lives on in a form that makes it possible for programmers to take their XNA skills and use them to make iPhone, Android, Playstation Vita, Windows Phone and Windows 8 games. And that's where the story was until today.

Microsoft UK have just done something very interesting. They've put together a package of hardware, software and educational materials that makes it very easy to set up a course that teaches programming and game development using XNA on real console hardware. And the fun thing for me is that they are bundling in all the XNA teaching materials that I've written over the years.

You can find out more, and sign up, here.  (although I must admit the website mystifies me at the moment, as I've no idea what a "Microsoft Volume Licence Agreement Number" actually is). However, Lee Stott will be able to help I'm sure. If you just want my XNA book you can find it here.

As a kind of celebration I've dug into my copious archives and found the first video of a set I made ages ago for a local video game webzine. It is a little bit out of date (Visual Studio 2008 anyone?), but still mostly valid. If you want to see the rest of the series (it's worth watching just for the animated titles - in XNA of course - and the catchy theme song) then let me know and I'll transcode and upload them. Enjoy. 

That could have gone better....

This component (the joystick) actually worked quite well, which is more than the rest of the system did.

I have strong opinions on the subject of software development. There are two things that I'm very keen on:

• Make sure that you sort out any "stoppers" (things that must be there for your system to work) as soon as possible during a project.
• Don't make any assumptions about what you are making.

Well, what's the point of making rules if you don't break them yourself every now and then?

One major stopper would be if the controller was unable to talk to the control elements. The idea is that you have to plug your fire button and joystick into sockets on the controller and during gameplay the sockets will fail and you will have to switch to other ones. In other words, a big part of the game is plugging and unplugging elements of the controller. It's kind of important that this works.  I'd assumed this would just work. It didn't. Plugging in a controller element caused the Arduino to crash, probably because as the plug goes into the socket it makes contact with power and ground signals and shorts them out.

In a sensible world I'd have checked this all out right at the start, before building anything else. In my world I left it until the last minute to find out that my choice of hardware had doomed our project. Oh well. We did win a special "Judges Award" prize - Most Ambitious Failure. The controller will rise again. I'll post some pictures once I've got a design I'm happy with. 

The judging passed off very well, with our judges doing a sterling job, going round each team in turn. Each team had to make a 3 minute pitch for their entry, which was videoed. I'll post videos, pictures and full details in an event report later in the week, once I've got all the pictures back. I wasn't able to take any snaps of the winners as I was helping with the presentations and didn't have my camera with me. 

Anyhoo, the whole affair was most excellent and everyone was very keen to do it all again. And I reckon that, since Grimsby College have been kind enough to come north of the river to visit us for the past two years, we should travel south next year and hold the Gamejam over there - if they would be happy to put up with us. With a bit of luck and a following wind, we can make that happen. 

Here's to 2015, and thanks again to everyone:: sponsors, organizers, judges, camera guys, security guards, pizza "disher-outers", general "make it workers" and of course the competitors, who made it so memorable. 

Making Hardware Under Pressure at Global Gamejam

I'd thought it might be fun to make a novel kind of controller with elements that could be plugged or unplugged. The plan is to use an Arduino Leonardo device as the controller. This has the useful ability to behave like a usb keyboard or a mouse, and also provides a serial port that can connect to a process on a host PC.

My idea was to use resistor networks in the controller elements so that the Arduino could identify particular a element by the voltage that it puts out. After purchasing some resistors and some tests by number one son the idea looked workable and so I set about designing the cases for the components. 

I'd taken Una the Ultimaker along and she was soon humming along making bits and bobs. We needed cases for the individual controls and the joystick, along with a larger box for the main controller which would house the Arduino and a led display that I planned to add. 

The rest of the team were working away busily and by the end of the day I'd got some of the boxes built and it looked like things were coming along nicely. Great fun. 

Global Gamejam Hull 2014 Gets Going

It doesn't seem like a year since the last Global Gamejam. But apparently it is. Last year we held our first Game Jam in Hull and it was amazing. We have high hopes for the second one, which starts today. We've got top level support. In the far right of the picture above you can see Lee Stott from Microsoft talking to local MP Alan Johnson (with his back to the camera) and Lindsay West and colleague from Platform Expos. And the student team on the left are definitely planning something.....

This year we've switched venues. We are in the Horncastle Building from Hull College, just across the road from the Hull Studio School were we were last time. The building is fantastic, and everyone has been wonderful, with lecturers giving up tables and chairs from their classrooms so that we can set up space for the developers in the dance studios in the building. And the Platform Expo crew have been busy setting up networking and power connections for all the teams. The Grimsby College students arrived on schedule and we all headed into the auditorium for the intro presentation from Simon.

I took this shot as students were arriving, I couldn't take many during the show as I was showing the briefing presentations and the video that sets the all-important theme.  We have around 120 students taking part from Hull College, Grimsby College and Hull University.

The way that GameJam works is that they set a worldwide theme for the competition, and we have to make a game that matches the theme. This year the theme was the phrase "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are". Deep stuff, raising profound questions about the nature of self and how we view the world. And certainly a bit tricky as the basis of that space shooter that I was planning to make, using a configurable controller that I was going to build, pretty much from scratch, in 48 hours. 

This year the "Beard Bandit" and "Spooky Elephant" teams have merged to produce a huge, eight person leviathan that will crush all before it. We have tentatively titled the collection "Elephant Beard", although this may change. 

Inventing a game to match the theme was a tricky task, and we continued the discussions long into the night. Simon was keen to make a multiplayer game which combined the attractions of Pacman and R-Type, along with a configurable controller to give an exploration of the human psyche. I could tell you more, but this would ruin the surprise when you actually play the game. Or something.

With work progressing nicely I headed home. There was a time when I could work all night on projects like these, but that has passed I'm afraid. But I'll be ready for action tomorrow. 

Comedy Rob

Since some folk think I've been doing stand up comedy since I started lecturing (it's not true, I set down sometimes) I've decided to have a go at "proper" stand-up. 

I've been given a chance by those brave people at LabRascals to do a slot at the "Geeks vs. Nerds" event on the 21st of March at the Piper Club on Newland Avenue (note to self, find out where the club is before the 21st). The blurb says: Several Fascinating and Hilarious ‘Geeks and Nerds’ Take the Stage to Tell Their Best Joke in Style. Whatever.

The organizers have taken the sensible precaution of having a proper comedian along as well. So for your 6 pound entry fee (5 if you book in advance) you also get to see the wonderful Helen Keen.  Find out more (and book tickets) here.

Lecture Capture is coming to Hull

I went to a rather interesting meeting this afternoon. The university is setting up a pilot scheme to test out lecture capture in Semester 2. With a bit of luck they will be capturing some of my lectures, which will be interesting.  Later the plan is to roll this out across the years of study, depending on how popular it proves. 

The technology looks very impressive. We can either capture on our laptops or use an lecture capture device installed in the theaters. The idea is that within an hour or so of the lecture the material could be available to view via the web or offline. 

The system that we are testing comes from echo360. Should be fun. 

The Single Headlight Theory

Driving home tonight I saw four cars with broken headlights. Me being me, I started to wonder why,

I've decided that it is the cold weather. Turns out that the electrical resistance of metal falls when the temperature drops. The lower the resistance, the larger the amount of current that can go through the filament. The greater the current, the more chance of the lamp failing if it has developed a weak spot somewhere. 

This is why bulbs often go "pop" just as you turn them on. The peak of current that they receive before the filament has warmed up and started to glow is usually when they are going to fail.

Up until now we have had a pretty mild winter, so lights with weak spots have had it easier. But over the last couple of days it has been proper cold, and I reckon that the extra current that has gone through the bulbs has finished them off.

That or I just noticed them more....