Hull Knowledge Factory Student Talk

At least now I know what happens if I try to use the Panorama feature of my camera to take a picture of the audience. Sorry if you were cut off.

I did a talk for a bunch of Knowledge Factory students today. These are folks who will be joining us at the end of the month as students, but have come along early to spend a few days getting a taste of university life.

The subject of the session was the joys of "Making Stuff" and it was great fun. Thanks for being a lovely audience folks. During the talk I mentioned some bits and bobs and I said I'd post references for anyone who fancies following up on the things I talked about.

Arduino

Arduino is the name of a family of embedded computers of different sizes. These are the kind of computers that you would put inside a device to control what it does. I use them in my wedding lights and other gadgets that I've made. You program them in C using a very easy to use framework that you can download for free from the Arduino web site.There are versions of the framework for Mac and PC. You put a program into the Arduino device and it runs that program each time the power is switched on.

You can buy Arduino branded devices but they are a bit pricey. It is much cheaper to go onto eBay and just search for Arduino. A company called Sintron makes some very nice kits of parts to play with, these start at around 30 pounds. Once you have the kit just search the web and you'll find loads of libraries, sample code and videos to get you started. 

If you want some books to read about the platform I'd look for books by Simon Monk. He has written some good Arduino primers, plus a few other fun books. 

Programming 

There is no such thing as the best programming language in the world, but I quite like C#. You can get a free C# book, plus a lot of teaching materials and sample programs, from here. 

If you want to learn some Python (and why not, it's great) we have a course of sorts here. 

3D Printing

My 3D printer is an Ultimaker. I call her Una and I made her from a kit a few years ago. You can find all my 3D printing posts here. 

Blogging 

Bloging is a great way to practice writing and maybe even make a name for yourself. I did a Rather Useful Seminar about blogging. You can find it here. 

Space Cheese Mining Takes Shape

I spent today building the First Year Assessed Coursework. Every year we implement a game as part of the course. The games usually involve Space and Cheese. This year we are doing "Space Cheese Mining". Players move around the board picking up cheese and stealing it from each other. I've built my implementation, added some AI players and turned them loose over 10000 random games.

Each game takes around 12 turns to play and the distribution of winners seems about right, although I think I'd try to avoid playing as red......

I make a new game every year so that people can't use "the magic of search engines" to find confusing (and probably wrong) samples on the internet. I'm looking forward to see what folks come up with on this one. We've got a "Cheese Battle" extension mode too.

Hull Freedom Festival Day 2

We went back to Hull Freedom Festival again today. What with the weather being so good an everything. Still awesome. They had these amazing flags down at the pier. Apparently they mean something, but I'm not sure what.

There are lots of reasons why I love living in Hull, and the Freedom Festival is definitely one of them.

We grabbed a drink and drifted from stage to stage in the sunshine.

I've no idea who these folks were, but they sounded awesome.

They had this "Giant Battleships" game going on Two teams at different ends of the street playing on huge boards and using signs and binoculars to communicate the moves. Fantastic.

.. and the Deep looked wonderful in the sunshine.  Here's to next year. And of course City of Culture in 2017.

Hive at the Hull Freedom Festival

This is the weekend of the Hull Freedom Festival. The BBC set up some tents containing all things digital, and the folks from Hive (Hull Immersive Virtual Environments) were there showing off their VR tech. Great fun.

The Mystery of Flickr Pricing

I'm a strong believer in paying for stuff I use on the internet. I really like the idea of a service provider having a stake in making me happy. I've been a Flickr Pro member since 2005. But I'm not sure if I'm going to continue.

I've just received a notification that my Flickr Pro subscription is up for renewal, which is fair enough. But what isn't fair is how they appear to be hiding the cost of this. If I click on the "information link" in the notification email (which doesn't tell me the cost) I get a page which tells me of the "benefits" of a subscription. But nothing about the price. Even the FAQ page is useless in this respect (see above).

Turns out that I have to pay nearly fifty dollars a year to stay on the "Pro" service level, which strikes me as rather expensive. Having had a look at the benefits over the free service I don't think anyone would want to pay for that. So I'll be cancelling my Pro subscription. If the charge had been twenty and they had been up-front about it there's a very good chance that I'd have stuck with it.

C# Yellow Book 2015 Bananas Edition Available

The latest edition of the C# Yellow Book is now available. This is the one that we will be using in our First Year Programming course at Hull.

There have not been a huge number of changes to the text, but after a number of requests I've added around 60 working code samples which are keyed to the text. You can use these to explore the programming concepts as you read the text.

You can download the text and the examples from here.

Lensbaby Fun

My Amazon delivery came up trumps today, so I toddled down to the union and picked up my package. Then, when I got home I got the adapter out and attached my Lensbaby lens to my Fuji camera. As you do.

I've had a Lensbaby for a while. It's a "bendy" lens that you can move around in its mounting to change the way that images are focused. Turns out that if you put it on the camera and then point it at the ceiling you can get some interesting results after a bit of image processing.

Amazon Lockers on the Hull Campus

Amazon are one of those companies that divide opinion a bit. Every now and then they hit the headlines for something unseemly that they are doing, or planning to do. Seems to me that they behave like every other huge company with lots of shareholders and stuff and a desire to stay in business. Like Starbucks, Google, Apple and so on. And they are very useful when you have an urgent desire for a particular kind of cable and an adapter that will let you attach Canon lenses to your Fuji camera.

Anyhoo, I placed the order today and I was pleased to find that there are now some Amazon lockers on the university campus in the Student's Union. I can get them delivered there and pick up the bits and bobs tomorrow, which is nice.

Pipe Closure

Well, we got closure on our pipe situation. Just as I suspected, a tiny hole had opened up in the copper. This was in the process of getting bigger when we noticed it.

The good news is that it could have been worse. The bad news is that we now have a smoking crater where the downstairs toilet used to be. We'll have to wait for it to dry out a bit before we put the floor back in.

Marrying Mr. Darcy Card Game

What with Winchester and Salisbury just down the road, this would seem an ideal place to have a go at Marrying Mr. Darcy.  It's a card game where each player takes the role of a character in the story, all trying to find married bliss. And perhaps a fortune.  

You navigate events, trying to build up your character and beauty in a way most appealing to your chosen beau. And then there's a flurry of proposals and counter-proposals, after which you find out who won. You don't have to end up with Darcy to win. I ended up marrying the Colonel, and my added charm and beauty points got me onto the winners podium. 

The game has some nice period touches and is great fun to play. I think I could have used a few more chances to scupper my opponents though, but if you like the story I think you'll enjoy the game.

Winchester Cathedral

Since we were just down the road from it, we took a trip to Winchester today. Lovely town. Got a great big cathedral in the middle. Yesterday we were in Salisbury, today Winchester. I reckon this is cathedral country. 

Anyhoo, it is a lovely place. It is huge, with a fantastic atmosphere. It is also the resting place of Jane Austen and there is a lovely memorial to her. 

They also have some fantastic stained glass windows. I had a go at taking pictures of one or two. They are surprisingly tricky to get right. I ended up taking different exposures and then merging them to get something that looks reasonable. 

Driving Fun at Thruxton

Today was a special day for one of the family. Number one son got his birthday treat, in the form of a driving experience at Thruxton. Thruxton is a lovely little racing circuit in the south of England, near Salisbury. They have a number of experiences you can sign up for, including a chance to drive something like the car you can see above. 

Number one son didn't get to drive the Lambo (as we call them) but he did get a twirl in a Porsche and a Formula Renault racing car. He had a great time, and we had just as much fun watching him whizz around the track and trying to take photographs. 

We all attended the briefing for the racers and I worked had to absorb all the advice about corner apexes and car balance. I'm sure these'll come in handy for driving the Cube to work. 

Leaky Pipe Fun

So, we were all set for a few days away. Bags packed. Cameras charged. Route planned. Then I heard myself asking a question that nobody wants to hear just before a trip away.

"Can you hear running water?"

Number one wife was even less happy to hear me ask than I was. But the thing about questions like this is that you can't really un-ask them. Instead you have to twiddle stop-cocks and faff around until you've determined that yes, there is water running when it isn't supposed to.  And now you are half an our late leaving. Not good.

We've been here before a few times. It seems that our house was made with pipe with a penchant for leakiness. So we turned the water off at source, left a key for the plumber and headed off into the distance. 

Who knows what we will come back to? But at least it shouldn't be underwater.

San Francisco Picture

I may never get around to writing up our holidays. But I don't see why this should stop me showing you some pictures. I'm quite pleased with this one.

When is Next Tuesday?

Outlook is kind of clever. It will find phrases in emails and offer to do sensible things with them. If it sees "11:00 next Tuesday" it will offer the option to make an appointment for that date.

Thing is, if you get the email on a Monday a human knows that "next Tuesday" is a week tomorrow, not tomorrow. Since if it was tomorrow the sender would have said "tomorrow" rather than "next Tuesday".

If you see what I mean.

Unfortunately Outlook doesn't. Which is why I had some minor palpitations when something I thought was comfortably distant in the future appeared a lot sooner than I was expecting....

Needy OneDrive

I love Windows 10. Working well for me. Apart from the way that OneDrive has suddenly become all needy on me. Nary a day goes by without one of the files that I've worked with throwing up a cry for help like the one above. Usually I can fix this by just opening and closing the document, but it is a bit annoying to have to do this.

One thing I have noticed is that if you get a "Couldn't contact the server to get the latest version" message (which I seem to get a lot more often than I should) you can go into the files menu and force Word to use either the server or the local version, removing a potential conflict. But then I usually end up saving everything in a different file anyway just to be safe which is a bit annoying.

But then again, OneDrive did save my bacon today when I, ahem, made slightly more dramatic changes to a file than I intended. All I had to do was drop onto the OneDrive site and pull back the previous version, which was very nice.

Favourite Shirts

The 80's band Haircut 100 released a song called "Favourite Shirts". Here's one of mine, which I found while we were doing some tidying. The link doesn't work any more I'm afraid, but you can find out more here: https://www.microsoft.com/net/multiple-platform-support

The Tallest Man on Earth Sings

A singer called "Tallest Man on Earth" is going to catch my eye every time. They were giving away free iTunes tracks from him at Starbucks and I grabbed the card, found him on Groove and downloaded his latest album on my Music Pass. Probably not how Apple would like their marketing to turn out. But the music is good. Catchy tunes well played and sung.

Star Wars Movie Exclusive

I've been given special access to the script for the up and coming Star Wars movie.

I can therefore exclusively reveal that the first two words that are spoken in the movie "Star Wars - The Force Awakens" are "Good Morning".

3D Printing with iBox Nano

Update: Please read the comments section of this post for the latest on this device. 

Thanks to a combination of poor time management on my part and digging up an absolutely crucial road at rush our on the part of Hull Council I wasn't able to get to the MeetUp at C4DI tonight. But when I did get home I thought I'd fire up the iBox nano printer that arrived last week. 

The printer was a Kickstarter project. I've had pretty good success with Kickstarter. I've only had one Kickstarter project come seriously unstuck - I'm looking at you Agent watch. The iBox project promised a light powered high resolution printer for less than 300 dollars and was too tempting to pass up. So I backed it a while ago (I think it was November) and then waited.

The device was a bit late arriving, but I don't mind too much about that. Lots of people get very upset when these projects have delays, but I'm happy to give them time to get it right. As long as something turns up at the end. I'm still looking at you Agent watch....

The iBox is powered by a Raspberry Pi and uses a WiFi adapter to connect to your network. You set up prints on your PC via a web interface that works really well. There are a few buttons on the machine and some lights to tell you what it is doing. 

So I carefully filled the vat with resin, rubbed the build plate with some sandpaper to make it nice and rough so that the print would adhere to it, lowered the plate into the resin and set it off. 

My first print failed. All I got was a little lump of goo on the bottom of the vat. Oh well. I've got quite good at consistent printing with Una my Ultimaker, but I remember how much fiddling it took to get to where I am now. 

It turns out that, just as with Una, the key to successful printing is the print height. When Una squirts molten filament at the build plate it is crucial that the very first layer is just the right height for the filament to stick to the plate and provide the starting point for the print. With my iBox printer, which doesn't have a name yet by the way, the crucial thing is the distance of the build plate from the bottom of the glass dish, or vat, which holds the liquid resin.

The idea is that the build plate is a tiny distance from a sheet of teflon tape stuck on the bottom of the vat. The UV light makes some of the liquid resin in this gap turn solid. Then the printer pulls the build plate upwards, taking this layer of solid resin with it. Only on my first print the solid bit stuck to the bottom of the vat instead, hence the mis-shapen lump that was produced. So I re-adjusted the build plate and tried again. 

The printer does look great while it prints, like some kind of illuminated mini-tower block. It is completely silent and runs off a standard Raspberry Pi power supply. I'd be quite happy to leave it printing to itself, although you do need to come back and top up the vat with resin if you are printing something tall. 

This time it worked fine, and I got a tiny iBox logo stuck to the build plate. The output is pleasingly solid, although they say you should leave it in the sun or under a UV light to completely cure the resin. 

So I thought I'd go for broke and tried to print a tiny bunny. This was a disaster I'm afraid, with another lump of goo forming in the wrong place. However, I'm pleased to have made something. 

I'm not sure if I'm going to be OK with this liquid resin stuff. Everywhere you see dire warnings about the danger of the liquid touching your skin. I've got some disposable gloves on order but I spent big chunks of the evening fretting about the resin escaping and simultaneously burning a path to the centre of the earth (it's supposed to be corrosive) and poisoning me. 

I guess I might get used to it. It's totally different technology from printing with Una providing a new set of problems to deal with. I feel like a heart surgeon who is not very good at it and has switched to brain surgery in the hope that might be easier. I'm impressed with the iBox machine though. It really does work as advertised. I can now think about producing tiny components.  If I can get over the fear of the resin. 

If you are after a good, cheap 3D printer I think I'd still advise you to go for a conventional, filament powered, one like Una. There are some quite nice devices out there in kit form. Take a look at the nFire device on Kickstarter too. But if you fancy pushing the frontiers a bit and you want small, higher quality, prints then iBox is worth a look.