Surface Dial controlling a Hull Pixelbot

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A simple demo of an app that uses the Surface Dial with an application that posts messages to Azure IoT Hub and controls a HullPixelbot.

I've managed to get my hands on a Surface Dial. It's a spiffy new PC control that acts like an, er, dial. You can use it to manipulate value in programs in a very precise and controlled way. The dial works best with the Surface Studio (which I've not been able to get my hands on) but you can use it on any PC which has Bluetooth. It appears as a Human Interface Device and has a really simple API that you can use to make any of your programs dial controlled. 

I wanted to use it to control the movement of my Hull Pixelbot and, after only half an hour or so of coding I had it working. 

It's not a particularly direct form of control just yet, but that is because of the way I'm sending control messages via the Azure Internet of Things hub, which is not really created for such rapid messaging, but it does work, which is rather nice.  I made a "hotel vision" video of the program working. I'm going change the code to make a more direct connection to the robot. 

Of course, what I really want is two dials on the PC, one for speed and the other for direction, but just at the moment you can't connect two Surface Dial devices to a single PC. 

MVP Summit Day 4

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MVP Robot ready for action. 

Day 4, and I don't think I'll be breaking any non-disclosure agreements by telling everyone that I went to a session about Microsoft Azure Internet of Things today. I took a long a Hull Pixelbot that I happened to have brought with me, and showed what my particular style of connected device looked like. Folks seemed quite impressed, which was nice. 

First Day in Bellevue

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The weather in Bellevue is un-seasonably nice. It's much warmer than where we came from. We went for a walk this morning without needing heavy weather gear, which was nice. 

I have no idea who is getting the love here. Or even if it was always the same person.

In the evening we had a great time at an MVP event in the Georgetown area of Seattle. There are lots of fascinating bars and whatnot, one of which had an amazing collection of pinball machines.

They even had a Twilight Zone machine, which was awesome, even though I still can't play it.Thanks so much much to the Microsoft folks who did such a great job of setting up the event.

Flying Icelandic

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They have the Northern Lights built into their planes

I've not used Icelandic Air before. But I will again. First up, their flights to Seattle are a bit shorter, since they fly further over the poles. And they found me legroom seats, which was very nice, But the most important thing to be aware of if you fly Icelandic is that there are no free meals and only free soft drinks. I don't actually have a problem with this. It does mean that I get the food that I want and that my brain is not strained deciding between "Chicken or Pasta".

 

An Idiot on eBay

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Can you work out what's in these two packages? Neither can I. 

I've been raising funds for the purchase of a Playstation VR (of which more later). Part of this involved selling some computers that I deemed surplus to requirements. So I took lots of pictures and, being a clever person, I boxed the computers before advertising them. Good plan.

Then I sent the wrong box to one of my customers. Less good plan.

It just goes to show that my capacity for stupidity is expanding all the time. As I taped them up I reflected on whether or not I should label each box so that I would know what is in it. I thought there'd be no way I could make a mistake, which of course is the reason why I did. 

Fortunately my customers are being understanding and it should all be sorted soon.

Robots at Future Decoded

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Click through for the full 360 degree experiences....

Like they used to say in "The A-Team", I love it when a plan comes together. In this case the plan was to get on a train, travel to London, do a session at the TechDays Online part of Future Decoded and then get the train back in time for tea. 

The plan worked. The journey there was smooth and on-time. All the demos that I did worked perfectly, in spite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I was using my phone as an internet hotspot for the robots. And we finished in time, which is very important. 

Thanks to Martin for MC'ing the session and providing a voice of reason. And thanks to Claire for inviting me. The videos will eventually be online here. If you want more details you can find the presentation slide deck here. 

mDNS Manager for Windows 10 IoT Universal Apps

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You know how it is. You have built a robot army that you're going to use to take over the world, but first you have to get them all under your control. And if you are using tcp/ip (the world domination network of choice) then you have to give them all an ip address and then put those addresses into your world domination program.

mDNS makes this much easier. It's how Apple's Bonjour network discovery works. A device running mDNS is discoverable on a local network. You can find all the hosts and their ip addresses, along with the services they are providing and the ports. Windows 10 provides a Watcher service that you can use to discover all the machines on a local network, but it is a bit of a pain to use.

So I've written a tiny mDNSManager class that you can use to create and manage a watcher object which will start a search for devices, tell you when it finds one and also present a list of all the devices it has found so far. It's very easy to use. 

You can find the source code for both the manager and a simple demonstration application on GitHub here. 

If you want to just use the manager in your programs you can install it from NuGet:

Install-Package RobMiles.mDNSManager

It works on any Windows 10 device, including the Raspberry Pi, and it makes it much easier to connect to a large number of devices. There are mDNS samples available in the example applications for the ESP8266 devices in the Arduino IDE.

I'm using this to allow me to create a Universal Application that will control a bunch of HullPixelbot devices without needing to know their ip addresses in advance. 

Broken Wire Bonding

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Thanks to number one son for the picture

Nothing like a bit of father/son bonding over a soldering iron (in my case not  a very good iron). 

Number one son drove up to see us this weekend and on the journey discovered that the remote lock for his car tailgate didn't work any more. A quick search of the interwebs suggested that the cause might be a broken wire. Indeed. And it turns out that the rear wiper on our car had broken for what was probably the same reason. 

So, what with it being a nice day and all, we went outside and peeled back a couple of rubber boots. As it were. Turns out we were both right. In my case doubly so as two wires had snapped. So we passed the soldering iron back and forth rather like a pipe of peace as we made good the damage. 

I find it really surprising that the wire can fail like this, and that car manufacturers are happy for it to happen. After all, we haven't actually spent days on end opening and closing the tailgates of our cars, these have broken after fairly light use. Oh well, as long as they last through the warranty, I guess that is what counts here....

C# Yellow Book 2016 "Cheese Edition" Now Available

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The latest release (or is that escape) of the C# Yellow Book is now available for download. No massive changes to the text, but a few tweaks and corrections here and there. And cheese. 

You can download it (along with sample code and whatnot) from here.

The Kindle version will be updated soon. I'm just grappling with adding an index. (why does making Kindle books have to be so hard?)

 

And, while we are on the subject of books what I wrote, you can now buy printed (or Kindle) copies of my lovely new "Begin to Code with C#", which was published a few weeks ago.

It's a great introduction to programming (said the author) and gets you creating useful and fun applications and games using my magical Snaps framework.