Ross is bringing his Hull Pixelbots in to c4di on Thursday for our Hardware Meetup. I'm going to bring mine too, to create The Largest Gathering of Hull Pixelbots ever seen on the planet.
If you want to come along too (and maybe bring your own Pixelbot) we start at 6:00 on Thursday in c4di. You can sign up here.
c4di is having some great evening events at the moment. On Monday we had CodePen, and today we had Joe Stead talking about future platforms for .NET development. Well presented and thought provoking.
Some interesting musings on how programmers are defined by the languages and tools that they use and how important it is to be looking at what's out there and developing professionally. Plus a look at some shiny new stuff.
I've come away with a list of things to investigate, and I'm pretty sure that most of the people there (and it was a good sized audience) were the same.
I love things like CodePen. Anything that gets developers talking about what they are doing is absolutely brilliant in my book. These kind of events are great for students too. They learn that developers are just like them, just a few years further down the tracks.
c4di are hosting another CodePen event next Monday evening, 5th of June. There are three speakers, and I'm one of them. I'm going to introduce folks to the Internet of Things by way of the Hull Pixelbot. I'm looking forward to seeing what the other speakers are up to as well.
The event is free to attend and anyone can come along, it all starts at 6:00 in the evening at c4di. You can sign up here.
Radio 1 invited us to take part in the Radio 1 Academy this week, which was nice of them. There are four days of events encouraging folks to engage with the "creative" arts. I was especially pleased to be asked to go along because I do computer stuff, and I see this as incredibly creative.
I had a very happy day showing people the robots, letting them control then with their phone and then telling them that the "magic ingredient" (i.e. the bit that links everything together) costs two pounds fifty. Which is less than the price of a burger and chips.
With a bit of luck, a few people who had never thought of getting into programming will turn up at one of our c4di hardware meetups and get involved in making stuff. I took a bunch of pictures during the event, you can find them here.
Won a prize today for speaking in an elevator. Not done that before. Only at c4di.
As I walked into the building yesterday I was asked if I'd like to take part in an "elevator pitch" competition. The idea behind an elevator pitch is that perhaps one day you'll find yourself in a lift with someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. So you've got the time it takes to get to the tenth floor to convince them to give you a hunk of money to let you follow your dream.
I was told I had sixty seconds in the c4di elevator (up to the top and back down) to convince someone I'm worth backing. I wasn't really prepared for it, but I said I'd have a go, and off we went.
I'd got a Hull Pixelbot with me (Crystal Masie as it turned out) and so I decided to wax lyrical about the joys of building tiny connected robots. When I'd finished I asked how much time I had left to speak.
Forty more seconds.
So I went on a bit more about getting people making and coding, and my dream of building an arena containing 100 Hull Pixelbots wandering around, just to see what they'd do. Finally the time was up and I went back to my room to do battle with the Microsoft Bot Service. As you do.
Today I found that I'd won the competition, which is awesome. I got a fantastic trophy and a lunch at Nibble.
I love that c4di are doing things like this. You can watch the community of developers building up thanks to the efforts of Dee and Jess. And getting practice telling people what you are doing and why it's a good idea is vitally important for professionals today. So everybody who took part has got something out of it.
Great fun.
ITN are doing a feature about Hull and c4di are in it. Yay! John asked me if they could get some shots of Hull Pixelbots in action.
Could they ever.
They were most helpful. After they'd finished I asked If I could take a shot "For the blog". Not only were they happy to help, but the cameraman set up his camera again so that I could get a good looking result.
As far as I know, the item is going out on News at Ten on ITV (that's channel 3 in old money) tonight.
Update:
Well, the items came and went. And there were Hull PIxelbots there. Kind of "blink and you miss it" stuff, but even so it's still News at Ten....
Just had one of our best Hardware Meetups of the year. Not that the others haven't been great, but at this one we had loads of new members, lots of excited talk and some really interesting hardware that folks had brought along. We've still got room for more folks though. If you fancy coming along to the meetups you can find out more here.
If you're having bother finding us, we're in the bottom of the shiny gold c4di building. Doors open at 6:00pm or so.
We started our NASA Space Apps Challenge at c4di first thing this morning. We've got teams looking at the NASA challenges and getting to grips with them. We've got satellite trackers, fire reporting systems, solar power simulations and orbiting robots. And another 24 hours or so to finish.....
..although of course it's really all about the stickers...and the pizza....
The team at the start of the day. Click through for a 360 degree view
Well, that was fun. By the end everybody had a robot moving around and using a distance sensor to notice things. Thanks to c4di for hosting, Robin for providing invaluable support and everyone for getting so absorbed in their building that they forgot two coffee breaks and I had to order them out of the room for lunch.......
Intense concentration....
Dileepa made this lovely little video about the c4di. I'm in it for around two seconds, blurry and in the background. Just how I like it.
I love hackathons. I actually won a prize at one once. And at another I was part of a team that won a special "most ambitious failure" award (perhaps less impressive). I also love hackathons because they are so good for those that take part. They broaden your skills, let you try out new ideas, meet new people and stretch yourself a bit. They look good on your CV, you can talk about them at interviews. And you get to eat pizza. Lots of pizza.
I'm helping to run a hackathon at the c4di at the end of April. It's in partnership with NASA, and the winners of the Hull heats are entered into the NASA round of the competition for consideration for worldwide acclaim. There'll be a bunch of space related themes that we aren't allowed to tell you about just yet, and all kinds of fun things to do.
It's over the weekend of the 29th-30th of April. You can work all night, or you can nip home for a few hours sleep (which is what I'll be doing). We'll be working at the c4di down at the waterfront, so if we are lucky we should get a nice sunset and sunrise over the water to spur us on.
You can sign up here, and you really should. I'm after team members; get in touch if you fancy working with me.
Another good night of discussion at the c4di hardware group. I always leave the meetups with lots of ideas of things to do. We'd love to see you too. Find out about the next meetup here.
Just finished writing a lecture for a session tomorrow in the university. Yiannis has invited me back to give a session about starting a business, so at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon I'm going to be back on the campus talking about "Success Through Failure".
Looking forward to it.
We had another really excellent Hardware meetup tonight at c4di. What surprises me about the events is that we get people walking in with awesome projects and things they've built. Last time we met up Andrew was showing us the thing he'd built above. Just because he'd only got one of his two robot motors hadn't stopped him from building something really neat.
The two "eyes" at the front are a distance sensor. You can place Andrew's device in the middle of the room and it will spin round and generate a polar plot of the distance of objects around it, measured by the ultra-sonic distance sensor and transmitted via WiFi to a web page hosted out of the device itself. The leds are to show the motors being driven, and just to look awesome.
Tonight we also had Brian showing off how he was using Blink to wirelessly connect sensors together and also provide remove monitoring via an iPhone app. And Steve demonstrating a really neat Raspberry Pi powered wildlife camera which automatically converted it's camera from infra-red to normal during daylight hours.
Great stuff. If you want to come along and show us what you're up to (or just find out how you can build something awesome) you can sign up for our next event here, or just come along to c4di and say hello at our next Meetup on Thursday 6th of April.
Got up bright and early to go and work down at c4di today. I've got all my robots set up there now (they've got plenty of space, which is nice) and I wanted to work on remote configuration of robot settings.
I was up so bright and early that the car was actually frozen solid. And as I drove into town a clear bright morning turned into something a bit foggy. But this did make for some nice photographs when the mist cleared a bit.
Some seagulls
c4di looking shiny
We had the world's largest gathering of Hull Pixelbots today at the c4di. We're trying to come up with a turn based strategy game which uses Hull Pixelbots as pieces. Quite fun.
At the end we loaded a simple "move and turn" program into the robots and turned them loose. Half way through a wheel came off one of the robots. Can you tell which onw?
Too busy to take any snaps at the meetup, here's a picture of some fireworks
I went to the Hardware Meetup with a bunch of things to do. Didn't get to do any of them because there was too much interesting chat. Which was great.
A few new folks turned up too and they were asking what to do to get started. Here's "Rob's Handy List of Hardware Fun Things to Do"
The clue's in the name. We play with bits of hardware. This doesn't mean that you need to spend a lot of cash though. You can start with just an Arduino and a few leds and switches. The Arduino is the embedded device that we like to start with. It's easy to program and cheap to buy.
The best place to buy an Arduino is probably eBay. The one you want to gets started is an Arduino Uno (or compatible). Search for "Arduino Uno". You should be able to pick one up for less than a fiver.
An Arduino on it's own can't do much (although you can flash a light on it) so you might want to take a look at one of the kits that are available. You could start with one that contains a bunch of lights and switches and a few more advanced components. These are also on eBay; I quite like the ones branded Sintron, although others are quite good.
You program your Adruino using a PC, Mac or Linux device. The Arduino software is a free download from here.
There are some getting started tutorials here that you might find useful. You can also search YouTube for Arduino videos; these are especially useful if you want to know how to use some of the more exotic devices in the kits.
Once you've got the examples working, have a go at something of your own.
If you end up making something impressive, bring it along and show us. If you try to make something and get stuck, bring it along and we'll try to help out. We meet up approximately every two weeks at c4di in Hull. You can find the agenda for the meetups (and lots of other things) here.
Getting started
The c4di is a great place to work. I can say that with confidence because this week I've started working there. My home office is great, but there is nothing quite like "going out to work" to get things done. I've been given some space at c4di for a while to just "do interesting things" and I'm going to try and do just that.
I've made some progress with the next version of the HullPixelbot. Up until now the robots have been remote controlled, which is nice, but I really want them to be autonomous, i.e. able to look after themselves.
"That's easy" you say, "Just put a program into the robot.". Well yes, I could do that. The Arduino that I'm using is very easy to write code for. But you can only change the program by plugging the Arduino into the computer again, and I don't want to do that. Worse still, I want to be able to send the same program to many (perhaps even 100) robots at once.
So I've done what any self respecting Computer Scientist would do at this point. I've invented my own programming language, especially for HullPixelbots. It's not a very complicated language, but that's OK. It's a bit hard to understand, but that's OK too, since I'm going to write a little program that will generate robot programs and distribute them.
Today I got HullPixelbot Code working and added the ability to download programs via the serial port. I'd thought it would take a few days to get this working, but I had most of it working by lunchtime. Like I said, a cracking place to work.
I'm going to be setting up some events and whatnot over the next few weeks, but if you happen to be in the c4di please come and say hello. Just walk towards the coloured lights......
On the way out I noticed that they were preparing the tidal barrier.
Sam drives some robots..
I took my working pixelbots down to c4di and gave a talk tonight about how they worked. Before the talk I set out a small part of my robot arena and we all had a bit of fun steering them around using my chatbot client.
Thanks to everyone who came along. Some very useful conversations. I left with some good ideas for improving the system. I'll be putting the presentation and the code up soon. Keep watching the blog for details.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
