The next meeting of CodePen Hull is at 6:00 pm on August 14th at the c4di. I'm not speaking at this one, but I really want to go along to listen to everyone else.
Developers in the Hull area are very welcome to come along too. Sign up here
David Keel of c4di explains what we are about
Spent an afternoon talking about robots and chatbots. In other words, a good afternoon. We had folks from Reckitt Benckiser over to talk about a new partnership with c4di. We were showing off stuff what we had made and I brought along a few Hull Pixelbots.
Another satisfice Hull Pixelbot customer...
I really love it when I show someone a bit of tech and they go "Oh, so that means we could use this for......." That's a big chunk of what c4di is all about, and there was a lot of it about this afternoon.
Then we went straight into a Hardware meetup. It was great to see everyone come along, Ross brought his beautifully made Hull Pixelbots and we had a good natter about how to control them.
Great stuff.
Finally, a blog post that isn't a thinly disguised plug for one of my books....
Anyhoo, today I'm plugging the Hardware Meetup at c4di tomorrow (Thursday). Ross is going to bring his robots, I'm going to bring some of mine, and we are going to do some robot things that might include rumbling.
You're welcome to come along and marvel. Sign up here. The meetups are in the ground floor of the awesome c4di building. We start at 6:00 pm and go on until 8:00 or until we run out of things to talk about (which usually means a bit later..)
If you've any interest in hardware (computer or otherwise) then it would be great to see you.
I think we had around sixteen robots at the hardware meetup tonight. Some new members, and the possibility of getting some cut from plastic. At which point we can have even more....
Great fun.
Update: Please note that it's the robots I'm having cut from plastic. Not the new members. Apologies for any confusion.
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
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.
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