The Pimoroni Mood Light Rocks

I just love a busy desk. 

A while back I ordered a Mood Light kit from Pimoroni. It never came (sad face). I told them about this and they dispatched a replacement. The same day. With no quibble or question (happy face). It arrived a couple of days ago and today I found enough time to assemble it.

With it being based on the Raspberry Pi I had to find a video display and a keyboard for it to get things going. I ended up using my video projector of Logo Blaster fame and a little remote keyboard that didn't work until I connected it via a usb hub.

The good news is that the Raspberry Pi experience has come on a lot since my early days with my Pi B. The great news is that the kit itself is awesome. Lovely attention to detail, even down to little rubber feet for the stand. It all fits together in a very impressive way and worked first time. If you're thinking of building one, you'll need to solder the connectors onto the Pi and the display device. If you've not soldered before it might not be the best thing to learn on, but if you've soldered a bit you'll have no problems. You'll need a power supply and a micro-SD card but nothing else, the kit has everything and comes beautifully packed in a nice plastic box. 

Once I'd got the Pi going and set up remote access I was able to do everything via my PC, so I could put my keyboard and monitor away. You control the lights (there are 32 neopixel leds on the lamp) from Python, so there is no limit to what you can make the light do. 

I'm very impressed with the kit and the Raspberry Pi Zero that it is based on. The fact that you can get the thing for thirty quid (or even less if they are having a discount offer running) makes this thing astonishing value. You should get one. So much power and potential for less than a full price video game. I'm going to get the Scroll Bot next.

Amazon Echo in Hull

Our Amazon Echo works really well. Except sometimes. The radio service, on TuneIn, frequently stops or breaks up.

If we ask again for the station it plays again for a while and then stops. It used to do this a lot a while back, but it seemed to have settled down.

I'm not sure if it is the WiFi in the house or the networking in Hull. Anyone else in Hull with an Echo had a problem with radio playback?

Return of the Kaossilator

The Korg Kaossilator is a nifty device for making weird sound effects. I got one quite a while back and it has provided the sounds for quite a few projects. Today I was working on Begin To Code Python and I needed a suitably awakening tone for an alarm program that I'm writing. So I dug out Mr. Kaoss.

I remember years ago that one of the marketing pitches behind Duracell batteries was that they didn't leak.

That is not the case now. Ugh. But after a thorough clean up we are back in business and making amazing sounds again. If you're interested, the sound I ended up with is here:

Apple Airpods

Number one son told me not to buy them because I couldn't afford them. 

So I bought them. Go me.

I've got a book on the go, I'm working quite hard (for someone supposed to be retired), and there's a prospect of another book after this. And besides this was close to Fathers Day. Enough said. 

I wasn't expecting to be able to buy them in Hull, but KRCS in Hull had just received some stock and they did look very nice.  

I don't regret the purchase. The Apple Airpods are quite pricey (after all, they are Apple) but their integration with the iPhone and the Apple watch is very impressive. You don't "pair" them in any kind of Bluetooth sense. You just open the dental floss like box they come in and your iPhone asks if you want to use them. And then they just work. With all your other Apple stuff as well. You can also press a button on the case to activate pairing with other Bluetooth devices, but I've not done that yet. 

The earpieces look like slightly longer ordinary earphones, minus the wires. And that is very important. You don't realise how annoying headphone wires are until you get a wireless pair. There's no sudden jolts when the cable catches, or walking away from the desk and watching your phone being dragged off the desk onto the floor. 

They fit perfectly in my ears and I've never really worried about them falling out. Even when wearing them to mow the lawn. Your experience might be different, I'd advise you to try a pair if you're thinking about getting some. 

The headphones work well with the Apple Watch, although I have a bit of a fight making them work with the watch if the phone is nearby. 

The sound quality is good enough. More expensive headphones sound better, as do some cheaper ones. The earpieces don't block out all external sounds, but that's probably a good thing bearing in mind you're going to wear them out and about, and you probably want to hear warning shouts about oncoming busses. Apple happen to own a headphone company and so they're not going to make their headphones sound better then ones they want to sell you for twice the price.

The sound has an emphasis to mid and high frequencies, the bass is there but you won't hear it unless you're somewhere quiet. 

The earphones are powered by tiny rechargeable batteries which are charged from a slightly larger battery that lives in the little case they come with. The case has a lighting connector that you can use to charge it. The earphones will go for around three hours and the case can charge then a few times before you have to get a wire out and plug things in.

The earphones detect when you take them out of your ears, so the music stops when you stop listening. If you only take one earpiece out of the box you can listen in mono. Double tapping the earphone (which probably looks quite silly) triggers Siri. Each earpiece has a microphone in it and uses some fancy audio beam forming shenanigans to pick up quality sound. I used the setup in a conference call and everybody seemed to understand me. 

Of course they are expensive. But they do what they say on the tin. I've used them a lot because they just make using headphones easier. 

Great Gardening Gloves

These are the exclusive "Goldfinger" edition

I never thought I'd be blogging on matters relating to gardening. Perhaps I'm growing up.

Shudder.

However, if you are in the market for some proper tough gardening gloves, ones that actually protect your fingers from all kinds of pointy nasties that you find when taking out a holly bush, then I strongly recommend these, which I got from the local PoundLand. And they cost only a pound.

They're made of leather off-cuts, with the pleasing result that no two are exactly the same. 

Solar Cell Silver Lining

I think another reason I was grumpy yesterday was that, while mowing the lawns, I managed to take out some of our solar powered lights. I'm not always a huge fan of lights in the garden to be honest. Last year we got some blue lights that must have previously been used on an aircraft carrier to guide planes down to land. To say they lit up the neighbourhood was something of an understatement.

But the ones we got this year are much nicer, giving out a very pleasant glow. At least they did until I wrapped their cable around the strimmer and tore it out of the power box. Oh well. Only ten quid to replace. And I now have a battery box and solar cell to play with. And enough space in there for an esp8266 and a power inverter. And fifty leds in a chain to make a "pimped up" Pixelbot.

Dell XPS 18 and Windows 10 Creators Edition

Just pull out a few wires and all will be well......

Last night I broke my Dell XPS 18 tablet. Rather sad. I've had the machine for a while, and I really like it. I'd never be able to get another one, I don't think anyone will be daft enough to try and make this kind of machine again. It's an 18 inch Tablet PC and up until around 8:35 pm it was running Windows 10 a treat. 

Then suddenly it wasn't. 

What it was doing, was flashing the power light red for half a second and then white for seven flashes, which were repeated until I got bored and held the power switch down. Just before I went to bed I searched for some BIOS error codes and found that seven might mean that the graphics hardware is toast. 

Just the thing you want to do before trying to have a restful night.

This morning I had better luck. A proper search revealed that there is an issue with the power supply management on Windows 10 which means that my trusty tablet had put itself into "zombie sleep" mode during the installation of some updates. The way to fix the problem is to remove the back, unplug the battery and CMOS battery for a few minutes and then restart the machine. Full story here

Now you're talking.

The fix worked fine, and I've now got Windows 10 Creators Edition running handily on my "Big Ole Tablet". There is still something dodgy about things though. Entering Sleep mode makes the computer really hard to wake up (in fact it usually results in a crash). I've no idea why this is, or how to fix it, or if it can be fixed, so I've solved the problem by doing the following, which I call my "None Shall Sleep" plan:

  1. Open the power settings and tell the computer never to Sleep.
  2. Change the Power Button action from "Sleep" to "Nothing". This is a good thing to do on the Dell anyway because the power button is stupidly hard to catch by mistake and very irritating when it takes the machine away from you. 
  3. Remove the Sleep option from the power menu. 
  4. Turn off the "Fast Resume from Sleep". I'm not sure what this does, but I've got an SSD in the Dell now, and it boots pretty darned fast without any fancy shenanigans. 

If you've got an elderly Dell machine that has been broken by a Windows 10 upgrade you might want to look into this issue. The effect of the failure really does leave you thinking the hardware is dead, and I was very pleased when mine sprang back into life again. 

Amazon Echo now in the UK

I've mentioned the Amazon Echo before. It is rather nice. Up until now the only way to get one was to import it yourself, which is what we do. Works a treat, as long as you are OK with only knowing the weather in Seattle. 

Anyhoo, after my positive review Amazon have decided to release it in the UK. Which means all kinds of useful UK services including trains, news and weather. I'm not completely sure how much of the american version will work once there is a "proper" version of the device in the UK, but even with it's slightly truncated feature set we've found it pretty useful. 

Amazon Echo

So, thanks to the wonderful food at Fabulous Freddies in Chicago we find ourselves at the airport with slightly more cash left than we expected.  

During our trip we formed a habit of getting  takeout from Freddies rather than going out for a meal. (If you ever get a chance, try the grilled chicken sandwich. Awesome.) 

Anyhoo, Turns out that I've got just enough dollars left in my pocket to buy an Amazon Echo from Sharper Image at the airport. So I do. But before I part with any notes I check on the interwebs, in particular the very useful Amazon Echo in the UK site, to see if it would work. The answer is, pretty much mostly, and so the purchase was made. 

Turns out it works really well. No pressing of buttons, just say what you want and the Amazon Cloud will try to get it for you. You can ask it questions and it will answer by referring to Wikipaedia among other places. You can even ask it to tell you a joke, but the results are even worse than mine, and that's saying something... 

In the 'states you can make it play music from your Amazon Prime account, but that doesn't work in the UK just yet. However, it is said you can upload some of your music collection and have those played on demand (although I've not tried it yet). Pandora and Spotify are also integrated into the device.

You can use a trigger word to get the attention of the echo or press a button. The default trigger is "Alexa.". When you speak the trigger the top ring lights up and points at the direction the sound came from. It reminds me a bit of the eye in the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. However it's much more friendly than that. The voice recognition is spot on for me, I don't even have to put on a fake american accent to make it work. 

If you want to listen to the radio you can just say "Alexa. Play BBC Radio Four" and the device (hard not to refer to it as she) will connect to TuneIn radio and do the business. The same goes for Bluetooth music playback from your phone, which just works.

There are also a bunch of services that the Echo can drive. They are packaged as "skills" and you can add them to your echo via a web interface or via speech. There is a connection to If This Then That (or IFTT) which means you can use the Echo as a gateway for voice control of devices around the house. Quite a few other home devices are also integrated as skills. 

Amazon are even running a competition at the moment, asking you to use their libraries and the Raspberry Pi to make novel embedded, Echo controlled applications. Find out more here.

Getting the Echo to work in the UK was a doddle. You can manage the device from an iPhone or Android phone app but these are only available in the US. However, there is also a web based interface that worked fine for configuring the device WiFi and getting it working. You have to have an Amazon.com username, or have a US username linked to your UK one. It just worked for me. 

It's only a matter of time before the Echo goes on sale in the UK I reckon. It is a real glimpse into the future. The sound quality is well up to that of Bluetooth speakers of an equivalent price and the voice activated services are genuinely useful. They will get even better after a UK launch when we can set our timezones and locations to this part of the world. Worth a look if you like your gadgets talkative.

In praise of big PCs

I must admit I'm quite liking having a big PC again. I've been using Surface devices as my main machine for a while and they are great, but there's nothing like a big lump of hardware to get things done. One surprising thing is how quiet the PC is. It contains big, slow-moving fans rather than small, whizzy ones. I don't hear it "rev up" when I start doing something difficult. I'm using Onedrive to synchronise with the other machines, which is working quite well so far. 

HTC Vive Fun and Games

I thought I'd spare you any pictures of me in shorts with headset stuck on my face....

The reason for my new hairy new PC is that I ended up getting an HTC Vive VR system. We finally got it working today. The delay has been technical, but it has also been spacial, in that it has taken me this long to clear an area large enough to use the system. And there is now a huge pile of stuff in the corner that I need to find somewhere to put... 

Anyhoo, the system worked wonderfully. The Vive comes with a couple of "lighthouses" that spray infra-red positioning signals all over the room. The headset and the controllers detect these signals and use them to place themselves very accurately in 3D space. What with it being our house and all, I was able to actually screw the lighthouses to the walls and furniture, and they work really well. There's going to be a bit of fine tuning required, and I have managed to try to put my hand through a window sill once so far, but the experience is proper and it is real. 

Next step is to play a few games, get a feel for the system and then pull down some of the software development kits for the platform and have a go at making stuff. And the developments with Windows Holographic are very interesting too. 

Building a PC

It's been a while since I've built a PC from components. Actually, it's still going to be a while, since my role in building this one was mostly confined to watching number one son put the bits together and asking questions like "Is it supposed to bend like that?" during the construction. 

The answer to the question is "Mostly yes.". I remember from years ago that there are some parts of the process, for example plugging in the memory, where a certain amount of "proper force" is required. We built the machine yesterday evening and left it running all night to give Windows 10 a chance to get its ducks in a row.

The installation of Windows 10, from a memory key, went really well. The only minor hiccup was when we discovered that the network drivers for the motherboard aren't part of the Windows 10 distribution and so we needed to install them by hand (from a CD-ROM - remember them?) before we could get on line. But apart from that it was smooth sailing (I'm writing this in the full knowledge that the next thing that will happen is a catastrophic failure of something or other). 

Anyhoo, to celebrate our success number one son bought Doom for the PC. It's available from Game, in a fancy box with extras for 27 quid, which seems good value when you consider that the download from Steam, which comes in no box whatsoever, costs 40 pounds. 

The PC kit included a fancy graphics card and we had the game running in 4K resolution on the big telly at a steady 60 FPS. Which was nice. 

Got Lightstream

Another achievement unlocked. That's two in less than a week. Got LightStream fibre optic broadband. at home. My data doesn't come down a wire any more. It comes as light. Right into the living room. I could even undo the cable and take a look at it. Although this would do horrible things to my data rate (and probably my eyes too).

To be honest I was a bit meh about it. I've never had that much of a problem with the old wired connection, although it was annoying if Windows 10 tried to download an update when we were watching iPlayer. But having had it for all of four hours or so, I'm hooked. Stuff just happens faster. Or instantly. It even seems faster than the network connection in my office at work.

According to the speed test web site I'm getting around 10 times my previous speed. And that is over WiFi or USB network dongle. I've not tried a proper wired connection yet. I wonder what going back to work will feel like. 

Kodak Photo CD Fun and Games

Twenty years ago, when I was still learning how to take photographs, Kodak Photo-CD was supposed to be the next big thing. Keeping photographic negatives and prints was going to be so old-fashioned in the new, wonderful, digital age. 

Of course I bought into it. I got four or five rolls of film encoded onto this magical, future-proof, media. Of course, twenty years on all my prints and negatives are still around and usable. And the Photo-CD? Well, if you dig  around long enough you can find a program called Irfanview which will convert the files into something you can view again. I spent a happy hour or so this evening getting a bunch of pictures of the disks and passing them around the family.

The one above came out sort of OK, although I seem to have got a perfectly focused foreground and blurry background. So, twenty years ago I was still making the same mistakes I'm making today, just with a lot less technology to help out. 

Ricoh Theta S 360 Degree Camera

click through to see the 360 degree scan on Flickr

click through to see the 360 degree scan on Flickr

I've seen the future. And it mostly works. On Saturday number one wife was injudicious enough to let me roam unsupervised down Tottenham Court Road, one of the more gadgety parts of London. Of course I came back with something. It's actually something I saw at the Gadget Show Live, but at the time I didn't think I knew enough about the device to be sure it was worth bothering with.

Anyhoo, with a bit of background research and a slight price drop I was able to nip into a shop and emerge with a Ricoh Theta S. It's a camera, but it does something that no other camera I've seen can do. It takes a full 360 panoramic picture in one shot. It is fitted with two wide angle lenses which are back to back. Each of them gives a 190 degree field of view, which means that there is enough overlap for two images to be stitched together to form the panorama. 

This is what a raw image looks like. The horrible pink bit along the bottom is my thumb and hand. It seems that things automatically know what to do with these images; when I uploaded one to Flickr it automatically uses a panoramic viewer when the image is opened. There's also a viewer you can use for your PC (which seems to produce higher quality images than the browser based ones) and an app for your phone (iPhone or Android) that you can use via WiFi to configure the camera, take pictures and download and view the shots. You can even display them as two images that you can pan around, which is perfect for Google Cardboard or the Samsung VR headset.

As far as image quality is concerned it is not great shakes. I think a good phone camera could probably out-perform it. However, you can set the ISO value (lower is better) and it has some HDR settings that improve things a bit. The images are fairly sharp, particularly close up, but I don't think the lenses have any form of aperture control and the shutters are electronic. 

However, for me the thing is not the absolute quality, but the fact that it can do this wonderful thing at all. I've had great fun playing with it. The pictures you get really give you a feeling of being there like no single image can. You can take video (although the quality is not that great) and you can also attach the camera to your PC and live stream 360 degree video.  You can send your images up to Google Streetview to add detail to places on the map. There's even an api that you can use to control the camera from your own software, and Ricoh seem pretty active with firmware upgrades and new software features. There are even some "professional" (i.e. expensive) things for sale in the App Store which take bracketed exposures and use them to create game environments.

There one hardware issue with the device itself that you need to be aware of though. The two lenses at the top stick out in a way that invites trouble. It's pretty much impossible to put the device down on a table without it being open to expensive damage. I've 3D printed a cover for the top which helps a bit, and I'll try to create a proper case of some kind.  The device itself is pleasingly chunky and very well made apart from that though. It has 8Gb of storage built in, enough for more than a thousand pictures or 25 minutes or so of video. Using it makes you feel a bit of an idiot though (or at least it did me). I ended up holding it on my head, which made me look very strange.

But I think when people see what this can do they'll want one. I also think that it would be a perfect feature to add on to a phone, if you could find a way of getting the field of view without the protruding lenses. It makes every picture into a selfie; but not in a particularly bad way. I know that whenever I go anywhere from now on I'll take this with me and get shots that I could not get any other way. Well worth a look if you want to see what everyone will be using in a couple of years.

Ho Hum Gadget Show Live

These speakers are intriguing, but I think they have got left and right the wrong way round. 

These speakers are intriguing, but I think they have got left and right the wrong way round. 

I must admit that the Gadget Show Live this year was a bit disappointing.  It isn't actually the highlight of my year, but I like to think that it is one of them. On a par with Fish Pie at the Magpie in Whitby.  But after this show it has dropped a bit in the rankings, down to perhaps home-cooked sausage and baked potato level. 

Previous shows have had large scale exhibitors such as Sony, Microsoft, Dyson and the like showing off their latest technology. This one had a lot of much smaller stands, but nothing that really stood out.  There were some 3D printers, a chance to queue for a long time to drive a Tesla very slowly a short distance and a huge number of slightly different drones. And some hoverboards. But nothing that really impressed. 

There was some fun to be had and after all, at my age a trip out is a trip out, but I will be checking the list of exhibitors very carefully before I sign up for the next one. 

They did have some BBC Microbits there though

They did have some BBC Microbits there though

HTC Vive Hands-On

When we found out that there were doing live demonstrations of the HTC Vive just down the road from us in Leeds it was only a matter of time before we headed over there. We'd heard tales of how busy the event was, and of queues over the weekend so we got up bright and early and shot down the motorway to get there as close to opening time as we could. 

It was very quiet, which was great. Both number one son and myself had a good go at all the demos. My favourite was the Google painting program which was amazing. On the way down in the car we had discussed all the ways that the experience could be horrible. Poor tracking, slow updates, dodgy display, etc etc.

There was none of that. It just worked. Even over glasses. I could just about make out the individual dots in the display, which surprised me, but once I started moving around in a fully realised 3D environment I completely forgot about that.

It wasn't until after we'd finished that we remembered that there was a complete absence of any queasiness from either of us. The thing just works. The environments that we were in were a bit "cartoony", which is probably because the detail is dialled down a bit to keep the refresh rate up, but they were real. And the sensation of walking around in another world was very well realised.

The experience was quite unlike the Hololens that I tried last year. That device can overlay virtual elements onto your view of the environment. The Vive just makes a completely new one. Both systems have their place, and both work really well. 

Number one son ordered a Vive there and then. Me, I've got to buy a PC first as this kit requires some fairly hairy hardware to drive it. But I'm very tempted.

Fingerlights for robots and photographs

These look useful. Particularly if you happen to want to attach them to a robot so that another robot can see it and charge towards it. As you do. 

They might work well for light painting too. I saw them at the Science Museum yesterday in their gift shop. They are a set of battery powered coloured lights that you are supposed to attach to your fingers. You can find them on eBay (search for finger lights) at really stupid prices. I'm tempted to spend a tenner on 40 or so sets and go nuts with them. 

I wonder how long the batteries last?