Achievement Unlocked: We now own a shed

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Actually we don’t own a shed as such just yet. Rather, we’ve got a collection of pieces of wood which one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) will be fixed together to form a shed-type building. The pieces arrived this morning at 6:45 am. At 6:55 it started to rain for the first time in a while. So I was out in the wet before breakfast trying to cover over the really big bits of wood so that they would remain dry enough for painting.

Fortunately I seemed to manage it and later on in the day when the rain had stopped and the sun came out I was able to give all the woodwork two coats of hopefully waterproof paint.

Writing a MIDI application on a Rasbperry Pi PICO

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I seem to have written 500 lines of Python which is now running inside a Raspberry Pi PICO. I’ve no real idea how much space this occupies on the device, all I can say is that it works really well. I’m using the Thonny IDE which has a setting for Circuit Python and works a treat.

I’m building a MIDI keyboard device (that’s what the box here is for). One of the great things about this is that the when you use the Adafruit adafruit_bus_device and adafruit_midi libraries from here you have a MIDI device that works with MIDI applications on your PC (I’m using Pure Data), but you also retain the serial port connection from the PC to the device. So you can write Python to send MIDI messages at the same time as use the console for talking to your program. Very useful and rather fun. And I’m loving writing Python again.

Lego Vidiyo is a good value at knockdown prices

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Not everything that Lego touches turns to gold. Lego Vidiyo has not been the success that Lego hoped and figures and sets are now on the market at temptingly low prices.

The idea of the product is very good. Place animated mini-figures in augmented reality pop videos and control the action using collectable tiles that you scan with your phone or tablet camera. Add in some stage sets that can be incorporated into the videos, tie in with the music publishers so that there’s a good range of 1 minute music clips and you’d think they would be on to a winner.

And I think they would have been, if the application that underpins the whole thing had been a bit better. As it is, the program ls clunky to use, insists on downloading stuff when you start it up and has a confusing interface. The videos are great fun, the sharing element is well implemented and safe for kids, but the whole thing is just that bit too painful to enjoy using.

This has of course not stopped me from picking up a bunch of figures and sets at knock down prices. After all, Lego is Lego. Although I’ve not managed to pick up the party llama yet.

Lego say that they are only resting the project for now. I hope this is true. I think it has massive potential once they’ve sorted out the software side.

12 Minutes is frustrating fun

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This iteration is not going too well….

This iteration is not going too well….

If you’ve got an Xbox game pass you can already play 12 minutes. If you haven’t, it is still worth getting and having a go. You won’t play it for the graphics though. They are fit for purpose, but viewed close up they fall apart a bit. On the rare occasions that you can see the characters in close up they look a bit scary. The gameplay is essentially a bunch of repeated attempts for a “happy ending” in a situation which doesn’t seem to allow for one. Well, what would you do if cop showed up and accused your wife of murder a few minutes into an evening at home?

Play it right and everyone ends up happy (I hope). Play it wrong and you get thrown back to the start with hopefully a bit more knowledge about what is going on. Some parts drag a bit, you end up trying everything on everything, but so far it has been making sense and we are making progress

This type of game is best played as a group effort, as you can all pitch in and make suggestions. There’s an apparently dodgy plot twist right at the end that we haven’t met up with yet, but we’ve enjoyed the game enough so far for it not to matter. It’s worth mentioning the voice acting, which is very good - with proper actors building a nice atmosphere.

Lunch at Thieving Harry's

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What better place for a birthday lunch than Thieving Harry’s. It wasn’t my birthday, but I still had a great meal. If you are in Hull and you haven’t been there, you should. If you aren’t in Hull you should make a special trip. It’s one of my “pin” places. I reckon that you could randomly stick a pin in the menu to pick an item and it would always be delicious. It’s worked for me several times….

Wrong Sized Holes

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This is the top panel for a new creation I’m working on. I want to make a pixel ring surrounded by pushbuttons. So I added a pushbutton button ring element to my design program and then printed it out.

Of course, after a two and a half hour print I then discovered that all the button holes are too small. You can see in the picture some of my attempts to make the holes bigger, but PLA (which is what I printed it in) is horrible stuff to work with.

Moral of the story: If you’re printing things with holes to fit other things into, perform a tiny test print with just one hole to make sure the size is right before you go and print the whole thing.

Tiny Raspberry Pi PICO box

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I’ve got another Raspberry Pi PICO powered project (that’s a lot of alliteration) in the works. To celebrate this I visited my box designer program (otherwise known as 2,500 lines of ‘technical debt’) and added the PICO platform to it. Then I printed it out and it works fine. This is the smallest box you can make, it just has a hole for cables and a slot for the USB connector. I can now add the PICO to other device designs and it should just work. I’ve put the design on Thingiverse, you can find it here.

VOIP phone

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The chap from Kingston Communications came along today to fix our broken phone. Except that he didn’t fix it, he changed us over to “voice over internet”. This was actually a very sensible move. There’s not a lot of point spending time and effort mending a connection to something that will be torn down in a few years anyway.

Now our fibre optic connection is also our phone connection. The dial tone is the same and everything works as before. This means we can continue to receive the spam calls that make up most of our landline use.

The only snag that I can see is that if the mains power goes off our phone connection goes too. However, we all have mobile phones, so in that situation we can use those instead to ring someone and ask “Our power’s gone off, has yours too?”.

WEX in Leeds is worth a visit if you like cameras

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The trend these days is for specialist shops to close. But WEX are bucking this. They’ve recently opened a slew of actual shops, one of them in Leeds. We went there today. I was permitted a few minutes to look round at what was on sale. But I wasn’t allowed to talk to any assistants or make any moves involving my wallet.

The store is really nice. There’s a good range of kit and you can also buy chemicals and bits and bobs for home film processing (which I’d love to have a go at again one day).

I think that WEX have realised that there is nothing quite like actually handing the equipment you are about to buy. They do a very nice line in demonstration videos (I’ve actually bought from them on the strength of these) but it is really useful to have an in-person option for buying this stuff again, even though I’ll have to make a pilgrimage to Leeds to do it.

Codewords smut overload

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We spent a very happy (and silly) evening playing Codewords. It’s a great web based version of a popular board game. Two teams take it in turns guessing their team’s words from a set of shared ones using one word clues from the “spymaster”.

When you start the game you can nominate the types of words that you are using as the start. Tonight one of our number thought it would be hilarious to use nothing but the “innuendo” selection of words. In the game we were playing as “spymaster” doing two things: thinking up clues for smutty words and trying to work out why some of the words are smutty in the first place.

We did win that game though, I’m quite proud of our use of the single word “stringy” as a clue for “snake”, “floss” and “hairy”.

Broken phone

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We hardly ever use our land-line telephone. Most of the calls that we get are of robotic voices telling us that our Amazon account is about to explode or we owe a bunch of income tax. However, we’ve stopped getting even those calls now, as the wire to the phone seems to have snapped somewhere. The good news is that the Kingston Communications folks are great to deal with and someone will be coming out later this week to take a look.

How to make a Kick Drum in PureData

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I’ve been writing an article about PureData for HackSpace magazine. I sent it off on Friday and with a bit of luck and a following wind it will be in next issue. I didn’t have room for the above illustration, which is rather sad. I’ve put it up here instead.

The program on the left shows how a linear ramp is converted into a drum sound. The three graphs on the right hand side show how the waveform starts as a straight line before being converted into a curve and then finally a sequence of sound waves.

The sound wave graph is compressed at the left hand side because the first part of the drum sound will be high frequencies. The spaced out waves at the right hand end (so to speak) are the low frequency parts that give the drum its kick sound.