PICO MIDI Cheese Box Constructed

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When you put your ideas out on the internets and in magazines it is always nice to see someone actually build one. “viragored” has not just built a device though, they’ve also designed their own case because I forgot to publish the design files. I’ve put my designs on GitHub now. You can find them here. But I think I like that the new one is better. I like the idea of using “push pins” to hold components in place rather than screws.

Remote Burglar Alarm Debugging

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Following on from the scary burglar alarm of yesterday I spent twenty minutes or so this morning on the phone to Chris, one of the support folk for Ring alarms. Interesting to see how support works these days. I used the app to authenticate the phone call so that by the time I was talking to Chris he already knew who I was and presumably what my system looked like. i was then able to send him a picture of the broken device (not sure what that told him) so that he could send out a replacement. I reckon that the true measure of a system is how well it works in failure mode, and by that yardstick I think that Ring did pretty well.

Scary Alarms

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So we were watching the BBC show “The Girl Before”. At the centre of the story is a spooky house which is totally controlled by a computer which is totally not going to turn out to be malevolent. And one of our burglar alarm sensors in our house started repeatedly muttering about being tampered with. Coincidence is a wonderful thing. The show is worth watching. We are half way in and pondering just where the evil lies. The alarm was much less fun. I’ve disconnected the offending sensor and popped its batteries out. If we get any tamper messages tonight I will be properly scared…

Console Nostalgia

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My PlayStation 3 ended up in my garage, not my loft. This is probably why it still works. Things I put in the loft tend to break. We got it out today and fired it up and were immediately transported back fifteen years or so. Mine is the first version of the machine, which means that it has memory card sockets, four usb connections and will run PlayStation 1 games. I think that PS3 was my favourite PlayStation iteration. It has a lovely glossy finish with just the right amount of black and shiny bits. The PlayStation 3 was the first thing we got with an HDMI connector, so it works just fine on our TV. Not sure what I’ll do with it, but it is nice to know that it still works. And Super Stardust is as awesome as ever.

To round off our nostalgia-fest we popped an XBOX 360 disk into number one son’s Xbox Series X. This just worked too. I think the game disk is just used to authenticate the download of a specially tweaked version of the software, but the experience was just splendid. Within a few minutes we had Dead Or Alive 3 running in what looked like very high resolution and even HDR. It was still extremely playable and a hoot. It’s interesting that the cut scenes now look much more dodgy than the in game action. I guess they can’t do much with the video, but with the game they can improve the textures and dynamic range.

Great fun.

Interstate 75

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Pimoroni do come up with good names for their products. Their PICO Interstate 75 looks very interesting. It plugs straight into the back of a HUB-75 based LED panel. These are the ones that we’ve been using to make a LED cube. They are the kind of panels you see on the side of buildings displaying brightly coloured graphics. The Interstate 75 is powered by an RP2040 chip (the same as the one on the Raspberry Pi PICO). This is a really good choice for driving led panels because it has special hardware that can be used to generate the pulse sequences that are used to make the display light up. It also has two processor cores, so you can use one to drive the display and the other to generate the image.

I’ve ordered one for myself for Christmas. And one for number one son. With a bit of luck they’ll arrive in time for us to play with them on the big day…

Developer Developer Developer Videos now live

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A few weeks ago I had a great time talking about making music with the Raspberry Pi PICO and Pure Data at the Developer Developer Developer Conference. All the videos are now online. You can find them on the conference YouTube channel here.

If you want to watch my video (and why would you not) you can click on the link above.

Christmas Meetup Postponed

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The in-person Christmas Meetup that we were going to have this week has been postponed. Well, it did have “probably” in the name…. I don’t see the situation with that nasty little virus getting any better and I’d hate it if someone fell ill because of a gathering I’d organised.

We will be meeting online on Thursday though, which is good news if you fancy joining us from afar. I’ll be wearing my tackiest Christmas Jumper and we will have a silly quiz plus all the usual chat. You can find details here.

Update: I’ve fixed the spelling….

The mystery of the haunted BL Touch probe

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In my experience the worst thing you can do with a 3D printer is to think of it as an appliance. As soon as you do that it instantly finds a new way of breaking that you’ve not seen before. I’m making a new gadget and this morning I thought I’d print out the bottom of the case. I printed out the top yesterday and noticed that every now and then the printer was making a “ticking” sound. This was caused by the extruder (the thing that forces the filament through the print head) skipping steps. It means that either the printer nozzle is blocked or the nozzle is a bit too close to the print bed and stopping the molten plastic from flowing.

I checked the nozzle and it was clear. It was only happening in one region of the print area so I thought I’d level the bed, which was a good idea in principle but practice turned out to be a nightmare. I could not get the bed to level. I ended up replacing the springs that support the bed with ones that I bought a while back.

The new springs are yellow, which apparently is a good thing. They give a greater range of adjustment and are a bit more substantial than the ones that came with the printer which I think have got a bit tired. I now have the bed level enough to print with which is nice.

I did find out one interesting (at least to me) thing while I was doing this. I have a BL touch sensor on my printer. It’s the red thing in the picture above. At the bottom is a little motorised probe that is moved into the “down” position whenever the printer wants check the height of the print head above the bed.

While I was working on the bed I noticed that the probe kept dropping onto the print bed in a rather annoying and potentially breakable way. For a while I thought the printer was haunted by “The Ghost of Failed Prints” but this was not the case.

It turns out that the probe dropped whenever I moved the print bed by hand. After a while I figured out what was happening. Stepper motors make quite good generators. If you turn them they produce a voltage that gets sent back into the circuitry of the device they are connected to. Some of this was finding its way into the coils that move the probe up and down and triggering them.

The lesson here is that when you move things you should move them slowly, so that they don’t produce as much voltage.

Demeo Defeated

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That new save feature is important

We spent a great evening last night fighting off various kinds of horrible demons playing four player Demeo on the Quest. And we won. It wasn’t necessarily thanks to me in particular. I was mostly dropping arrows on myself and standing in poison. But fortunately my colleagues were made of sterner and more capable stuff and we managed to vanquish the hordes and emerge triumphant in time for “Have I got news for you”.

We’ve been playing the game for a while. It has only recently gained the ability to save progress. We did get close to finishing one time, but we were beaten back by the final level and poor headset battery management on my part. Now we can just play one level at a time and complete the campaign over a few weeks, which is what we did.

The game is also available for PC and would work fine with a mouse and a keyboard, but in VR you do get the impression that you are “going somewhere” when you play it. The game creates a view of the playfield with animated characters that remind me strongly of the Amiga Battle Chess game from way back. The aminations and sound effects are great, but it might be even more fun if we actually played it in the dungeon rather than standing over it.

If you fancy a bit of RPG on your Quest and you can find three like minded souls to have a go with you it is rather fun though.

Perfect fit - darn it!

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I’m working on a new project. I start with the box and then put things in it and wire them together. My usual approach is to run a 5 hour print for the entire case and then find that some of the holes in it are the wrong size. So today I thought I’d do it properly. I printed out a tiny test print instead. Of course, when I do it this way round the holes are exactly the right size.

Snoopy Calendar

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These people are selling Snoopy Calendars. This takes me back. When I was a student we all had ones which we printed on the university mainframe line printer. The best time to print them was at night, otherwise you might get told off for wasting resources. Unfortunately they seem to have sold out. The good news is that I have written a program to create calendars (any year you like). The bad news is that I seem to have lost the punched cards I wrote it on…..

Free Gmail Cleanup Tool - MailStore

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I’ve used Gmail as my main mail client for many years. In fact I’ve used it for so long that I’ve filled it up. Google allow you 15 GBytes of storage for your mail messages but if you are in the habit of keeping everything (as I do) then it turns out that after a while you can use it all. You then have the option of tidying up (ugh) or spending some money for storage (double ugh).

Enter MailStore. Mailstore is an app which pulls messages out of Gmail and stores them on your machine. It’s a free download from here. You can install the application along with its data on a drive somewhere and connect it to your gmail account. Then you can pull messages down from your mail and store them locally. It works with Microsoft Outlook and Windows Live Mail and is easy enough to use. It takes a while though, I had to run it overnight to get around 5G of messages down.

How to be a programmer

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At the end of the C# Yellow Book I include a few links to useful resources for readers. One of them is to “How to Be a Programmer”, an article I came across many years ago.

I got an email from a reader who’d made it all the way to the end of the book and found that the link doesn’t work any more. I did some digging and I found a link to a free version hosted on GitHub here. You can also buy a proper printed copy, or get it on Kindle by clicking the image above.

It is a really good read. Everyone who wants to be a programmer (or just make things for people) should read it. And then go back and read it again every few years.