Safemaking with the Bambu P1S

/

somewhere safe to put all the money I haven’t got

One of the great things about having the Bambu printer is that I seem to be able to decide to print something and then just print it. Even if the thing is large. Today I had a go at printing this bank vault. It just worked.

These are the main parts

I was expecting a bunch of problems and a ten hour wait. After all, I’ve been printing for a very long time. What I got was all the important bits printed before lunch.

The lock contains a surprisngly complicated latch

I had the whole thing built by mid afternoon. The design cost me a couple of quid or so and it was very well worth it. I even got instructions telling me how to assemble the different parts.

Raspberry Pi Popup in Leeds

/

I bought a new mousemat too

We were in Leeds today Christmas shopping. I was really pleased to see a Raspberry Pi popup in Victoria Gate. We went in and had a look around. I tried to impress the staff by showing them my by-line in a copy of HackSpace magazine they had on sale. I think it worked. They did give me a free sticker.

The store was excellent. The staff were great and it was lovely to be able to take a proper look at some devices I’ve only ever seen in pictures up to now. I hope they open it again.

Using the second serial port connection on the ESP8266

/

Perhaps not many of you have had problems with the serial port connections on your ESP8266 devices. But I’m going to write this down anyway. Here’s the problem:

The ESP8266 has one and a half serial ports. But I want my ESP8266 to use serial connections to two different devices:

  • I want to be able to connect my computer to the ESP8266 so that I can load programs into the device and set configuration options.

  • I want the ESP8266 to be able to talk to a Pixelbot robot and tell it what to do.

Connecting the ESP8266 serial signals to the robot processor breaks the serial connection to the computer. So if I want to connect my robot to the my PC I have to unplug connections on the robot itself. Which is tiresome. So instead I’m using a little know feature of the ESP8266. It can swap the serial connections to different processor pins. So I can connect the robot serial signals to GPIO 13 (TX) and GPIO 15 (RX) and, once my program has started running I can call a function to swap the serial signals over to these pins.

Serial.swap();

After swap has been called code in the robot using the serial port will send messages out of the alternate pins. When the robot starts up it looks for messages on the original connection and if it doesn’t see anything it swaps the connection. This makes it much easier to use. This is the kind of kludge I’m proud of.

Robot Rugby is coming

/

Do you want to be able to play rugby with robots? I do. To that end I’ve spent the day building a web backend for a system that will host a rugby game and allow players to drop program code into their robotic rugby players and tell them what to do.

I’m not sure how much fun it would be to play rugby with robots. But I’ve had great fun which I think is perhaps the most important thing here…

HULLCS50 is a thing

/

Official celebration light. I’ll put the plans on thingiverse so you can make one of your own and link it to the event server

The Department of Computer Science in the University of Hull will be 50 years old soon. We’ll be celebrating this event at the university over the weekend of the 10th-12th May 2024. We are going to have an anniversary Three Thing Game, Welcome Party Redux, Robot Rugby and guest speakers. Plus campus tours and chipspice. Put the date in your diary and keep watching the skies (or my blog) for more news.

Comicon with the Mamiya

/

Black and white dark side

I carried my carefully weighed camera all around Comicon today. It was great. Pro tip: Check your coat in at the cloakroom so that you don’t have to carry it all round the show. It will be the best two pounds you spend on the day.

I took a few pictures. I’m particular pleased with this shot of “The Northern Vader” and a couple of his chums. I was using a large flash on a bracket to the side of the camera. I think it worked very well.

Casual Buzz

There were some cries of surprise when the flash went off in a manner rather similar to a nuclear explosion. But I’d already got the photograph by then….

Dalek central control

I’ve got some more shots in the camera. I’ll develop those when I’ve finished the film off.

/

AS an added bonus, the mole wrench is now very easy to find.

A while back I mentioned my sinking feeling, caused by a failing gas support in my chair. The chair company have sent me a replacement, which is nice of them. However, it has proved to be impossible to fit, what with the broken part having welded itself into position. I’ve come up with a solution though. My chair now holds its position perfectly.

Bambu printer top tip: pick the right buildplate

/

If your plate is gold (which is most likely) it will be the Textured PEI plate)

I’m getting to really like the Bambu P1S. It’s unlike printers I’ve had before. With those the very first prints I got with them turned out to be some of the best prints they ever made. With the Bambu it seems that the more you use it, the better it gets.

This is the first printer I’ve had with swappable build plates. They are held on with magnets but you can pop them on and off - especially useful for removing prints. There are also a few different types of plate, and herein lies a problem that I (and lots of other folks) had. My first prints looked good, but kept coming off the print bed or curling up at the corners.

It turns out that the print is supplied with a Textured PEI Plate, but the default setting for the Bambu slicer is the Cool Plate. So the temperature of the print bed was far too low. A peek at the forums revealed that lots of other folks have had this problem. So - if you are lucky enough to get one of these machines, make sure that you make the build plate match the slicer for best results.

Too much voltage is bad for you

/

the first PICO powered Pixelbot

I’ve not made a brand-new Hull Pixelbot for a while. Today I made a new one which is powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO. I usually power the robot from four (or sometimes five) AA batteries. This gets me around 6 volts. I did that today with the new robot and it failed to work. It turns out that the Raspberry Pi doesn’t like voltages much higher than 6 volts, and shows its displeasure by not working. I had scrabble around to find a set of “slightly worn” batteries to get it going.