Old School Lumix Lives

Not bad for a 20 year old camera

Took the Lumix DMC-LC5 camera for a walk earlier in the week and I’ve only just got round to getting the pictures out of it. The camera was created by Leica and Panasonic, has an amazing lens and a tiny (by modern standards) sensor. However it is particularly good with some colours, particularly red.

The water levels are quite high at the moment

I must get into the habit of taking these old devices out every now and then. They are quite fun.

Hardware Meetup

It was a quiet meetup on Wednesday this week. Just three of us chatting about 3D printers, life and the universe. It’s always fun to go down to Hull Makerspace and see what people are doing. If you fancy joining us the next one is on Wednesday 7th of February when we will be doing some Robot Rugby. Come along and pick a side. We’ll be starting at around 5:30 pm and going on until around 7:00 pm in Hull Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull.

Effortless Debugging with Your Pico Probe: No More Sudo!

Hey there, Raspberry Pi enthusiasts! Are you tired of summoning sudo every time you need to commune with your Pico debug probe? Fear not! Today, we're delving into a nifty trick to make your Pico probe obedient without the superuser incantations. And for those of you using Visual Studio Code, this trick is a game-changer.

Why Bid Farewell to sudo?

Summoning sudo for debugging is like wearing a full suit to a casual brunch; it's overkill and can be risky. Moreover, when you're using elegant tools like Visual Studio Code, running the debugger as a superuser inside the tool is a bit tricky. Let's simplify this, shall we?

The Power of udev Rules:

In the Linux realm, udev rules are like spells that control how the system interacts with various devices. By crafting a specific udev rule, we can grant ourselves permission to access the Pico debug probe without escalating our privileges to the superuser level.

Crafting the Universal Pico Probe Rule:

Most Pico debug probes share the same Vendor and Product IDs, so we can usually use a standard rule for all. Here's how to do it:

The Magic Numbers: For the Pico debug probe, the typical IDs are: Vendor ID 2e8a and Product ID 000c. We'll use these in our rule.

Creating Your Rule: Head over to /etc/udev/rules.d/ and conjure a new file called 99-pico-debug-probe.rules Sprinkle the following line into it:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2e8a", ATTRS{idProduct}=="000c", MODE="0666"

This incantation essentially tells your system, "Hey, let everyone read and write to this device, will you?"

Enforcing the Rule: To make the rule take effect, use this spell:

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

What If My Device Is Different?

Got a different device? No problem! Plug it in, run lsusb, and look for the ID format VendorID:ProductID. Use these values to create a custom rule.

Post-Reboot Harmony:

Your new rule is like a loyal house-elf, diligently working after every reboot, ensuring smooth, sudo-free access to your debug probe.

Conclusion:

And there you have it! A simple yet elegant solution to make your debugging sessions with Raspberry Pi Pico as smooth as butter. No more sudo, no more hassle, especially when you're working in sophisticated environments like Visual Studio Code.

Happy debugging, and may your code be bug-free!

Author’s note: I didn’t write this. ChatGPT did. I worked with ChatGPT to solve my problem and then asked it to write a blog post about the solution “In the style of Rob Miles”. I’m quite proud of this, although I didn’t do much of the work….

C# Yellow Book now on ChatGPT

I’ve signed up for a ChatGPT subscription. It’s become very useful and I want to see what else it can do. Just for giggles I’ve created a GPT from the text of the C# Yellow Book. You can ask it questions about the text and it seems to give quite sensible answers. I’ve made it public and you should be able to find it here.

Cold Battery Blues

Thanks again Dal-e

On Radio Humberside talking about cold batteries. Apparently Tick Tockers (whatever they are) have been noticing that they can’t make as many videos on their phone in the cold weather. This is what I said:

• Low temperature increases the “internal resistance” of the battery. This limits the amount of power you can get from it.  It also means that to get a certain level of performance it takes more power out of the battery.

• Electric cars are affected too. They heat up the battery in cold weather. If you have the car plugged in at home you can “pre-condition” the battery to warm it up. This can improve the range, which is a good idea in winter because cold substantially reduces range (at least by a third).

• Always Be Charging. There’s no advantage in running your lithium battery right down before charging it (in fact flattening a lithium battery can destroy it). Keep your battery charged every chance you get. The only reason to let the battery run down is so that the phone can work out the battery life.

• Keep your phone in an inside pocket so that you keep it warm.

• If you give your phone something hard to do this will warm it up (although of course it will also flatten the battery). There are even “hand-warmer” apps that do this – but they are not a particularly good idea.

• Charge the battery when it is warmer.

• Warm your phone up before you do something that consumes a lot of power.

Another year of Cubeness

Nice work Dal-E. Not sure about the number of door handles though….

Our Nissan Cube is getting on a bit. As are we all. He’s not perfect, but he is good enough to pass the MOT test for another year. I’m going to get his underside comprehensively clarted with wax and whatnot to try and stave of the inevitable onset of rust (poetic prose) but it is nice to have him around for at least one more year.

Hardware Meetup Wednesday 17th January

Printer Poop produced when switching colours

We’re having a hardware meetup next Wednesday evening at Hull Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull. We’ll be opening 5:30 pm with a presentation of 3D printing lithophanes and the HueForge program starting around 6:00 pm. We’ll finish around 7:00pm

There’s no need to book, just turn up and look interested. If you’ve got anything to show off we’d love to see it.

Lithophane Colour Chart

I’ve Cropped off the very dark areas

I thought it might be fun to make a lithophane of a colour test chart just to get an idea of how well colours are resolved and what colours you could get. Above you can see the original chart. I ran it through Colour Lithophane Maker and then printed it.

This is 0.1mm layers with a 0.4mm nozzle

This is the lithophane that I got. Quite interesting. I think it might be worth running your images through a “posterise” filter of some kind before making the lithophane.

Superhuman

Looks like rain dear

Today I’ve filed my tax return and merged two branches in GitHub.

What a man…

Heavy Work

The computer is eight years old though….

What do you think I was doing to raise the CPU loading to the dizzy heights you can see above?

Well, I was moving some files from one folder to another. There were quite a few files, but even so.

I think I need a new computer.

PICO Powered Pixelbot now with Wi-Fi programming

Just plug your Pixelbot into your computer to set up the network

The latest version of the Raspberry Pi PICO Powered Pixelbot (I love a bit of alliteration) now supports Wi-Fi programming. You can connect your robot to your local network and then use a web interface to create and deploy programs into the robot. You can find all the details, plus the images you need to put into your PICO-W here.

Future Meetups

The MakerSpace is a good looking place..

I’ve put together a schedule for hardware meetups for the first part of this year:

Wednesday 17th of January Colour 3D printing

I'll bring in some examples of colour printing and show how to use Bambu Studio to colourise prints and create lithopanes. I'll also show off some work made with HueForge (https://thehueforge.com/)

Wednesday 7th of February Robot Rugby

We'll set up a Hull Pixelbot rugby match and get a game going.

Wednesday 21st February Music and MIDI

I'll bring in a bunch of MIDI music devices (some Pico and Pi powered) and we'll have a go at making some tunes

Wednesday 6th March Analogue photography

I'll show you how to get started taking analogue photographs on instant and black and white home-processed film. If we can have access to running water in the Hackspace we can take a bunch of pictures and process them on the night.

All the meetups are in the Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull. Doors open at 5:30 pm and we start the presentations and whatnot at 6:00pm after some chat. We finish around 7:15pm or so. Anyone can turn up and you don’t need to book. If you have a topic that you’d like us to cover (or better yet you fancy running a session yourself) get in touch. If you want find out more you can find it all on our Mattermost page here.

Late Chair

Every time they failed to deliver the chair they added a new one to the order…

We needed a chair bed to put up a family member at Christmas. So we ordered one. The delivery came and went, and came and went again. Chairs were not delivered owing to “un-foreseen circumstances”.

There are worse things in life than missing out on chair deliveries. Although after four attempts where we had changed our arrangements to fit around their schedule we were getting a bit fed up.

The chair arrived today. Just three weeks or so late. It is very nice. They’ve sent me an email asking for my opinion of the service they provided. Every single person I dealt with, from the folks on the first call to the delivery team, has been lovely to deal with. But I’m forced to conclude that they are trapped in a system which is not working very well.

Percussive assembly

Built some shelves today. There were no nuts or bolts, the parts just needed to be slotted together and tapped into place. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve made something using a hammer.

3D Printing Minox Cassettes: Fail

A few attempts and the camera I’m trying to use

I’ve been trying to print Minox film cassettes for a while now with no success. I love the Minox system for its tinyness and amazing design, not to mention the nice pictures you can get with it. But I’ve only got a few film cassettes and I’m too mean to buy any more. So I thought I’d print some with my lovely new printer. It kind of works. The finished articles are almost useable. But not quite. Even if I use the high resolution 0.2mm nozzle. The problem is that some of the sides of the cassette lids are just one strand of filament wide. The printer can print these just fine, but they haven’t got enough strength to stay attached to the lid for very long, as you can see above.

I’d be happy to trace printability for film length: in other words a 24 shot exposure film held in a cassette that has double thick walls would be just fine with me. Unfortunately I’ve not found a way to tweak the design just yet. If anyone reading this can point me at designs I can work with I’d love to have another go.

Hull Pixelbot in Raspberry Pi Blog

Fame at last at last

My article about the Hull Pixelbot has reached the dizzy heights of the Raspberry Pi news stream. You can find the HackSpace issue containing the article here.

HueForge

This is fresh from the printer plate, complete with purge tower

HueForge is amazing. It lets you care 3D printable pictures from images.

I’ve mapped different colurs in the image to different filaments

The original image is on the right. The predicted print is on the left. On the bottom left you can see the four colours I’m using (black, blue, grey and white) and you adjust the sliders to determine the image colours they match. It works wonderfully well and drops out an STL file. You just have to tell your printer the layer numbers where the colour changes and away you go.

If you have a 3D printer that can print different colours you should get HueForge. It’s as simple as that.

Kinect Carbonizer still works

Carbonized Duck ready for printing

Around ten years ago I created one of my first ever GitHub repositories when I uploaded the code for my Kinect Carbonizer. You can find it here. Now that I have a 3D printer that can print things in colour (and at speed) I thought I’d revisit the project with a view to making some multi-coloured carbonized images. I installed the Kinect toolkit, plugged in my Kinect sensor, downloaded the repository, pointed Visual Studio 22 at it and it just compiled and ran.

Amazing.

I had one issue, where the USB on my Windows 10 machine refused to properly recognise the Kinect sensor. I’ve updated the GitHub page with the fix for this.

You can pick up Kinect 2 (not the the original Kinect 360) sensors really cheaply nowadays. You can’t plug them into your computer directly - you need an adapter and power supply - but you can pick them up on ebay at a good price too.

Bambu Studio lets you set the colour of each layer in a print so I should be able to make multi-coloured carbonized prints quite easily. Such fun.

New Years Higher Resolution

I thought you might like to see the original picture. I took it in Melbourne a few years ago

Most 3D printers use a print nozzle which is 0.4mm in diameter. This is a good compromise between speed and quality. But you can get 0.2mm diameter ones too. So I’ve tried printing the same lithophane as you saw yesterday, but with a 0.2 nozzle. There is a definite improvement, but I don’t think it is worth the extra six hours of printing.

This is using a 0.2mm nozzle for best results

The detail is improved, but I would have to add more layers to get rid of the sky banding. Which would make the print time even larger. I reckon a good compromise is 0.1mm layer height with a 0.4mm nozzle. And perhaps not an image with lots of gradual colour changes.

Lithophane Fun

This is about half way through

What better way to start the year than by printing some lithophanes.

This is Melbourne

I’m quite pleased with the results. I got a Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, White kit from Bambu. They have a little wiki which tells you how to do it. This image took around 2 and a half hours to print, which is not bad. Next step is to try a 0.2mm nozzle and see how that turns out.