Inky Fingers

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Keep the bottles of ink well away from the users…

These things are quite fun. They are little rollers which print out sums when rolled down the page. Each roller is in two halves which can be adjusted so that the sums are different. Great for a little someone who just happens to like doing maths. Search for “Roller Teaching Stamp” if you want some.

Just don’t touch the rollers to check whether or they have ink on. They have.

First Man In at DDD

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What Dall-E thinKs I look like. I’ll show the real picture of me at the session…

I’ve got the schedule for DDD North next week. I’m on first thing at 9:30 which will be fun. I’m talking about ChatGPT and my existential crisis.

Apparently they’ve had such a demand for tickets that they’ve had to add a bunch more. I’m really looking forward to it. Now I just have to decide which camera to take along….

Recommended Toothbrush

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It comes with a snazzy case as well

It has to be said that I don’t usually put toothbrush recommendations in this blog. But yesterday m dental hygienist insisted that I get a new toothbrush and even wrote down the make and model. It arrived this morning and I must admit it is rather good. It lights up when I press too hard and even tells me how much time to spend on each quadrant of my mouth (before today I didn’t even know that my mouth had quadrants).

Pimoroni Pi MMe base

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Fun times..

The Raspberry Pi 5 is a seriously powerful beast. I’ve been very impressed by the way I can run even demanding graphical applications at reasonable speed. Today I thought I’d speed it up even more by adding a “proper” hard disk to it. I got hold of an MMe base from Pimoroni and popped a 256G solid state disk in it. The total cost was less than a video game. The base was easy to fit and setup. the hardest bit was feeding the funky ribbon cable into the connectors on the Pi and the base. Once they were connected I screwed the base onto the Pi and fired it up. My Pi was already running from an SSD memory card so I used Raspberry Pi Imager to put an operating system on the new disk, swapped the boot order using raspi-config and we were off. The difference in speed for loading applications is amazing. The system boots in around the same time it takes my PC to wake up from sleep.

If you are after a speedup for your Pi which will turn it into a much more viable desktop replacement you should take a look at this.

Falling for Docker

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I’d heard nice things about Docker. Now I’m saying them. I’m using it to get ROS2 (Robot Operating System - er - 2) running on Raspberry Pi 5. You can do this by installing a custom version of Ubuntu and then building ROS 2 on it, but I want to make it easier, and Docker does that.

When I’ve finished you should be able to install Docker on a 64 bit Pi and then just run my Dockerfile to create the image. I’m also making scripts to start and run ROS2. It’s great fun and super powerful.

Brother A3 Printer

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It does take up quite a bit of space though…

I’ve had my eye out for a new printer ever since I discovered the price of buying new cartridges for my current printer. Last week I noticed that a Brother one I was interested in had dropped in price to something I could afford. So I took the plunge. It’s a BROTHER MFC-J6540DW and it is all A3, which means that it can print (and scan) pictures twice as large as your average A4 device. I really like this. If you are making signs and things, and printing for display, there’s nothing quite like a bit of extra size.

It is quite big and heavy and no fun to carry upstairs. But the print quality is nice and it was easy to set up (although there was one bit after installation where it wanted to know it’s password and this turned out to be written on the back so I had to get it out again so I could look which was a bit of a pain).

The printer uses little containers of liquid ink and comes with enough to do a few prints. They also do an ink subscription thingy but its not obligatory, which is just as well.

Scalectrics at the Hull CS50

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Just needs a new rear axle…..

Had another planning meeting today for the Hull University Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebrations. It was the best kind of meeting. We set up a tiny track and tested some of the Scalectrics cars we used to use for our welcome parties. The good news is that 5 of the 6 cars work OK (although they’ll need a bit of tidying up). So we’re going to set up the big track and having it running during the event. If you’ve been to Hull as student or staff in the last fifty years we’d love to see you. Find out more here.

ChatGPT and HueForge

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It did a nice job with “Nissan cube”

Here’s a nice collision of useful technologies. HueForge is a great way to design 3D printable artworks. And ChatGPT is a great way to package expertise. So Jay has made a GPT which combines the two. You can ask it to make a HueForgeable (if that’s a word) image from a text prompt.

And this is a very presentable Twin lens REflex camear

I might even have a go at printing some of these.

Anyone got a spare P8?

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The kit was beautiflly presented in every other respect…

Spent some of today trying to build a “birthday present robot” for an important guest. Fell massively at the first fence when it turned out that our kit was lacking the P8 axle you can see above. We had two P6’s, but that doesn’t really help. The good news is that there are lots of these kinds of kits and they are quite cheap. The replacement should arrive tomorrow.

HP Sprout in "The Dengineers"

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The programme was made in 2016. Which makes sense..

One member of the family has a new favourite TV show. It’s “The Dengineers” from the BBC. We were watching it together and I noticed they had an HP Sprout in the cast. They were using it as part of their design process. I nearly fell off my chair. I’ve had a Sprout for ages. It still works, although successive Windows 10 updates have taken their toll and it’s no longer as sprightly as it used to be.

I was planning on popping the machine in eBay but it since it is now cool in the eyes of at least on family member I’m probably going to hang on to it for a while.

Carbonizing at the MakerSpace Meetup

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This was the setup

I took the Kinect sensor over to Hull Makerspace this evening. I’m still working on the latest release, so I used the previous code (ten years old) running on my Surface Pro 3 (ten years old).

It worked, but it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. Things ran, but very slowly.

An image being worked on. Slowly.

Brian brought in a 3D printer he is donating to the space and fun was had by the few of us who turned up. Next meetup is Wednesday 21st Feb. All about photography.