Speaker Wisdom at DDD North

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This picture has nothing to do with the subject of this post. I just like how it came out.

One of the best bits of DDD yesterday was getting together with some students to talk about plans for the future. Boss had organised a bunch of speakers to have a word with a bunch of students. For me it was great to hear folks echoing what I used to tell students all those years ago. All of the speakers had great stories and I chipped in occasionally too. But I think all the advice can really be summed up very simply:

Do stuff and tell people about it.

People who might fancy hiring you will expect you to have completed your studies successfully. But if the only “war stories” that you have to tell are about your assessments you will find yourself at a disadvantage. You need to have other things you have made, done or failed at to talk about. And they don’t necessarily have to be in software. You should form a policy of finding things to do and ways in which you can use them to your advantage. If you take care of that you might find that your future will take care of itself.

Talking ChatGPT at DDD North 2024

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A great audience here in black and white

Did my talk at DDD 2024 this morning. After a brief panic where it turned out that my HDMI adapter wouldn’t talk to the video system I managed to get everything working (thanks Warren for lending a working adapter). The audience was great and we had a splendid discussion afterwards. You can find the slide deck here.

Musical Hardware Meetup March 6th

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I’ll be keeping the lid on though

Our monthly hardware meetup for March will be on Wednesday 6th March in the MakerSpace at the top of Hull Central Library. We start around 5:30 pm and then go on until 7:00 pm or so. We theme the meetups, the March one is all about music. I’ll bring along the MIDI CheeseBox, Crackers Controller and Chocolate Synth along with a few more conventional devices. If you’ve got something you want to show off or talk about, feel free to bring it along.

No need to sign in or anything, just turn up and take part. It would be lovely to see you.

Robot Power Adapter

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Very useful if you kept buying 12v power adapters instead of 5V power adapters….

One of our students showed me a useful gadget today. You can plug a 12 supply into it and get out 5v, 3.3v and the 12v going in. The two onboard regulators aren’t good for particularly high currents at around 800ma each, but this is a terribly useful controller if you are building a robot and want 12 for the motors and then the other voltages for your onboard devices.

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.