Life goes on

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We’ve got all kinds of activities and stuff planned for the next few weeks and we know that Rodney would have wanted us to keep going. So we are doing, starting with a trip to Leeds today. As is the way, I bought a new lens (although it wasn’t that expensive - honest). This one is an F 3.5 35-105mm zoom lens for my Pentax A which I’m presently using to take colour photos. Turns out it works a treat, as the picture above shows.

Farewell Rodney

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This is a blog mostly about frothy fun stuff and tech with bits of hardware and jokes alongside the occasionally useful aside. But every now and then real life intrudes. My father-in-law Rodney passed away on the 10th of July at the great age of 94, with his family by his side. He was a splendid fellow and will be sorely missed. I’m going to take a break from blogging for a little while as we deal with this, but I will be back..

Bolex Gear Fun

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This is the gears in place

A while back I got a 16mm camera. That’s not a camera that is really small (ho ho) it is one which uses 16mm wide film. This is all part of my “get Rob into the movies” project. The snag is that the camera I got uses “double perf film” which has holes down both sides. Modern film is “single perf” to leave more room on the film for a wider picture. But if you put “single perf” film into my camera the pins on one side have no holes to go into and the film jams up. Above you can see one of the rollers in the camera with pins on both top and bottom. The solution to the problem is quite simple. Just remove the top row of teeth from the roller.

So the first step is to remove the roller from the camera. This turned out not to be easy. A crucial component needs to come out first which was held in by a screw that would just not budge. You can see it on the top left hand side of the picture . The screw has some damage to the slot, the result of numerous failed attempts (some by me) to undo it. However today I had another go, motivated by the thought that if I don’t do this I effectively own a paperweight that looks like a movie camera.

We need to make sure we file off the pins on the top

And I succeeded. Above you can see the two rollers which now need to be “de-pinned”, a process that involves a file and a fervent prayer that the rollers aren’t made of hardened steel.

Antique Dealer

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I’m surprised it is not more dusty. After all, it is an antique.

What do you do if you want to own a genuine antique? You buy and Apple product and wait six years. Apple have just announced that the original Apple Homepod (released in 2018) now has “antique” status as far as they are concerned. This not not much of an honour for the poor thing though. It means that it is no longer deemed repairable and probably won’t get software updates. I’m used to devices going out of date, but this seems a bit much. I’ve got batteries older than that which are still working.

New Old Canon Dial 35

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Bought another Canon Dial 35 last week. I tell myself it was cheaper than a video game (which it was). This one was sold as broken, for me that’s the game part. Turned out that the spring power unit was sticky but because I’ve bought a few video games cameras already I happened to have a working spare attached to a really broken version. I got the camera winding film through and it seemed OK. Popped a battery in and the meter and the shutter seem to work fine. So the next step was to put a film in and take it for a walk around the village.

Of course the camera could break at any moment. But for now I’m calling it a win.

Debug ESP32/ESP8266 programs in PlatformIO using the exception decoder

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This is the prototype. I think I need to make a PCB for this..

I’ve been hard at work adding RFID abilities to Connected Little Boxes. It’s going mostly OK. It worked first time, which I hate because it means that the pain comes later. And it did, in the form of random crashes. The program would run for a while and then reset with an exception. The ESP devices produce a lump of debug output when they fail, but you then have to decode this text. The great news is that this behaviour is built into PlatformIO, the wonderful tool that I’m using to make the application. All you have to do is add the following line to the platformio.ini file in your project:

monitor_filters = esp8266_exception_decoder

The serial monitor will now look for the messages that mark the start of the debug information and then use the build file to tell you where the program was when it fell over. Very useful. In my case it allowed me to determine that the program was failing in WiFi code, not something that I wrote. Of course, even though it is not failing in my code, I still have to fix it. I have two golden rules when debugging embedded code:

  1. First check the power supply.

  2. Second check the memory allocation.

In this case the power is OK, so the problem must be memory. I thought I had enough free memory for the system keep going but this turned out not to be the case. I freed up a bunch of space and the device has been running solidly ever since.

Rabbit r1 Magic Camera

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Just found something that the Rabbit R1 can do which is really rather awesome. You can take a picture with it and shortly afterwards a “Rabbit Magic Camera” version appears in your Rabbit Hole site.

This is what it did to my picture. Perhaps I should grow a moustache

Apparently this is my desk

.. and this is my audio mixer, which I think looks awesome

The Rabbit is not perfect. But I think it is definitely growing on me..

Canon Dial 35 for the Win

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Just some trees

As if to underscore how good the Canon Dial 35 is after my earlier post I thought I’d post some pictures I’ve just processed. The Dial that I used is a bit slow and has the meter switch wired the wrong way round. A lot can happen to a camera in sixty years. And it does still mostly work. Anyhoo, the meter under-reads, which meant that the shots were all a bit over exposed. So I compensated by developing the film for a bit less time (quite proud of that) and the shots speak for themselves.

Blackpool Booth

Blackpool tower and a spitfire

Humber Bridge Park

MPP Camera Resources

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Hmmm. Could use a bit of a dust..

If you are lucky enough to own a Micro Precision Products (MPP) Micro-Press camera I’ve made a couple of 3D printable resources you might find interesting. The first is a lensboard (the thing which holds the lens in front of the camera). The second is a spacer which makes it easy to use a LomoGraflok back with your MPP camera. You can find them here.

Rob and the Rabbit R1

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It is impossible to overstate how orange this thing is

I mentioned to number one daughter that I’d got a Rabbit R1. “But aren’t those supposed to be useless” she replied. Well yes. And no. She wasn’t surprised that I’d got one. All it took was one vaguely positive review a while back to get me to whip out my credit card. And I do have a record of buying doomed devices, Nabaztag Rabbit, Chumby, Berg Little Printer, Windows Phone. And I had just got paid. For the same outlay I could have bought a few meals out, a not very good golf club or three or four video games. But I got a gadget instead. Big surprise.

It arrived yesterday. Well packaged and presented. No power supply, just a snappy little box. And it works (as in it does the few things that it is supposed to do). You can ask it questions and it will give you useful replies most of the time. It now has the ability to control Apple Music, but having seen stories about how badly protected the internal software is, I’m not going near it with my Apple credentials any time soon. And anyway my phone has a better speaker. One thing I do really like is the “tell me what you can see” feature.

Mostly right

I pointed the Rabbit at Hull MakerSpace last night at the meetup (which was great fun by the way) and it came up with the above description, which I think is about right (although it is not really that messy). Holding a conversation is fun and context is maintained very well. I’ve not tried getting it to do something, but if they ever release a way of creating your own scripts and whatnot (and they are scripts - I don’t think the Large Action Model is really a thing just yet) then I’ll be tempted to have a go.

I’m not sure how much I’ll use my Rabbit, although it is nice to have something you can just ask a question any time. If I was using my phone or computer I’d have to stop what I was doing, find the appropriate application and enter the question. And then I’d forget what I asked and have to ask it again. With the Rabbit you get a RabbitHole web page that gives you a lovely time sequence of questions and answers which you can go back through.

I guess my biggest concern is whether the Rabbit will still be here in a year’s time. It was sold as a device that gives you free access to a high quality large language model and it does that in a responsive and useable way. But that model is not sustainable in the long run. All of the devices that I mentioned at the top (with the exception of Windows Phone) failed because they used backend servers that needed to be paid for.

I’d be happy to pay a subscription for my Rabbit (or better yet roll that subscription into what I’m already paying for ChatGPT). However, I don’t think enough of the other Rabbit users will be happy to do that. So unless someone with deep pockets and a long term eye for market share steps in I’m afraid that in a while my Rabbit will in a box in the loft alongside all the other next big things up there. But I’m enjoying it for now. It’s an interesting signpost on the road to where we are all headed.

150 RFID Cards...

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I seem to have bought 150 RFID cards. As you do. I’ve been playing with RFID tag stuff for over ten years. The cards I’ve bought aren’t particularly special, but I think they have some internal storage too, which makes them even more interesting. And I do have plans for them. I don’t just spend 25 quid on a whim you know….

First plan is to give one to everyone who comes to the Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebration in October. I’m going to scatter a few readers around the place and use them to manage the free drinks. We also might have a go at some kind of RFID based Ultimate Werewolf thing.

Second plan is to fit a bunch to the bottom of the HullPixelbot robot arena so that I can fit readers to the robots and they can navigate by reading cards at different positions.

Hmmm. Having thought about it, perhaps I should buy some more…

Double Perf for the win!

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Made in 1992. I’m sure it’s fine

A while back I got a movie camera. And now I’ve got some film for it. It’s 16mm double perforation (holes on both sides - very important) black and white film which originally came from Russia. I’m not that fussed whether it takes pictures or not (although I plan to try and find out). I really wanted it so that I could make sure that the camera mechanism works correctly before I spend some cash on proper film.

Pentax 17 vs Canon Dial 35 - Fight!

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It sure is a very handsome camera

Big news. Pentax have just launched their first film camera for a very long time. It’s called the Pentax 17 and it looks awesome. It takes 17mm (hence the name) high shots on 35mm film (that’s half-frame). You can get 72 shots from a single cassette of film. It has automatic exposure, a nifty wind-on lever and lots of shooting modes. The focus is manual (you choose from a number of different zones) but then it does something very clever to put the lens in a position that will maximise sharpness if that is what you want. It has a built-in flash and really looks the business. But I won’t be getting one I’m afraid.

The price is just too high, at nearly 500 pounds. Now, don’t get me wrong, for a brand new camera with this pedigree this is absolutely good value. It would have been very hard for Pentax to launch this thing at a lower price. They will have had to do lots of work on design and tooling just to get the thing out of the door. If you are the kind of person who wants to have a proper warranty and ongoing support for your film cameras this is for you. If it breaks you’ll be able to make it someone else’s problem.

However, I’m not quite like that. I prefer to get super-cheap old cameras and then see what I can do with them. For the price of a Pentax 17 you could get lots of Chaika, Olympus Pen, and Canon Dial 35 devices. And some of them might even work.

A dial and a dial

At the time of writing ebay are showing a few Canon Dial 35 devices for quite a bit less than a Pentax. I managed to pick up a fully working model and the pictures it takes are just lovely.

The university in fine fettle

The Dial 35 is manual focus and auto exposure - like the Pentax 17. It also has a very neat little clockwork winding motor. And it looks like something from both the past and the future. If you have the cash, absolutely get the Pentax. If you haven’t or want to have a more interesting journey, then I reckon you should lurk around eBay until a cheap Canon Dial 35 comes around.