The August 2025 edition of Raspberry Pi magazine is now in the shops and available for download. I’ve written a couple of articles for this one. Inside you can find my deathless prose about using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop replacement (which works rather well) and storing settings in embedded Python apps.
Not sure how this makes my steering wheel work better….
I like my Logitech G29 steering wheel and it works well. However, since I installed the G Hub application that lets me configure it I’ve had Discord asking if Logitech can have access to my account. The access is fairly limited, but even so, I don’t see why I should have to do this. I went to a Tech Session a while back that made the point that data is the most valuable commodity on the planet at the moment. So I guess this is just part of the price of things now.
The gear lever is worth the extra cash
The Logitech G29 steering wheel is a good option if you fancy a bit of force feedback with your digital driving. It frequently pops up heavily discounted. The PlayStation version works with Gran Turismo but also with the Forza games on your PC. The only problem I’ve had with it is that the buttons are a bit hard to understand. The game asks you to press buttons and you have no idea which one does what. I’ve spent a while fiddling with it and made this little map.
| Button # | Label | In-Game Mapping | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | X | Forza 1 | Confirm |
| 1 | Square | Forza 2 | View |
| 2 | Circle | Forza 3 | Back |
| 3 | Triangle | Forza 4 | Rewind |
| 4 | Right Paddle | Forza 5 | Shift up |
| 5 | Left Paddle | Forza 6 | Shift down |
| 6 | R2 Pedal | Forza 7 | Accelerator |
| 7 | L2 Pedal | Forza 8 | Brake |
| 8 | Sunrise Button | Forza 9 | ESC in G HUB |
| 9 | Hamburger Button | Forza 10 | ENTER in G HUB |
| 10 | R3 | Forza 11 | |
| 11 | L3 | Forza 12 | |
| 12 | 1st Gear Button | Forza 13 | |
| 13 | 2nd Gear Button | Forza 14 | |
| 14 | 3rd Gear Button | Forza 15 | |
| 15 | 4th Gear Button | Forza 16 | |
| 16 | 5th Gear Button | Forza 17 | |
| 17 | 6th Gear Button | Forza 18 | |
| 18 | Reverse Gear Button | Forza 19 | |
| 19 | Plus (+) Button | Forza 20 | |
| 20 | Minus (–) Button | Forza 21 | |
| 21 | Red Dial Right | Forza 22 | |
| 22 | Red Dial Left | Forza 23 | |
| 23 | Red Dial Press | Forza 24 | |
| 24 | PS Logo Button | Forza 25 | MAP |
| Direction | Forza Device Mapping | Function |
|---|---|---|
| Left | Device 1 SW 1 | LEFT |
| Right | Device 1 SW 2 | RIGHT |
| Up | Device 1 SW 3 | UP |
| Down | Device 1 SW 4 | DOWN |
The left-most column is the button number as far as the steering wheel device is concerned. The label tells you which button it is on the wheel. The “In game mapping” column gives the button numbers in Forza and finally the right hand column gives you notes for useful in-game functions.
I’ve used the G Hub application to map two steering wheel buttons to ESC and ENTER, so that I can use the wheel without needing a keyboard.
Ready for firing
Apparently outings where you do stuff are now the thing. With this in mind, I recommend Pots on Pier Street off Humber Street in Hull. We did some pottery painting a while back in Leeds, which was great fun, and now we can do it much closer to home. We went along this afternoon.
The setup is great, the support impressive and I got the chance to make a black bun version of my previous work.
On the box it says Flip 7 is “The greatest card game of all time!”. I think that they are pushing their luck with that statement, but since that is what the game is all about, it is probably fair enough.
You use a special deck of cards. Most of the cards are numbered from 0 to 12. There are 12 cards numbered 12, 11 cards numbered 11 and so on. There is one zero card, which kind of breaks the pattern, but there you go.
There are also special cards, some of which give you free points, others let you inflict things on other players or give you protection against “busting”.
You “bust” when you pick up a card with a number which matches a card you already have. So getting a 12 card is good news score-wise, but bad news in that there is are plenty of other 12 cards out there that can ruin your round if you get another one.
During a round the dealer will ask you whether you want to get another card or stick with your score. A round ends when everyone is either bust or happy with their lot. Then all the cards go onto the discard pile and another round starts.
Each round score is added to your total until someone tops 200, when they win. Oh, and if you manage to get seven number cards in your hand you get a special bonus.
The luck pushing element is finely judged, and some of the special cards can be quite fun, particularly the one you can use to force another player to draw three cards. Good fun, and works with a large number of players - which is great.
Took the big camera into the garden today. Totally worth it.
Some software you release. Other stuff just seems to escape… HullOS-Z has now escaped onto GitHub. It’s the next version of the Connected Little Boxes software and the Hull Pixelbot controller, rolled into one enticing bunch and dropped onto the Raspberry Pi PICO W. Other versions will be coming along soon.
It’s definitely a work in progress and the initial focus is getting something to work with Robot Rugby. It is also the first step in integrating PythonIsh (and another surprise language) with Connected Little Boxes.
You are welcome to have a play with it and let me know what you think. In fact I’d love that. The repository has a uf2 file you can drop onto a Pico W or you can build the whole thing yourself using Platform IO.
Time taken to resolve problem - 1 minute
Take taken to fill in questionnaire sent to find out how well my problem was resolved - 5 minutes
All contributions gratefully recieved
Had a great birthday today. Got a new money box I can use to save up for cameras (and film), along with chocolate goodies, a camera bag and a book about experimental photography. Then it was time for the hardware meetup. I took cake. It seemed the right thing to do.
In the spirit of novel musical instruments, Ian brought along this amazing wind powered keyboard.
We had a good group of folks turned up. All the cake was eaten and the conversation was as wide-ranging as ever. Ross had brought along his “awesome keyboard controller” and it was, er, awesome (so good I forgot to take pictures). We also had the next iteration of rugby playing robots.
These are the robots in the arena
Ben was coding the robot movement and Brian had some software running for tracking them.
You can see the blue markers on the tops of the robots showing they are being tracked.
The next step is to send position information to the robots so that the code in them can work out which way to go. We should be doing that at the next meetup in a couple of weeks.
You are not allowed to call it “Brian”
I took this picture on Sunday at the Science Museum. What is the name of the computer?
Scene: A single performer on the stage, sitting at a large bench with a magnifying class and assorted small tools. The performer speaks:
“And now we move on to the Casio CA-500WE-1AEF which combines an 8 digit calculator with timekeeping functions. It uses a single CR2016 lithium coin cell which we can access by removing four 1mm screws found in the back of the case…”
The camera pulls back to reveal an audience of spectators staring earnestly at the performer. The camera continues to move backwards away from the stage, backwards through a corridor, into the foyer and then out through the front doors of the theatre onto the street where it lights on a sign that says…..
“Watch batteries replaced”
..as described in the blog
Last year we followed our trip to Hyper Japan with the Formula E finals. This year the timings are different, so we settled for a trip to one of my favourite places in the world, the Science Museum. They’ve added a few bits since we last visited. There’s a great section about you as a person and a machine, and another about energy. They’ve still got the displays of stuff from the past, which is being updated and now contains a disconcerting amount of stuff that I remember….
When does a “new” sticker stop being a thing?
Right hand drive…
Thanks to my recent outing I was able to describe in excruciating detail what all the various bits do.
The start of somethiung big…
My favourite machine of the day. A single cable goes up and down around 10 pulleys which are slightly off centre and rotate at different speeds to simulate the effect of various celestial bodies (sun, moon, planets etc) on the earth. The cable ends up being connected to a pen that draws a line on paper drawn through the machine from one spool to the other. In other words, you turn the handle on the right and the machine displays future tide levels.
Then we got on our train back to Hull and were treated to exactly the same experience going home as we had getting to London. This time they added more excitement with live arrival data for both our train and our connecting one. They also added more jeopardy, with hardly any trains going to Hull later that evening. Would be we stuck in Doncaster? Fortunately, again, both trains were late, but in a good way for us. Why didn’t we just catch a train that that straight from Hull to London you ask? Well, last time I did that the train wasn’t late. It just wasn’t there. I think I’m reaching the point where train travel is just too exciting for me. Anyhoo, it has been a great couple of days.
We’ve been to Hyper Japan before. Last year. It’s still awesome. I took a camera and grabbed a bunch of pictures that look very similar to my previous ones.
They had all the things that were there last time, including lots of little stalls manned by artists turning out all kinds of art. Great fun.
I’m looking forward to next year.
We knew exactly what was going to happen when someone shouted “Raise the alarm!”. But it was still funny. That’s a huge tribute to writing, performing and set design. It takes a lot of work to be that silly, that quickly. Not all the lines were that good/bad. But there were so many of them, they came so fast and they were performed with such conviction that the packed audience, including us, were swept along. We got running gags, set pieces, impressive staging and good ice-cream. And they even found time for an engaging story with some poignant endings.
We were at “The Comedy about Spies”, part of our mini-mini-break to London. The very first element of the break was an exciting edge of the seat experience provided by the British Rail transport network which, by the simple expedient of making one train late, added a lot of excitement to what should have been a routine journey. “Would we arrive in time to see our next train leaving the station?”. Who knew? Certainly not anyone in charge of the network. As it turned out the train we were meeting was also late and, in a magical plot twist, not even the train we were expecting so our seat reservations didn’t work. Ho hum.
Anyhoo, we got to London, had a walk around and then headed to the play. It was really good. I take my stupidity very seriously and this stuff was done very well indeed. Strongly recommended.
Pro tip: The seats that we had (Row U in the stalls) where somewhat cheaper because of their “limited view”. This didn’t reduce our enjoyment (they had a video screen showing the bits we couldn’t see). If you want to reduce the price of your great night out you should go for them.
if (tokenOffset + 1 >= MAX_TOKEN_LENGTH)
I’m writing some text decoding stuff at the moment. The piece of code above is a bit of C that I’ve written to make sure than I don’t write over the end of my token array. If the tokenOffset gets larger then the length of the array the condition is true and I will stop writing into it. One of the joys of C is that you have to worry about this kind of thing, otherwise you can overwrite memory and have all kinds of bad things happen. However, the code above is not as efficient as it might be. Any ideas why?
…sound of crickets….
Well, every time the code runs it will have to work out tokenOffset+1, because tokenOffset is a variable. However, look what happens if I do this:
if (tokenOffset >= MAX_TOKEN_LENGTH-1)
The logic is the same, but now I’m subtracting the value 1 from MAX_TOKEN_LENGTH, which is a constant containing the length of the buffer. Since this is fixed at compile time the compiler will just drop the reduced value into the code, so the program now performs no calculations when the test is made. This is the kind of thing that you used to have to fret about, back in the day when every processor cycle was precious. Such fun.
Incidentally, you might be wondering why I have one less character in my text buffer than I think. This is because in C a character string array contains a null character (a character with the code of 0) which marks the end of the string. This character has the lovely name of “terminator”. This does mean that a 50 character array can only actually hold 49 characters, because the last one is the terminator. Another way to solve this problem is to make the array one bigger when you create it, to leave room for Arnold.
I’ve just spent the day playing with PythonIsh. It’s a tiny language that I’m adding to my Connected Little Boxes. It originated in the Hull Pixelbot, but now I want use it to make it easy to program all my different devices. Today it actually worked properly for the first time, which is nice.
The idea is that you can write tiny bits of code that run in response to events on devices. You can save program files in the device and one program can load in another. You can also enter a new program while an existing one is running. And, as you can see above, the device can host a website where you can enter code. You can also edit code online and send it to a device over MQTT.
It will be out soon on GitHub.
They have barges down on the river
Went to the rubbish tip. An affair of badly chosen (massive roadworks) and implemented (turned wrong way) routing. But the tip is in a nice place, down by the river at the far side of a bridge not operated by a troll. Or at least I couldn’t see one.
Non-troll operated bridge
The tip is self-service, lots of labelled bins waiting for their particular type of rubbish. I really hope that they don’t tip all the bins into one big skip at the end of the day.
I’d taken the pass you are supposed to show when you want to throw things away but nobody asked me for it. Maybe next time. Looking at what’s in the garage, there will be a next time….
I love the list of people the magic brain is ideal for….
I got the two items above in Scarborough last week. They are the kind of things that 12 year old me would really have liked. The marked deck lets you work out what card your victims are holding by decoding tiny icons on the back. A stripper deck is one which has been filed down on the sides. The width at the top of each card is slightly different from the width at the bottom. If you put the chosen card in the deck upside down you can easily find it because it sticks out. You slide your fingers up the sides of the deck you can “strip” the inverted card out and look quite magical.
I actually did get a “Magic Brain” calculator when I was 12 and used it to sum up survey results. You add, subtract and multiply (but not divide) by using a metal stylus to move the vertical sliders up and down, changing the numbers displayed in the windows. If adding the value to the one displayed causes a carry you slide the value down and then loop around at the bottom to add the carry. For subtraction you dialled in one number, and then slid the numbers back up to subtract. It didn’t handle negative numbers very well….
Slightly older me thinks both these things are really rather wonderful. Scarborough has lots of little shops selling things like these for knock down prices. My magic brain only cost me a pound and the playing cards weren’t much more. Great fun.
I didn’t get to see much of Live Aid back in 1985. I was working in Paris for a couple of weeks, teaching American students how to program the BBC Micro. Skills which I’m sure they found useful when they got back to the ‘states. The flat I was staying in didn’t have a telly, so I only saw bits and bobs in bars and whatnot when we went out. We watched some of the concert last night, when the BBC reprised the show. I really enjoyed it. Random observations:
Leather trousers were big in 1985, which must have been lovely in the heat of Wembley stadium in July.
It was interesting to watch the camera operators waving around enormous broadcast cameras to get close ups of the performers. This must have been quite ground (and back) breaking for the time.
Apparently Queen spent three days honing their 16 minute set. It really showed. Freddy Mercury was a genius.
You could pay your donations in a Giro bank account at you local post office. Imagine that.
They had the famous actor (and Hull University Honorary Doctor - I was at the ceremony) John Hurt on and asked him his favourite band. He gave a very diplomatic answer which was fortuitously (for him) cut short by the next band starting up. America had Jack Nicholson. And Bette Midler.
Nobody in the crowd was holding up a phone to record the show. I wonder why that was?
Did some painting today. It’s kind of been a week of painting. On Thursday I painted the garden seat brown and afterwards spent a while trying to clean a freckle off my arm….
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
