Electronics and Broken Wi-Fi at the Hardware Meetup

I really thought I’d cracked it. I thought my shiny new Robot Wi-Fi hotspot would give all my robots squeaky clean connections and all would work.

Not so.

The robots persistently fell off the network. Just like last time. Most annoying. And after a lot of testing back home where they worked perfectly. Oh well. If I had a drawing board this might be a good time to go back to it.

The good news was that we had some impressive stuff on show. Ian had brought in a complete DSP rig which lets him “round trip signals” from a signal generator, through a DSP module and then back into the computer so that he can view the effects of his DSP code. Very impressive and super-useful if you want to tune the frequency response of your system to match particular environments. You can find out more about what he has been up to in Practical Electronics magazine. Meantime Ross was working on Hull pixelbot PICO migration and Brian had brought his robot arena system with him which proved extremely good at ball tracking. Soon all the robots will be “ball aware”. Just as long as I can get the network to, er, work.

The next Hardware Meetup will be on the 17th of September. All are welcome to turn up and discover if whatever changes I’m going to make will fix anything….

Flash Power

Apparently the harsh light of electronic flashes are the latest new trend in photography.

Although the results are also quite interesting when the flash doesn’t go off….

The Worst Bugs are by Design

The latest version of PythonIsh is coming along a treat. I spent most of today fiddling with working on the code. And I fixed a silly bug. My new command to send MQTT messages from a Pythonsh program wasn’t working when entered into a program. Although the command worked fine when entered from the terminal. What’s going on? Turns out quite a lot. But first, some background:

Pythonish is a thin wrapper on top of a thing I’ve called HullOS which runs programs that are implemented as two character statements. Some HullOS statements have extra data on the end. For example I have the command:

rtHello World

This is in the “remote” family of commands (that’s what the r means) and it transmits an MQTT message (that’s what the t means). The rest of the command is the message to send (Hello World). There are command families for quite a few letters of the alphabet now. Remote commands are special. They control receipt and storage of remote programs. The rm command says “Don’t perform the statements I’m going to send you, instead store them to run later”. Then the rx command says “I’m done with storing code, lets go back to performing statements”.

When I implemented these commands it occurred to me that it would be silly to allow running programs to initiate remote downloads and whatnot as this would get really confusing really quickly. So, I built the code so that r commands are never added to stored programs.

And then I wrote a bunch of extra r command behaviours which do need to be stored in program code. Idiot me. I’ve fixed it now. I’m not sure what the lesson is here, other than “Don’t do stupid things”. And add big comments on code which behaves differently from the norm.

If you want to follow my journey and have a play with the code (we even have some documentation now!) take a look here.

Gone Flying

We’ve done a lot of fake flying. We have regular meetups where we tour the world in Microsoft Flight Simulator 24. It’s very good. But no substitute for the real thing. Today one of us got to fly a real plane and I went along to take pictures using a variety of cameras and lenses. We were at Beverley Airfield. The weather was great, the conditions were clear (if a bit draughty) and everything passed off without a hitch. The only real problem was that they serve bacon butties for breakfast in the café and we’d already eaten. But we’ll know for next time.

Bought another broken camera

Today we had a bunch of folks around for a game night and were playing “Formula D”. Things were going OK and then I got an e-bay alert about a price reduction on a “mostly working” camera. Which I then bought. And then our car fell to pieces at the next corner. I hope this isn’t an omen.

Side note: Formula D with all the damage and wear options enabled is really hard work.

Snickers for the win

There’s a branch of the family that isn’t keen on the Snickers sweets you get in tubs of Mars Celebrations. Sometimes when we meet up they give me a bag full of them. Thanks folks.

Sewerby Hall with a Hasselblad H1 Camera

Last year I took a Mamiya Press film camera to Sewerby Park. This year I took something a bit more modern, only 20 years old. You can find more pictures on Flickr.

Humber Bridge

The Humber Bridge was looking especially fine this morning.

Microworld at Ferens Art Gallery is Super Fun

This is one of those blog posts where the title says all you need to know really. We went today and it was really good. Nice to see Kinect sensors being put to good use.

You can find out even more here. If you want to go you’ll have to be quick. The exhibit ends on 7th September.

FreeCAD Tips

I’ve been writing Python programs in FreeCAD for ages. So after the success (hah!) of my Python Shorts I thought I’d make a little resource with some tips based on what I’ve learnt working with it. You can find it at here.

If you run Python programs in FreeCAD you should take a look. If you want to learn how to write Python programs in FreeCAD it tells you how to get started. I’ll be adding more items later.

You should be playing Cheese Finder

I’ve just renewed the domain for Cheese Finder. I made it a little while back when I was writing Begin to Code: Building Apps and Games in the Cloud. The board contains hidden cheeses. When you click a square it changes to a colour that represents the distance that square is from the nearest cheese. You have to figure out where the cheese (or cheeses) are with the smallest number of clicks. The puzzle above went well. I only needed four clicks. I clicked in three corners, which all came up the same colour. Which meant that the cheese was somewhere in the middle.

It’s quite fun. You get a different puzzle every hour with a different number of cheeses and different colour mapping.

This one was a bit harder to solve, what with there being four cheeses to find.

Robot Hotspot

Yesterday I ordered a heavily discounted portable Wi-Fi hotspot for the robots. I hope they appreciate it. The device arrived today. I slapped a “Pay as you go” phone sim in it and spent 10 minutes setting it up. It works a treat, and the robots can connect to it quite happily.

It doesn’t support 5G signals, but I’m not really after speed and the service it found seemed snappy enough. So, with a bit of luck the next Hardware Meetup won’t end with a broken network…

Not Sleuth

Turns out I was wrong in my identification of the guilty party. It wasn’t the husband.

I hope I haven’t spoiled anything with this disclosure.

Leeds Industrial Museum

Today finds us at Leeds Industrial Museum. We like museums. Especially this one. It used to be a Mill, and not a great place to work.

All around they have put up descriptions of the horrible afflictions inflicted on the workforce. The ear defenders above are for visitors to wear when they fire up the spinning machine. Not something that the employees got. They just had to put up with going deaf after a while. All the machines were powered by a steam engine which turned long shafts that ran along inside the roofline. Canvas belts transferred power to the huge machines that took wool into one end and then produced cloth at the other. There were no covers on the belts or the machine mechanisms. Getting mangled was just something you had to try to avoid doing.

It’s interesting to think that at the time the mill was opened these places would have seemed like the ultimate in technical advancement and heralded as the next great thing. Oh well. It’s not as if our generation would widely adopt new technology without thinking hard about the implications and the effects on people using it..

Robots and Axolotls at the Hardware Meetup

We had a super special Hardware Meetup tonight. With young guests, an axolotl on a throne, 3D headset and self-breaking Wi-Fi (which was not in the plan). It was great fun - even when the network broke. Many thanks to the Hull MakerSpace team for doing such a job of showing our guests around and demonstrating some of the awesome machinery they have.

We all learnt something. In my case it was that trying to hang 8 robots off a single phone hotspot doesn’t always end well. For the next meetup I’m working on something a bit more robust…..

Deep Jellyfish

Pesky weather. We had all kinds of plans for today. We were going to head over to Sewerby Hall and look at the penguins and do all kinds of fun outdoor things which are no fun in the rain. But it was raining. So instead we went to “The Deep” and looked at some different penguins. Pro Tip 1 for visiting The Deep: Get there early. Preferably when it opens. You will have a blissful 45 minutes or so to explore the place before everyone else turns up.

Pro Tip 2: Don’t miss the jellyfish. Around half way round you get to an inviting white tunnel entrance which looks really good (it is). But to the left of the entrance is another one to the Jellyfishes. These are awesome and great fun to photograph.

Pro Tip 3: Go to the café and get a seat at “the pointy end” with views all the way up the estuary to the Humber Bridge one way and across the river the other.

And best of all, the tickets last for a year. Which is how we got to go back for free…

Yellowphant

Shown with the original white one. I need to work on my brush technique

Got my “black burger” back from the pottery. We went there and painted some pots a while back. I think it came out pretty well. They have a really nice elephant model which I was planning paint with a different colour for each facet.

Like many of my plans, this one collapsed completely when presented with reality. So instead I want for a “yellowphant”. I’m looking forward to seeing how that one comes out.

Hesslewood Car Show

Today I reaped the benefits of my film testing yesterday. Mostly. I took my instant camera to the Hesslewood Car Show and grabbed some shots. I’m pleased with the results, although I need to learn how to make adjustments for light and dark subjects. The car show was great. It was right next to the Humber Bridge Park and they had loads, and loads, and loads of interesting cars. Along with coffee, pizza, bits and bobs and birds of prey. We had a great time eating pizza and watching the birds go through their paces. I think it is an annual event, so if you are at a loose end in August 2026 and want to support a good cause (Humber Rescue) then you should head along.

Exposure Testing..

Instant photos are great fun. But not if they are completely white or completely black. In that case they don’t even make very good drinks mats. With this in mind I spent the afternoon measuring light levels and taking pictures using different lenses. It’s my idea of fun. OK?

Anyhoo, I got the results on the left. The top shot was taken with the wide angle lens, and it looks fine. Then we switch to the normal lens and things still look good. And then…..

My telephoto lens has a shutter in it which could be described as “a bit on the slow side”. This lets lots more light in with the hilarious white result you can see in the bottom picture. So, I’m going to have to make some adjustments when I use this lens.

This is something worth keeping in mind when using camera bits which are around 60 years old. Just because the mechanism goes “whirr-click” doesn’t mean that it is going at the right speed. Instant film is extremely picky about the amount of light it needs so a problem that might not show up on more tolerant film stocks becomes horribly obvious when you load up with instant film..

Love and Large Language Models

We went to see the Fantastic Four movie last night. It was OK. Before the film they had a bunch of adverts, including one for Google Gemini, one of the many AI assistants being forced down our throats at the moment. I found this one particularly depressing when it showed the sample query “How do I know if I am really in love?”. Ugh.

This is not what you should use AI for. AI is for things like “how do I unblock a toilet”, or “how do I create a tuple containing only one element in Python”. Not for affairs of the heart. I guess that the creators of AI have decided that most of us don’t need to unblock toilets or create tuples very often (unless our lives have taken a particularly strange turn), so they are moving into other aspects of the human condition.

Please don’t use the tool for things like this. For one thing you need to remember that one of the aims of an AI assistant is to keep you talking as long as possible (a bit like a hostage negotiator) and to do this it will tell you things it thinks you might like to hear. For another, remember that, since you aren’t paying for the service, Google will soon move on to monetising your engagements, so questions about love might well end up resulting in your next searches returning lots of adverts for chocolates and underwear.

I must admit I quite enjoy talking to AI when I’m doing stuff with it, and it is not a huge step to starting to think that the software understands me and cares what I am doing. But it doesn’t and it doesn’t. It just wants to keep me talking.