Microsoft Experience Centre

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It would have been so cool if this had been what you could buy

Today we had to head home, but before we got on the train we took a look in a few places, including the Microsoft Experience Centre on Regent Street. If you are ever in that part of town it is worth a look. They have all the new Microsoft machines on show (including the latest laptops and tablets with CoPilot) and upstairs they have a lovely gaming display including the original X-Box which was unveiled when the console was announced. This is interesting because it really is a giant X (see above). We had a look around the back and it has all the connections so, in theory it should be possible to plug it in and play it. They had lots of other XBoxes too plus a range of games and accessories.

Taking a Rabbit to the Formula E Finals

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this is about the best I could do on the day. Turns out that racing cars are hard to photograph

Formula E is a bit like Formula 1, except that the cars are powered by electricity and sound a bit like turbocharged hair driers. We went to the final event of the season in London today. We watched the practice, the qualifier and finally the race. In between these we wandered around looking at stands in the exhibition attached to the race, watched a mini-concert from Craig David and generally had an all-out wonderful time. I took a camera and the Rabbit R1.

I took a bunch of pictures with a proper camera, and lots with the Rabbit R1. I was lucky because for some reason we had good mobile phone connections and the Rabbit was able to take the shots and do “Magic Camera” type things with them. I really like the results. They are not photographs in the proper sense of the word, but they provide a lovely record of the event and I’m very pleased to have them. And if you bear in mind that a Rabbit R1 is a fraction of the price of a new camera lens I reckon it is a good investment if you want a quirky record of what you’ve been up to.

This is what the rabbit thought of the race

Some of the racing got quite intimate

A “Rabbit’s Eye View” of one of the cars on display

The Racers

Yes, there was a Costa

Tyre smoke at the start

From now on I’m going to be taking the Rabbit R1 with me to get its unique perspective.

Hyper Japan is Awesome

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This is what the Rabbit made of it

This is slightly more conventional

Today we were up early and heading for Hyper Japan, a celebration of all things Japanese. It was wonderful. Stalls with video games, figures, clothing, and all kinds of other stuff. We had a walk around, had a great lunch (a first time with squid for me) and then had another walk around. There was some splendid cosplay and loads of stands. Plus cars. I took a few pictures

Of course there was bonsai

Nice Car

Not sure what these are, but they sure are cute

Seeing Red

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The first image came out completely white owing to too much exposure

Above is the first successful test of the leaky camera. I fired the LEDS in red for a tiny amount of time and was rewarded with a nice red picture. I’m pleased that the colour seems fairly even. Now I have to get the camera itself working and then I can find out what happens if we add this to an existing picture. Rather exciting.

Making a Leaky Camera

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The PICO on the side of the camera controls the brightness and colour of the led lights

What kind of an idiot puts lights inside a camera? Er, this kind of idiot (and also Fuji Film with their Instax Mini 99). I was converting another Polaroid Land camera to use Instax film (it’s a thing - believe me) and I wondered what would happen if I put some leds inside and exposed the film a bit with them. Well, today I built the first version. I’m using a PICO with a little LCD panel to control a row of Neopixels inside the camera. I’m not sure how well this will work, and what level of exposure is required, but I’m going to enjoy finding out.

Stationfall is good back-stabbing fun

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This is what the rabbit thought the boad looked like at the end. Note the cheating three-handed player on the bottom left.

Stationfall is a board game that plays out on a space station falling from orbit to the ground. On board are a totally motley crew, each with their own agenda. Some want everyone to survive. Some want everyone to perish. Some just want to have fun (or so it seems). When the game starts nobody knows which game players are assigned which game characters, and players can use their influence to move any of the characters and make them do things (for example release deadly killing machines from quarantine at a really annoying moment).

I think we are going to have to have another go at this because there was a lot of stuff to take in at the start. But we all did enough to agree that it is good back-stabbing fun.

Life Tip

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Not sure if this is a life tip, but it is a good tip nonetheless. We spent a big chunk of today arranging a funeral (helped by the wonderful Kelly from the Co-op). This was made much easier because my father-in-law had taken the very sensible step of making clear exactly what he wanted to happen and sorting it all out in advance. Doing this really helps those that are carrying on.

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..