Hoxe Airtag clones are good value with one Achilles Heel

Each tag is around 40mm across

We’ve used Apple Airtags to keep track of our stuff for ages. They work very well but they are a bit pricey. Hoxe Tracker Tags do the same job and you can get eight of them for the silly price of ten pounds (or sometimes even cheaper). On Apple you use them in exactly the same way. Add them to the Find My app and they pop up on your map and away you go. They contain a CR2032 battery which you’ll have to change ever now and then. I can’t speak for how well they work on Android, but I’d expect them to be fine.

What’s not to love? Well, there is the way that they use a tiny little button (you can see it on the picture above) to control their reset behaviour. Hold the button down for a few seconds and the tag goes into “pairing mode” and waits for something to talk to it. Put a tag in your back pocket with a bunch of keys and then sit down and you might also activate the pair behaviour which stops the tag working. I must admit I’ve not had a problem with this myself. I pop the tags into bags where it is unlikely to happen. If I want to put one on a keyring I might make a little case which covers the button.

Phoenix II film

The images above (and the one from yesterday) were taken on Phoenix II film. It’s a very interesting film with a different coloured base and an evolving emulsion. I exposed the shots at the suggested film speed. I think they are a bit dark, so when I use my next roll I’ll add another stop or so. But I like the colours and the grain in the pictures.

Wheely Good Time at the Hardware Meetup

Here are some flowers in place of hardware meetup pictures

I’ve done it again. Taken a camera to the Hardware Meetup and totally failed to take any pictures. So there is no evidence that we had a great time (despite me bringing the wrong robot parts along). Nice to see new folks turning up and we did manage to get robot wheels fitted and turning, which is a great start.

Next time we will be adding a distance sensor so that the robot can move around without bashing into things.

Cheap Handles

I can make two camera handles with just one set

I’m making a big camera. In a big box. With a printer. It’s going to be quite heavy. And it will need a handle. I’ve managed to find these on Amazon. They are supposed to be used for underwater photography. You put a camera in the middle and some lights on the top. But they come to pieces to leave you with two handles and two fairly sturdy base plates, which are the bits I’m going to be using. I managed to get mine “nearly new” for the princely sum of fourteen pounds. If you are building anything that needs a handle, they are well worth a look.

Turning Black and White

I need to work on my focus

I’m getting back into black and white analogue photography. I think I’ve found the cheapest way to do it: process at home and use bulk rolls of film that you load into reusable cassettes. This drops the price significantly, although you do have to deal with films that tell fibs about their speed (I’m looking at you Fomapan 400) and leave you with very thin, underexposed negatives. Either that, or I got the developing time wrong.

Anyhoo, the results are always interesting and would be very difficult to replicate on a digital camera or phone.

Cameras and Coffee in Leeds

Cameras. And coffee

Went to Leeds today for the monthly Cameras and Coffee event. It was great fun. Next time we’ll plan to stick around a bit longer.

Boxing not clever

One of these holes is in the wrong place

Spent a lot of the day designing boxes for printers. Manged to move the wrongly positioned hole in the wrong direction, which on the hole was not positive.

Horrrse

I’ve been fiddling with AI generated pictures. Sometimes it produces some wonderful stuff. Like the horrrse above.

Got my Leeds Photo walk pictures back

We’ve got back the pictures we took on the photo walk last Saturday. Kudos to Analogue Wonderland for turning them around so quickly. My favourite shot is above. I took it in the Victoria Shopping Centre in Leeds. We’d gone in there to cool down in the air-conditioning and I noticed the skylight.

I had a few duds, mainly because I forgot to focus the camera. But all in all I’m very pleased with the results. If you’ve not done a photo walk before, I strongly recommend them.

Bendy printing

I think I needed more support underneath it.

A cunning 3D printing trick is to print at an angle. The thinking is that a printer can quite happily print at 45 degrees, so if you have lots of overhangs in your design (which is the printer case I made yesterday) they will all print at 45 degrees and there will be much less need for support. I have actually done this and it worked well. But not today. It was probably because I was printing on one of the hottest days of the year.

The print went all bendy and dipped below the print head so that the printer started printing in thin air, and just produced some very fine spaghetti. This is the first time the Bambu printer has let me down. It’s my fault really, the print was a bit ambitious. In the end I stood the design on its side, printed a bit of support and it came out just fine.

Drain cover of the year

The colour for this year is yellow

Every year around now Yorkshire Water come down our street, take a look at the drain outside our house and notice it is broken. Then they paint a cross on the drain (last year it was blue as I remember) and go away for a year. I wonder what colour it will be next year.

Making a printer cutter

Last time I went to the Electromagnetic Field Festival I took along a converted Polaroid camera that produced Fujifilm Instax Wide pictures. This time I’m going a bit bigger. I’m making a Raspberry Pi powered camera that uses a Canon Selphy CP400 dye sublimation printer. These printers produce super high quality prints which are around a third of the price of the Instax ones. And you can pick them up for around twenty quid on ebay. They work fine on Raspberry Pi (and Windows 11 PCs) too. The downsides. They are quite big. They run on 22 volts DC. And they are quite big.

I’m designing the camera box and I have to leave room for the printer and the battery pack. The Pi and the electronics will be at the top and I’ll have room for quite a big screen. I’m using a new design technique (to me). Rather than try and place fixing and access holes in the case that I have designed, I’ve instead created a model of the printer and all the cut-outs and mounting holes that it needs.

The long thin bits are the mounting holes

This is the printer cutter. I just design the box, position my model inside it and use cut to remove the printer from the box.

This is the box with the cutter cut out of it. You can just see the mounting holes at the bottom. All I have to do now is print it and hope that my model is correct….

Cottingham Fair in Great Weather Shock

The last few days have been a target rich environment from a photographic point of view. In the morning I took a camera around Cottingham Show. I was hoping they would have some old motorbikes and I wasn’t disappointed. At the moment I’m getting back into analogue photography in black and white.

I developed the pictures this afternoon and I’m really pleased with the results. The only problem I had was that the temperature of the developer is supposed to be 20 degrees centigrade and at the moment the water coming out of the taps here is at 22 degrees. Rather than fetch some ice cubes I just developed the film for a bit less time. The camera I used is older than me. I think results are pretty darned good.

Leeds Photowalk

Every year Analogue Wonderland organise photo walks all over the country. Last year we went to the one in Hull. This year we headed for Leeds. It was great. Howard was the walk leader and took us around a few bits in Leeds I’d not seem before. The weather was lovely, the company was great and the photographs will be back from the developers in a few days.

Repeated Humour

I’ve found two different birthday cards bearing the inscription:

“Surely, not everybody was Kung Fu Fighting.”

I quite liked the first one, but when I saw the second one I was less impressed. Are we really that short of good lines? Perhaps they should give me a call.

Never too warm for Lego

As I write this Hull is the only place in Great Britain without an extreme weather warning. It is still jolly hot though. But not too hot for Lego.

This is a splendid build. When you turn the crank on the right hand side Mario and Yoshi run along in a very well animated manner.

Building it was great fun. I liked the way that pixels map onto Lego tiles

FreeCAD fun at the Hardware Meetup

We had a very select gathering at the Hardware Meetup tonight. But fun was still had. I managed to get my robots moving forwards rather than backwards (always a good thing) and Simon was preparing FreeCAD designs for 3D printing at the MakerSpace.

Incidentally, I’ve set up a Discord server for the group where we will give out details of meetings and chat about hardware and whatnot. If you’d like an invite get in touch (hardware at robmiles.com) and I’ll send you one. I’d put the invite link in a blog post, but that ways lies madness and an awful lot of spam.

AI for things you don't want

I already know what the bedroom looks like

We’ve upgraded to the latest AI version of Alexa (Don’t judge me. It was free and I like new toys).

Now screens about the house offer to “Write a Haiku about how your day is going” or “Describe your surroundings”.

Is there anyone in the world who has ever needed a Haiku writing about their day? And if I’m standing in the kitchen holding a mug of tea, I don’t really need a device to say “I can see bloke in a kitchen holding a mug of tea”.

Camera Cased

My home made Pi camera now has a case. All it needs now is a lid.

Perfect Father's Day

I’m planning on getting all three

Had a really good day today. The weather was just the right temperature for a barbeque. I got a book I’ve been after for ages. I got to do some Lego, got a super-interesting book about the 6502 microprocessor (among other things). I also got to play with a camera, go for a walk and run a film off and then come home and develop it. Good times.