Epcot

/

What Disney think that the UK looks like

The Epcot theme park is a peek into the future and a huge pile of cultural appropriation. The peek into the future gives us, amongst other things, a Guardians of the Galaxy ride (which is apparently very good although I haven’t been on it owing to my issues with fairground rides and regurgitation) and a restaurant in space.

The cultural appropriation gives us regionally themed area around the park dedicated to different countries. The UK area has some red phone boxes and a fish and chip shop. The Mexican area has a beautiful plaza and a boat ride which features Donald Duck in a Mexican outfit. I know which I prefer.

Eating in Space

We had lunch in the spaceship restaurant. It is very well done. You get in a “lift” which takes you up a hundred miles or so and one wall of place gives you panoramic views of the earth in space. The views are constantly changing. Spacecraft turn up and dock, space-suited figures drift past and there’s even a dog in a spacesuit if you wait long enough. The food was very nice too.

My favourite picture so far

The great thing about this place is the way that you really do get insights into the ways of the world. The Japanese area has a fantastic exhibit all about Japanese cute and the little “local” shops sell a huge range of interesting artefacts.

We were very proud of the way that we managed to last to 5:00pm without collapsing, but anything more than that (like another ten minutes or so) would probably have seen us keeling over.

Hello Florida

/

Oooh. Dollar prices

I find it amazing that you can have breakfast on one continent and then tea in another which is thousands of miles away. But we just did. The weather is lovely (if an English person writes about somewhere they are going to mention the weather pretty quickly).

They seem to have things around the place just to look nice. Which is nice.

I don’t think we’re in the country of America. We’re really in the country of Disney. It’s very nice, though. In the UK we tend to make things charming by leaving them to themselves for a few hundred years. Here it is all very designed. But still very pretty.

Fully Packed

/

This guy didn’t make the final cut

Today we taking our first step to our holiday destination, a hotel near the airport. I’ve got four cameras and twelve pairs of socks among other things. I’m now a big fan of packing cubes, which let you put all your socks together in one place. The flight leaves tomorrow. Allowing myself to get slightly excited about all this.

String powered photography at the Hardware Meetup

/

I had all these plans for the Hardware Meetup today. I was hoping to persuade folks that the camera I was using to take portraits was so old that it only took black and white pictures. What a wizard April Fools joke that would have been. But then I found that the Instax back I was using to “process” the pictures was full of colour film. So that ended that.

But we did manage to get some good pictures though, along with some glorious failures. I was very concerned about focus. So I adjusted the bellows on the camera until I had a subject in focus at a particular distance. Then I cut a piece of string to that length. Now, to get a sharp picture I just had to put the bellows at my known position and then use the length of the string to set the distance of the subject from the camera. Worked for me, and the subjects. I did manage to lose a few shots. A couple were under exposed and two more went through the processor the wrong way. But I was able to hand out a few nicely sharp and well rendered prints, which was nice.

The next hardware meetup will be in three weeks on 22nd of April. I’m going to be further improving my portrait action then.

Goodbye to Beverly Camera Centre

/

Beverley Camera Centre is no more. It closed today. I bought a couple of things and the retiring owner (if you see what I mean) was kind enough to give me a tiny digital camera which he has had lying around for a while. Tiny digital cameras are all the rage at the moment so I’m going to have a go at getting it to work. The good news is that it is powered by an AAA battery. The bad news is that it needs custom USB drivers to make it work. Should be fun.

I’m going to miss the camera centre though, it has been part of my weekly routine to drop buy there and almost never except sometimes buy something.

Foolish Hardware Meetup

/

For the first time ever we are having a meetup on April Fool's day. With that in mind I can definitely confirm that we will not be taking your portrait with a 130 year old camera, playing with googly eyes or creating 3d printable picture mosaics. And there will be no Furbies present whatsoever. 

Come along on Wednesday 1st April from 5:00pm in Hull MakerSapce in Hull Central Library to find out who the fool is. And bring your own foolish creations too. 

Cursed by the wrong size...

/

Sure is a good looking camera from the front thogh..

So I went to the Photography Show and bought a camera which is perfect in every way. Except one. The plastic around the viewfinder is broken. Wah. I can’t stress enough how little effect this has on the camera. It works fine and you can’t even see the fault from the front. But it bothered me. So I bought a differently broken camera with an intact viewfinder surround and tried to replace the damaged part.

It didn’t go well.

I managed to get both cameras to pieces, removed the broken part and got the replacement in place. And then it all went wrong.

this is the doner camera. That powder used to be foam

This is the replacement part in perfect condition. But the wrong size

I’d assumed that because the parts on the cameras looked the same, they would be the same. The cameras were different versions of the same model, but nobody would subtly change the design of a part just because they could, would they? Of course the answer is yes. The replacement part is around half a millimetre thicker than the old one. And that’s all it needs to be not to fit. Double wah. So I’ve had to put both cameras back together and continue the quest. Or convince myself that it doesn’t really matter. As if that’s going to happen.

The only piece of good news is that while I had the lid off my original camera I was able to make the flash work properly. The camera has a socket for connecting the flash gun, but when I got it the connection was always short circuited, causing the flash to fire when it shouldn’t. I had a quick look and a connecting tab on the socket was shorting against body of the camera. I bent it out of the way and I now have timely flashes.

I’m going to call this a score draw. Book now for round two…

FreeCAD Mosaic Maker

/

These are just the colours that happened to be in the printer. I think they worked rather well.

I’ve been playing around with Python programs in FreeCAD for a while. Today I did a bit of image processing. The little program I’ve built reads in an image, resizes it, reduces the colour depth to 4 and then drops out four STL files, one for each colour. These can then be combined in the slicer to make a low-res picture.

The pictures look better the further you are away from them. A bit like me. At the moment I’m using a resolution of 128x128 pixels. I’ve got to tidy the code up a bit, and then I’ll put it all on GitHub.

New issue of Raspberry Pi Magazine out

/

There’s a new issue of Raspberry Pi magazine out. It’s got some really nice articles. And a couple that I wrote. My favourite so far is the one that describes how to install and run Stable Diffusion on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 1G of memory (or even a Raspberry Pi Zero. The good news is that it works. The bad news is that it takes several hours to create the image.

I don’t see that as a problem though. At the moment I’m trying to get it working on a Raspberry Pi attached to an e-ink display. I think it might be rather cool to have randomly generated art popping up every now and then.

Tiiny Ai looks nice

/

If I was going to bet the farm on the future (and I had a farm to bet) I’d be inclined to look closely at things like the Tiiny Ai. It’s a portable device that has enough under the hood to be able to run quite powerful large language models, amongst other things. You can plug it in and it gives you your own personal AI. It’s not as powerful as a proper PC with a GPU or anything in a distant data centre but it might be good enough to keep most people happy. Maybe this could take the place of huge data centres and give everyone their own portable, personal AI with zero usage charges.

Achievement Unlocked - Apple Newton

/

I’ve always fancied owning an Apple Newton. I remember when they were released and I couldn’t afford one. Now it turns out that you can pick them up quite cheaply.

My “new to me” Newton arrived last week. It works, even the display lights up. It has a nasty scratch on the screen but this doesn’t seem to stop it from working. I’m missing the pen though, so I’m scouring the net for a replacement.

The biggest problem is that the internal clock just can’t handle 2026. It’s as if the Apple engineers didn’t expect people to still be using them 33 years after they were made. Apparently the trick is to tell the machine it is 1998, then the days line up.

The machine has a serial port, so I’m going to have a go at making it talk to a PICO and see if we can get data in and out of it. Such fun.

Making a 130 Year Old Instant Camera

/

The Camera itself is a work of art

The camera above was a very impressive gadget back in the 1890s. I got it at a camera fair in Boston Spa. It’s a quarter plate camera which takes pictures on glass slides. These are mounted inside a film holder which clips onto the back of the camera. When it was time to take a picture you’d slide back a “dark slide” on the film holder which covers the film surface and fire the shutter. Then you’d slide the dark slide back over the film and try to remember not to expose it again. The film holder has a dark slide on each side, so each holder is good for two shots.

Back home in the dark you’d take the glass slide out of the camera, develop it to make a negative and then create contact prints by exposing photographic paper through the negative. Then you’d post the prints to your friends and head off the chemists to buy some more glass slides, chemicals and paper to repeat the process. Instagram in the time of Queen Victoria.

You can’t get the glass slides any more. But you can get Instax Wide instant film. It turns out that the instant film is around 2 mm deeper than the glass plates and won’t fit in the holders I got with the camera, which is rather annoying. So I thought I’d make my own film holders which are large enough to allow me to use instant film with the camera.

This was the design I came up with. The dark slide (the black thing in the picture above) fits behind the blue outer frame. Then we have the Instax film (you can just see the grey edge of the film sheet) which fits inside top of half of the frame (the red bit). The purple bit at the bottom is the other half of the frame. That will have another outer frame bolted to it and hold a second dark slide. All the parts are bolted together. I have to use this rather complex design because 3D printers can’t really print the kind of overhangs that you’d need to print both sides at the same time.

Pen and Tie Fighter for scale

At the back right is the camera folded up in its little box. On the left at the front is an original wooden film holder. On the right is my 3D printed version. It turns out to be light tight enough to be used successfully. I wouldn’t leave it out in the sun, but as long as you keep it in the shade it works fine. I load it up with Instax film, pop it in the camera, slide open the dark slide, take the the picture, put the film back into an Instax film holder and then run it through an instant camera to process it. It sounds a bit complicated, but it is easy enough. If I make a few more of the holders I can load them all up and then go out and take a bunch of pictures.

On the left is the first ever picture I took with the camera and my film holder. The duck is a bit blurred, but the stuff further back is tack sharp. The picture on the right is not particularly interesting, but it is lovely and sharp with plenty of detail. There’s a light leak down the left because I pulled the dark slide all the way out and a bit of light got in. The finished version has a stop which prevents the dark slide from being pulled all the way out, so that shouldn’t happen again.

I’m going to take the camera to the next hardware meetup and try and take some portraits with it. The film holder designs will be available on GitHub for anyone who has a camera like this and fancies using it as an instant camera.

Hello Rodret

/

Ikea were selling off remote control devices for two pounds each when we went there recently. I bought four. Last of the big spenders.

The devices use the old Zigbee connection rather than the newer technology. I’ve paired one with my TRADFRI Ikea gateway and I can control the brightness of a light with it, which is a start. There are a few projects online involving Home Assistant which I’m going to have a play with.

Lego Smart Brick Fun

/

At the beginning of March Lego launched their new Smart Brick technology. The idea is to make Lego models you can interact with. It’s all based around the “Smart Brick”. This is a slightly taller version of the standard “2x8” Lego brick that contains a tiny microcontroller connected to a battery, a microphone, a speaker, an accelerometer, light sensors and a bunch of lights. The brick also contains a bunch of coils which point in different directions. The coils are used to take power from a wireless charger, talk to external RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) devices and also to detect the position and orientation of smart bricks nearby. It’s clever stuff and it all just works.

I initially pre-ordered a couple of sets that contained Smart Bricks. Then I changed my mind and bought a camera instead. Then I got to take a look at the bricks up close and I changed my mind again and bought some. I’d seen reviews that didn’t like the sounds that the bricks made and the way you interacted with them. But I reckon that they are just fine.

At the moment the only sets you can buy are Star Wars themed so I got an X Wing and a Tie Fighter. That got me Luke, Darth and Princess Leia “smart minifigures”. These contain RFID chips which can trigger a Smart Brick to do things. All the behaviours are character appropriate, although you don’t get any voice clips as such. Instead you get a burbling sound a bit like the way that Animal Crossing characters talk. The bricks are controlled by waving different coloured items close to them. Red seems to make lasers fire, green repairs and blue refuels. And if you shake the bricks or move them around, and they’ve been placed in one of the ships, you will get appropriate sounds. It’s a bit restricting to only have two smart bricks; you have to move them between models. The interactions are a bit limited, but they are there and show a lot of potential.

The models themselves are sturdy and fun to make. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens next with the bricks. They can talk Bluetooth to your phone, although at the moment this connection doesn’t do much. In fact, there is a lot of unrealised potential at the moment, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be used in the future. At some point you will be able to upgrade the software in the brick and these features will become available. I’m looking forward to that.