3D Printing Fun at C4di

Well, that was fun. Peter, David, Helen, Paul and myself all got together to talk about 3D printing and scanning at C4di. I took along Una, my Ultimaker printer, David, Helen and Paul took along their 3D scanner and MakerBot printer and Peter showed off his “Richmond” printer.

Within no time the place was full of the smell of hot plastic and the sound of machines whirring away. We had a huge audience (in that there were lots of people, not that they were giants) and they seemed to really enjoy finding out about 3D printing. I started things rolling, with a quick zoom through my presentation about how I got into making things and then Peter followed up with a talk about how he came to design and build his own 3D printer from scratch. As you do.

Finally David rounded off with a description of how 3D printing and scanning technology is being used in his business and how it will undoubtedly develop in the future. Helen and Paul were showing off their modelling and scanning skills and the whole thing ended with lots of happy people wandering round, taking a look at the technology and getting to grips with it. Without getting their hands burned.

Thanks to Jon Moss for setting up the session and C4di for hosting it.

C4DI Meetup - Building a legacy

Today I went along to another C4DI meetup. This one was presented by Andy Whale, who is director of engineering at Kingston Communications. For those of you unlucky enough not to live in the Hull area, you might not know that we have our own local phone company. This makes it unique in the UK.

When every other regional telephone company was wound into a nationalised service many years ago, for some strange accounting reason Hull got left out, and it has functioned independently ever since. This means that we had innovations like untimed local calls for years before anyone else, and it also means that Hull phone boxes are painted white in colour. 

Andy was talking of his trajectory from British Telecoms engineer to being the man charged with rolling out Lightstream, one of the most ambitious networking projects in the world. There is a lot of talk today about putting the awesome speed of fibre optic based networking into people’s houses, but it turns out that there are two ways to do this.  One is to run an optical fibre to a box in each street and then use wire for the last part. The other is to actually put optical fibre into the house. The first is comparatively easy. The second is much more challenging. It is also the best way and how Lightstream is being deployed.

Once you have a continuous stream of glass fibre from the exchange to the house you can unleash completely staggering amounts of bandwidth, should you ever need to. The glass fibre itself will last pretty much for ever and is not prone to degrading over time. The devices that put signals onto the fibre are improving every year so the whole thing is future proof.

Of course, the snag is that the effort to get the glass out there is considerable. Andy spoke of the difficulties in getting connections through ancient conduits and under and over roads. He also made the point that a successful engineer must also work with a certain amount of cunning and faith in themselves and their people to get the happy ending that everyone wants. KC has rolled out several thousand installations of fibre, developed new techniques, patented new technologies and changed the lives of lots computer users.

The legacy that Andy is building will keep on changing lives for as long as we keep on thinking of new ways to use the highly reliable, expandable performance of the network infrastructure that is being put in place. I feel proud of being in a city where this is happening.

Before Andy left British Telecom he was assailed with warnings of how this kind of widespread optical fibre deployment was impossible and probably unnecessary. And now it is here, he is making it work and people are loving it. One person at the meeting made the point that if they could bring bandwidth like this to his premises, he would move his business to Hull to take advantage of it. The question on everyone’s lips (mine included) was “When can I get Lightstream to my house?”.

Andy brought along some props, including old style cabling. This is how it used to be.

This is where it is going. Still coloured connections, but with thousands, perhaps millions of times the capacity.

The government is pumping money into banks to try and get the economy going. This would seem to be changing the lives of a few bankers, making them slightly richer. Also some house prices in Surrey are going up a bit. It makes me really cross to think that projects like this are not being funded and rolled out everywhere in the UK. This is life changing technology which will be used well into the future and bring about things we can’t even imagine just now.

Andy and his team have shown that it can be done. Thanks to him for great talk that really brought out how engineers can directly change lives.

You really should go to “Your Really Should” events at C4DI

Simon Hudson (left) and Jon Moss, with a Lumia 1020 in the middle..

I seem to be spending  a fair bit of time at C4DI at the moment. Tonight I was there for the first of their “You really should be..” events. The format is simple enough. Take the words “Your really should be..” and put them in front of something that you can talk about for fifteen minutes. Then take questions and repeat twice. It works really well, generating discussion and interesting things to do in equal measure. And the first topic was right up my street, when Simon Hudson spoke on “You Really Should Be giving a Windows phone a try”. Absolutely.

Simon gave a great description of what makes Windows Phone is such a nice platform, starting with some impressive sales figures (now phone platform number three) and moving on to the neat and useful things you can do with the device. Of course, I don’t need convincing of any of this, but it was lovely to hear someone else voice the same opinions and give some strong context about how Windows Phone is proving so useful to them. Highlights were Voice SMS, Live Tiles and Rooms. You can find Simon’s presentation here. For me the killer fact was that his daughter was into Windows Phone first and he got his after her.

Next up was David Gilson: “You Really Should Be buying Bitcoins!”. Bitcoins are “maths made money” in that the actual currency is created as a series of mathematical proofs, each of which identifies a particular coin. Coins are mined by computers that grind through calculations to generate the proofs which are assigned to owners.

When you buy a bitcoin or use part of it to pay for something the transaction is stored as part of the bitcoin infrastructure in a series of tamperproof blocks. You can use bitcoins to pay for stuff and you can buy them and keep them in your digital wallet. There are 21Million possible Bitcoins out there, and they will get both harder to mine and more valuable over time. At the moment around half the Bitcoins have been “mined” and people are investing in ever more powerful systems to find more. The idea is to do away with the present volatile paper based currency systems and replace them with something clean and mathematically sound.

As you might expect, the world of finance is looking a little askance at this attempt to make an end run around the systems that have made, and are keeping them rich. Bitcoins, with their untraceable ownership and easy electronic transfer, are also also ripe for use by various unsavoury enterprises. Me, I’ll be keeping my cash in traditional forms for the time being, but David did make a very compelling case for “having a flutter” on Bitcoins.

Finally Jon Moss rounded off a very enjoyable evening with a session called “You Really Should Be using Textexpander”. The TextExpander program installs on your Mac and allows you to create and manage keyboard shortcuts to vastly improve your speed when creating documents. Rather than typing “From the pen of the desk of Rob Miles” at the end of each email I could assign that to ESIG or some other combination of letters and numbers. TextExpander monitors your keyboard and then inserts the expanded version when it sees the shortcut.

That’s nice enough, but there is a lot more besides. You can create template documents, for example meeting minutes or email responses and have them all created automagically. If you find yourself typing the same phrase, or building the same document, time after time then this system would save you a lot of work.

It is a pity that the program is only available on Mac (although it is available across all the Apple platforms and works really well on iPhone and iPad). If you fancy having a go at this and are using a Windows PC Jon reckoned that PhraseExpress is your best bet.

It was an absolutely great evening. And when I went out of the office I was able to grab a nice picture of The Deep again.

C4DI have set up a web site:

http://www.youreallyshouldbe.com/

You really should be keeping an eye on it.

Update on 2013-08-28 12:27 by Rob

You can find David's Bitcoin slides here and a video of his talk here.