My Next Car

 

Look at the size of that SatNav screen.

While we were walking around Bellevue Mall we noticed that Tesla Motors had a shop and one of their cars on display.

Want one.

The Tesla is an electric car powered by Lithium Ion batteries (the ones that they put in laptops and mobile phones). These give it high range (up to 300 miles) and amazing performance (0 to 60 in 6 or so seconds). They have a rather clever plan to put “Supercharge” stations over the country which are 200 miles or so apart. These can deliver a decent charge in around half an hour and should make it possible to drive right across America in the car. Because the stations will be solar powered Tesla are even offering free power top-ups for the lifetime of the car. I’m not convinced on that part, it will take an awful lot of sunshine to fill up the 40kWh batteries in even the lowest range vehicle, but you can’t knock them for trying, and I’d love for it all to work the way they say it will.

I really fancy a car like this, even though it apparently doesn’t have an engine.

Of course it is far too expensive for me, and anyway I love my Nissan Cube, but should I ever be in the mood to drop 50,000 pounds or so on a new car, it would have to be one like this.

Although I probably won’t buy the base model. (thanks to Peter for the line).

Catching Heartbeats with the Gadgeteer

I reckon the Gadgeteer has more interfaces than just about any other embedded framework. Including neat things like this Pulse Oximeter from Seeed. They make the point on the product description that you should not use this as a medical instrument but, what with the theme of GlobalGameJam being heartbeats, and me having one to play with, the temptation to use it in our game was very hard to resist.

Using it is very easy indeed. You can bind to events that fire when connected (i.e. someone has put their finger into the sensor), disconnected (when someone has pulled their finger out, so to speak) and on a pulse detected event. You can also read the sensor object to find out pulse rate, blood oxygen levels and signal strength.

This is my code to bind methods to the sensor events:

pulseOximeter.ProbeAttached += 
   new PulseOximeter.ProbeAttachedHandler(pulseOximeter_ProbeAttached);
pulseOximeter.ProbeDetached += 
   new PulseOximeter.ProbeDetachedHandler(pulseOximeter_ProbeDetached);
pulseOximeter.Heartbeat += 
    new PulseOximeter.HeartbeatHandler(pulseOximeter_Heartbeat);

The handlers then do all the work:

void pulseOximeter_Heartbeat(PulseOximeter sender, 
                             PulseOximeter.Reading reading)
{
    sendMessage("P" + reading.PulseRate.ToString());
}

The sendMessage method takes a string and sends it on to the game via a serial port interface that is also connected to the Gadgeteer device. The sensor has proved to be quite sensitive and works rather well. It is quite unnerving to be playing a game and find that the gameplay matches your heartbeat.

Buying a Computer is Hard Work

Last week I decided that I needed a new computer. Specifically a Sony Ultrabook. While I love my Samsung Slate to bits it has hardly any internal storage and the behaviour of the USB drivers when you turn on hardware virtualisation is less than exemplary. So I went down to a well known computer store (they have a World of PCs there) and tried to buy one. This was not a good experience.

In the first branch I tried they had the computer I wanted proudly on display. But of course they had none in stock. And according to the salesman (I use the term loosely) there were none to be found this side of York (although he could order one for me for delivery – just like I could from Amazon).

Of course, when I go on to the internets and check stock levels I find lots of local branches showing the item. So I head for one of those. Yes, they have one in stock. No, they can’t sell it for the price advertised. This is because, as a special service to customers, they’ve taken it out of the box, set it up and then made a backup CD. Which costs twenty quid extra. So they want me to pay for a service I don’t want or need. When I refused to pay the extra they were miraculously able to track down another device that hasn’t had this treatment, and so I actually managed to get the one that I wanted at the price advertised. At this point I thought I was out of the woods. But no.

I now had an experience not unlike the uncomfortable ones that I used to have at school when I went to see my headmaster to be told off. The salesman sat at one side of a desk and I sat the other side feeling defensive. He then tried to sell me services that I didn’t want for a computer that shouldn’t need them, implying that I was taking a risk in not going for the extended warranty and other gubbins that they are all undoubtedly under great pressure to sell.

Finally I managed to escape with the goods. I’m loving the new machine. Very, very useful. I’ve been horrible to it already, plugging and unplugging devices, and using it as if I didn’t care how much is left in the battery when I charge it, and generally just opening it, using it a lot, and closing it again. And it has taken the punishment with aplomb. I’ve got an extra 4G of memory for it from Crucial and it fair whizzes along.

But I must admit that I fear for the future of shops selling hardware if my experience is anything to go by. At a number of points in the process I felt I was being told stuff that was at best a bending of the truth, purely to serve the agenda of the person and company I was buying from. I’m pretty sure I’d have had a much better experience buying from an Apple Store and of course if I’d gone to Amazon I could have cut out the person completely. And given the hassle that I had, there is now an even greater chance that I’ll do that.

Using Everything Everywhere at Hull

To be honest, I don’t use my phone much to talk to people. But when I do, I expect it to work. Last week it didn’t. And text messages didn’t get through either. Most annoying and embarrassing. I’ve had this problem before on the university campus, with a number of different phones. I thought it was just me until I spoke to James, who is also with EE (Everything Everywhere, a result of the merger of Orange and T-Mobile).

The good news is I think I’ve solved it. Delving into the mobile network settings on the handset I found that the Network selection option was set to “Automatic”. This means (I think) that the phone will search through available mobile networks and find one it is able to use. I wondered what would happen if I changed this to manually force the phone to select my network. So I brought up the menu to pick the network and found a couple of EE networks in the list. I tried each one in turn and, sure enough, one of them rejected calls and bounced text messages, while the other seems to work fine. So I’ve left the phone set to that version of EE.

I’m not sure if there is any downside here, my theory is that Orange and T-Mobile have “merged” their networks by simply giving them both the same name and one of them doesn’t work properly. This might mean I’m only using one network, rather than both of them, but I haven’t lost a call (that I know of) or failed to send a text message since I made the switch, which is definitely an improvement.

Update on 2013-01-22 12:26 by Rob

Ha. As soon as you blog about fixing something it breaks again. Still got problems with this. In fact, after discussion at coffee, lots of people with different devices on different networks have been suffering from problems recently. Perhaps it is the "upgrading" to 4G that we are hearing so much about....

Nokia 920 Wireless Charging

Pad of Power – Pity it isn’t Yellow..

When I bought my Nokia Lumia 920 I was offered a free wireless charging pad. Today it arrived in the post. It is a slim, white, affair with a slightly beefier power supply than the one that came with the phone. You plug it in, place your Lumia on the pad and it charges the phone.

That’s it.

It just works. It takes a bit longer than wired connection and it does work if the phone is in the case, although in this case it seems to take slightly longer and the phone itself gets warm. This is either because there is greater inefficiency if the phone isn’t directly in contact with the charging base, or perhaps the case keeps in the normal charging heat you get when you charge a battery. Either way I rather like it. The only thing I’m less keen on is the charging light, which is an ultra-bright white led. If you have the charger on your beside table you had best point the light away from you as it is super bright in the dark. If you’re like me you’ll have dreams where you are being chased by people wielding powerful torches until you turn it round a bit.

I can now feel the tiniest pang of pity as I watch number one wife plug her iPhone in every night for charging. Nice enough phone, just not keeping up with the times.

Sticking to the Surface

I don’t care that my most popular photo of late is a grey image that I made in Photoshop for a laugh, I’m still going to keep posting proper ones…

Well, I’ve had my Surface RT for quite a few weeks now and so I thought I’d write down what I think of it so far.

General usefulness: Very high. It has replaced my iPad as my browsing weapon of choice, principally because web sites seem to work better for me. Especially those which have nasty pull down menus that you can’t access via a touch screen. Because I have the touch cover plugged in I can just open them with no problem. I like being able to plug a memory key directly into the device and pull the files straight off it. And the Office/Skydrive/Printer combination (i.e. I can get documents off my Skydrive, edit them and then print them) is a wonderful thing. Great for presentations too, I’ve got the VGA output and that works a treat.

Battery Life: OK but not as great as the iPad. Having said that, it has never let me down. I just have to remember to charge it.

Fun to Own: Getting better. There aren’t as many apps as other platforms, but because the browser is more capable you can do more things on the web, for example BBC iPlayer. Since they added solid implementations of Solitaire and Mah Jong to the store it has got a lot better for me personally. There is now a really good image editor (Fhotoroom) and I don’t feel the lack of much. I’ve got tons of applications on the iPad that I’ve never actually used after the day I downloaded them.

Annoyances: The Mail client is very weak and deeply annoying to use. I really miss Outllook. I was upset to find that there is no Silverlight support. There seem to be more updates that I expected, and the application updater seems to get stuck every now and then. Having said that, every time I turn on my iPad I find that at least four or five applications need updates there too.

Surprises: I was gobsmaked to find that I can actually create and deploy applications on the Surface RT using Visual Studio. Nothing anywhere tells you that this is possible, I was convinced that the only way I could get code onto the device was to put an application in the Windows Store and then buy it. If you want to do this you can find out more here. The really nice thing is that once you have remote debugged an application it remains on the Surface RT for later use from the Start menu. When you install the remote debugging client on the Surface you have to give your developer id but after that it all just works, barring a bit of fun and games configuring remote debugging.

Conclusion: I’m pleased I bought a Surface RT. Having said that though, I’d love to get my hands on a Surface Pro, that could well be my dream computer.

Livescribe Echo Pen

I first saw a Livescribe pen last week. It looked very interesting, and so on Saturday I invested in one. (note that I never buy gadgets, I invest in them.) This time though I think I have invested in something really useful. If any part of your life involves taking notes (like for example as a student) then you should take a look at this device.

The hardware is fairly plain on the outside. A shiny black pen with a little OLED display, a single button and sockets for usb and headphones/microphone. You can write on any paper of course, but if you write on the specially printed blank pages that you can buy from Livescribe the pen will remember what you wrote. You can then upload your scrawlings onto a computer. So far, so conventional. But you can buy the paper in the form of bound books. Each of these is uniquely identified so that when you upload the pages they are already automatically filed by page number and volume. The pen tracks which book is which, so you can chop and change and it all just works. If you fill a book and buy a replacement with the same number you can archive that volume on your computer and start afresh.

So, at the moment we’ve got a device that will store and index stuff that you write. For me that is very useful. I like to write things in meetings, but I end up just losing those notes afterwards. With Livescribe I can keep track of what I’ve written and go back to it much later on my computer. The pen knows the date and time, so I can go back to notes I took at particular points in time. But then we turn on the microphone in the pen and things get really interesting. Now I can record audio of a meeting and synchronise it with my notes. Tap a sentence in my notes and I instantly hear what was being said when I wrote that. Flip the process around and I can record interactive presentations. Livescribe will even host these for me for free (up to 500M of content).You can even plug in stereo headphones with built in microphones to record what is happening in binaural stereo.

I’m impressed with the device and its potential. It is not that expensive to get on board. The fact that you need special paper is a bit irritating, but if you have a colour laser printer you can print your own blank paper and the books and notepads are not that expensive and well made. You can even get post-it notes that you can bring to life with audio extras. It also works with Evernote, which is something I’ve yet to explore. You can also load applications onto the pen, use it to make a piece of paper into a piano and buy a program that will convert your handwriting into text. You can find out more at Livescribe. Worth a look.

Microsoft Surface First Impressions

I call this composition “Surface and Space Cheese Battle”.

When the doorbell rings at 8:30 pm on the 30th of October you feel a certain trepidation about answering it. Particularly as we haven’t got any sweets in the house for Halloween yet. Sending kids away with a bread roll and a few length’s of spaghetti is probably not going to end well. Anyhoo, it wasn’t trick or treat, it was a harassed looking delivery chap with my Microsoft Surface. They promised delivery by the 30th of October and they just made it. By three and a half hours. I’m not that bothered about the delay to be honest, they did give me fifty quid to spend in the Surface hardware store to say sorry for not having the machine to me on Friday. I put it towards a “type Cover”, although I think I may have slightly wasted my money, as we shall see later.  I’ve been playing with the Surface now for a couple of hours and so of course I feel totally qualified to write a complete, in-depth, review of the device. So here goes.

It works. It’s different from the iPad. I think I get what it is for, and I really like it. I love my iPad like I love my TV. It lets me consume stuff that other people have made. But try and produce something other than finger paintings or music and the iPad falls apart. I remember my bitter disappointment when I tried to use the iPad Pages word processor, with its much touted “Office Capability”, to make a document. I suppose I should have realised something was up when I discovered the price of Pages was much, much less than the equivalent component in Microsoft office. I didn’t actually want much, just a table in the middle of some text, but the way it went wrong was just horrible. And as for printing from the iPad, just don’t go there. Really.

The Surface has proper Microsoft Office built in. Proper. And it integrates with Skydrive directly. All the documents that I’ve put into the cloud are ready and waiting to be worked with. As for printing, it just saw the printers in my Homegroup right out of the box. The only slight bugbear is the lack of the Outlook component. I spent a futile thirty minutes trying to get the Surface Mail client to connect to the university email server before I discovered that the university email was down at the time. Now it is working OK the built in email application looks OK, but I do like Outlook.

I ordered the Surface without any great plans for it. My main aim was to have a test platform for any Metro style things that I might fancy writing. But it turns out to be much better than that. The tight integration with my documents means that it will now be my weapon of choice whenever I go away. And the micro-SD slot means that I can load it up with 64G of movies and anything I fancy when I go.

I got the touch keyboard cover with the device. This provides a cover and a keyboard at the same time. The magnetic attachment is extremely strong and positive and it wraps around the device very nicely.The word on the street about the touch keyboard was that it was OK, but took a while to get used to. I think this is wrong. It works very well right away. I’ve ordered the type cover too, as I do like having keys that move when you hit them, but I’d be quite happy to use the touch keyboard to knock out large documents. It is in a different league to typing on the screen, which is something I’ve never enjoyed doing.

Hardware wise the Surface is very nice. The black metal finish is very swish, although it does seem to be a bit of a fingerprint magnet. I can never understand why hardware makers don’t think about this a bit harder when they make these devices. Nothing makes a device look old and worn like a covering of smeary fingerprints. The standard of construction, and of the presentation in the box is very impressive. The power supply is larger than you might expect and even has a fuse in the plug. It puts out a fairly meaty amount of current and seems to be able to charge the machine pretty quickly. The effect is spoiled a bit by the label on the Power Supply itself, which looks like it was stuck on as an afterthought, and the magnetic coupling for the power connector is nowhere near as positive or strong as the one for the keyboard, which is sad.

The weirdest thing about the Surface is that if you put it alongside my Samsung Slate and asked folks to spot the Windows RT device, they’d have a hard time telling them apart at first. I wasn’t expecting a full desktop, much less a command prompt. And I can plug in memory cards and stuff using the USB adapter and they seem to just appear and work as usual. Of course the illusion breaks whenever you start looking for programs to run. The Surface will only run programs that have been created for Windows 8 RT, which is the version specially crafted for the ARM chip inside it. At the moment this is restricted to applications from the marketplace, of which there is not a huge number. Hopefully the future will bring a few more programs, I’m looking for a good image editor which supports raw camera files and a Metablogger poster (Live Writer would be perfect) and I’ll be a very happy bunny.

I said to myself when I ordered the Surface that I’d be selling the iPad once it arrived. Then I said “Yeah, right…”. But now I’m thinking I might be filling out forms on ebay after all. The way I work, I seem to spend much more time making stuff than I do consuming it. I actually enjoy writing things. Perhaps my favourite game program is Microsoft Word. If that’s true of you too, then you will love the Surface.

New Embedded Stuff

There are quite a few new embedded toys that I’ve discovered just recently. Here are three.

First up is the DAGU racer. This is a neat little Bluetooth controlled racing car. They’ve got it on discount at RoboSavvy at the moment. It comes with an Android app that you can use to control it, but they also expose the Bluetooth command set so that you can control it from anything, including Gadgeteer I reckon. It is powered by a tiny lithium ion battery and even comes with a set of stickers you can use to customise the racer. And for under twenty quid it was very tempting. So I got one.

I got all excited when I first found out about the Electric Imp. This is a wireless embedded device that fits into an SD card socket. You can’t actually use it as a memory card but you can use it to control a connected net appliance. And you can get it for around twenty quid. My excitement dissipated quite a lot though when I discovered that every device is bound to the imp cloud service which is where it registers its data and where messages come from.

I’ve bought these kinds of devices before, my Chumby and Nabaztag rabbit worked in a similar way. The idea of the company behind them is usually that they don’t make much money on the devices themselves, but build a subscription model which lets them pay for the infrastructure by getting cash somehow from the users of each device. Snag is, if that doesn’t work and the company goes bust you are left with a paperweight.The folks behind the imp seem quite confident that they can make it work, and the service is free at the moment. But they are talking about $50 subscriptions for business users and stuff like that, so I think I’ll pass on this, amazing as it is.

Now this I really do like. It brings you the best of the .NET Micro Framework, Arduino and Gadgeteer in a single board that costs less than thirty quid. You can feed it five volts and it just works. You’ve got an Arduino shield, three Gadgeteer ports, SD card, USB client and host and a space to put an Xbee or WiFi receiver. I’ve been looking at very simple devices that I’d like to make using the Gadgeteer and wanting a cheap, simple board that just gets things done. The FEZ Cerbuino Bee seems to fit that bill perfectly. For less than the price of a video game you get a device you can program with .NET, connect lots of Gadgeteer devices to and put onto WiFi at a bearable cost.

If you are learning C# and want to dip your toes into embedded development I can’t think of a better start. Lovely.

Hello Mr White

Bought a new laptop today. Not for me I hasten to add, but for Number One Wife, who has some writing to do. Her old laptop, still proudly bearing its “Made for Windows XP” sticker, has taken to forgetting the date and time and whether or not it has a hard disk attached. Replacing the battery that causes these memory lapses involves taking the machine to bits and unsoldering and replacing a component with a very very long part number, and to tell the truth I can’t really be bothered.

So, it was off to up town to see what could be acquired at the, ahem, lower end of the market. And we happened across the beast above. It’s made by Asus, has a processor which will do the job (word processing, surfing the net, maybe a bit of Skypeing), 4G of RAM, a reasonable sized hard disk and even a USB 3 port on the side. It doesn’t have an optical disk drive, but I can live without that. And you can get it for less than 300 quid. Even managed to buy it from one of our students, who works in Currys Digital up town.

I took it home, and once we had got over the 36 updates it wanted to install, cleared off all the rubbish littering the disk and installed Microsoft Security Essentials it works a treat. The battery life is not stellar, but it has this really nice multi-touch mouse pad that lets you scroll and zoom really easily. A properly useful device for rather less than the price of an iPad.

When Number One Wife goes out I might even pop Visual Studio on it and see what it would be like for developing Windows Phone applications.

USB3 Need for Speed

This car is presently in the entrance to our department. I’ve no idea why it is here, but it looks great and fits the subject. And I want to have a go at driving it….

Along with my Windows 8 installation I’ve also been working on beefing up my main machine a bit. I take a lot of photos. And I mean a lot. And some of them come out. The rest stay on my hard disk as I never throw anything away. And now the disk is full. Maplin (of all places) were selling a Seagate 3Gbyte USB3 disk for a very good price (less than 130 quids) and so I bought one and then hopped onto ebay (only the best will do) and spent another ten quid on a USB3 card, because my PC motherboard is one year old wildly out of date and doesn’t have the new high speed interface.

I popped the card in this evening. Then I took it out again, because I’d forgotten to remove the blanking plate from the PC case. Then I put it back and off we went. Seems to work OK. One tip, if you install a card like this in your PC and it has PC power supply connector on it you really should connect this up. Otherwise devices might try to draw more current than a PCI Express slot can deliver, which will end badly in any one of a number of ways.

Anyhoo, tests indicate that I’m getting around double the speed of my older USB 2 drive on the connection, up to around 58 MB/sec on the larger files. Not quite the 10X increase that USB3 is supposed to offer, but at around half the speed of my internal SATA drive I can live with that. These numbers come from the spiffy performance display that Windows 8 gives you for file copies:

Seeing as they are not raw speed readings, but rather more “real world” in their usefulness, I’m a happy bunny at the moment. The number above is a bit low because I’m moving lots of small files around, which always restricts the throughput.

Amazing Pulse Gadgeteer Device

Scarlet put me on to this amazing device that transforms internet data into a graph. It was made using six servos which are driven by a .NET Gadgeteer processor. You can use it to show you the weather forecast, how busy your Twitter feed is, or anything that you can pull from the web and make into numbers.

You can find out more about the Pulse device here.

Tetris Lights

Number one daughter told me that I might like to get some of these lights. She’s right. They’re great. The bottom Tetris piece (the blue bar) is connected to a power source and the others then light up when you stack them above. I spent a happy ten minutes getting them into this vaguely plausible arrangement. I’m trying to get them stacked with the top flat… If you are a Tetris aficionado you might want to seek them out.

Scary Nexus 7

The Nexus is proving quite an impressive piece of hardware. Battery life is shaping up to be very good. I’ve found out how to make the screen brighter (turn on auto-brightness) and got auto-rotate to work (for some reason it is turned off by default). I’ve also found some useful applications, including one that provides access to my Skydrive storage amongst other things. I’ve loaded some films and music onto it and they work very well and look rather good. Then it did something that totally baffled me.

I took the Nexus 7 to work today. Left it in my bag. Didn’t bother connecting it to the campus network. After a while it beeped, so I got it out to take a look. It had received a new email message. Which was rather impressive, bearing in mind it didn’t have a network connection. Then I took a closer look at the WiFi settings. It knew all about the university network, along with a couple of networks at places it had never been to.

Strange.

Eventually I remembered, around a year ago I had a brief fling with a Nook Color, another Android powered tablet. I found the Nook great for reading books (that’s what Barnes and Noble made it for) but a bit slow for anything else. But I did take it to work and connect it to the campus network. And of course I’d registered the device using my Google username. Which means that the Nook had uploaded the WiFi settings to my part of the Google cloud which then made them available to any other Android device that I register.

I’m not sure whether to be impressed or frightened by this. On one hand it is very convenient for me not to have to mess around with SSIDs and passwords. On the other it is a bit scary that Google are holding all my (along with lots of other people’s) network credentials up in their cloud. One of the boxes that I ticked next to a page of licence agreements (does anybody actually read these) probably gave them permission to do this, but I now worry a bit that if I get a security breach on my Google account it also gives people access to my home network, should they choose to register their own device and then stand outside my house, browsing files the other side of my network firewall…

This is a reminder of just how clever and connected modern devices can be, and just how much you have to be aware of the dangers of all this cleverness.

Google Nexus 7 Review

I think other folks have used the gag about needing three hands to work it, so I won’t

Warren told me that I’d get a Google Nexus 7. I protested. ‘There is no way I need one of those’ I said. But the one Adam had bought looked very nice. And the price is pretty amazing. And I was going to get number one wife a Kindle Touch for her birthday. And the Nexus will do a lot more than just read books. So there you are. We ended up with one each, mainly because I hate the idea of number one wife having better gadgets than me. And I have just been paid.

The device is very nice. Works a treat. Binds tightly to your Google account. Has this Google Now thing that is supposed to tell you all kinds of important stuff about your life. At the moment it is just telling me that it is 18 degrees in Cottingham, which is about right.

You get 15 pounds of credit in the Google Play store with the device. I’ve spent 70 pence on Real Racing, which is on offer at the moment. It runs very well and really shows off the power of the device. I also wanted to download BBC iPlayer (one of the best reasons for owning a device like this) but at the moment it doesn’t work, which is pretty terrible. I think this is because the Nexus is “Flash Free” and iPlayer needs that. Whatever it is, it needs to be sorted out soon. There are some other irritations in applications, some of them assume they are headed for a phone screen, and look wrong. Also, for some reason the default setting of the device is to lock in portrait mode, which is a bit of a pain. Number one wife was upset to find that you can’t get Scrabble for it if you are outside the USA, which is unfortunate.

You can rent (but I can see how to buy) movies on the device. You do get a free copy of the latest Transformers movie though. And a Jeffry Archer book. I’m looking forward to loading up the 16G of internal memory with some music and videos of my own. Battery life seems OK, I’ve not run it flat yet but 7 hours seems a reasonable amount. It has WiFi and Bluetooth, but not mobile data. For me this isn’t a problem, as I can us the Lumia as a hotspot if I need to. The 7 inch screen is bright and clear and the software is responsive, even if the UI seems a bit more complex than it needs to be – but then again I am used to Windows Phone on touch devices. There is no video out facility, but given the fairly limited internal space on the device I don’t think you ‘d be using it as a video library really.

All in all, you’d be bonkers to spend any more than the price of a Nexus on a tablet of this kind. The hardware is excellent and there’s no way they can be making much, if any, profit on it. This does of course mean that you are meant to be part of the product, and so you can expect all your actions on the device to be comprehensively mined for selling opportunities. Having said that, you can just use it and it will deliver a very good, and eminently portable tablet experience.

Nintendo 3DS XL

The Nintendo 3DS is a nice little portable console. The 3D effect doesn’t do a great deal for me (apart from make me slightly queasy after a while) but there are some very good games for it. I rather like Pilot Wings, Street Fighter and Mario Kart 7.

Now Nintendo have released an XL version of the 3DS, like they released a full fat version of the DSi a while back. It works exactly like the 3DS, only with a bigger screen. I really like this. Although the device is a bit bigger to cart around, it is not prohibitively larger and I’ve got much better at games like Ridge Racer as I can now see further into the distance because the dots on the screen are larger.

However, the XL version does have a much less “premium” feel than the original 3DS. That came with a power supply and a docking station. The 3DS XL comes with, well, just a cardboard box. Not even a power supply. This is a bit of a problem if your business model for your upgrade involves selling the old 3DS. Fortunately I have a spare supply lying around from way back.

The original 3DS was made of expensive looking plastic of different colours and levels of shinyness. I don’t think that this added a great deal to the gaming experience, but it did make it feel a bit special. The 3DS XL is not badly made, but the plastics and the finish seem to have been built to meet a price, rather than to make an impression. The large 3D screen is very impressive, but not particularly 3D as far as I’m concerned.  Battery life is no worse than the original device and the transfer from one device to another is painless and fun to watch, as a horde of Pikmin characters carry the information from your old machine to your new one.

If you have a 3DS that you have to squint at, you will appreciate the improvement. I certainly have.

Microsoft Bluetooth Keyboard

Another day, another plug from Rob for some Microsoft stuff. Actually I do buy things from other companies too you know, as far as I’m aware Microsoft do not make Strawberry flavoured milk yet.

Anyhoo, they do make some things that are quite nice. I’ve always liked their bendy keyboards, being fairly sure that the main reason that my fingers have not dropped off/seized up yet is that I’ve been using their Natural Keyboards for many years now. They provide very good wrist support and let you type at a more natural angle. Of course you lose all that when you open up your laptop. Until now.

The Microsoft Bluetooth Mobile Keyboard 6000, which you can see above, is intentionally bent. It also comes with a somewhat superfluous numeric keyboard which I’ve left in the box as I can’t see the point of it. But the keyboard is very good. I’ve paired it with the Samsung Slate and it works a treat. It is very thin, so it fits in my bag with no problems, and when I’m typing I can feel the difference.

The key action is pretty good for a device of this type. The Bluetooth keyboard that comes with the Samsung Slate has a very nice action, but is not bendy, and for me some of the keys are now wonky on that keyboard, which is a bit annoying. Actually, the mobile keyboard with the best key action is the Apple Bluetooth one, but unfortunately it isn’t bendy – at least not in a way that would leave it useful afterwards.

I picked up my keyboard cheap from Amazon. They have this thing now where you can find used examples of stuff that you want, and for the first time I tried this. It worked very well, the item arrived well packaged and in good time. This is looking like a good alternative to eBay. None of the bidding daftness, and the prices are very competitive too.

Microsoft Surface for Windows 8: Something else to want

I love my iPad. But I don’t find it useful as such. It is great for playing games or consuming data, and should I ever feel the need to paint a portrait or compose some music it might prove useful I suppose. But I like to spend my time creating programs and documents and stuff like that, which the iPad just won’t let me do. But the new Microsoft Surface should.

At the moment I’m loving my Samsung Series 7 Slate, which gets pretty close to the larger of the two new Surface devices. I’ve got my slate running Windows 8 Release Preview and it is a properly useful device. In fact at the moment it is my main computer. I’ve got two docking stations, one at home and one at work, and I now carry my desktop around with me. The machine has more than enough power to do what I want, which is use Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop, play a bit of media and browse the interwebs. It is a bit restricted in terms of built in storage, but I’ve got around 20G free at the moment and a 32G SD card plugged in the side which has got a whole bunch of movies and other stuff on there. Battery life is fine too, with at least 5 hours if I work the machine hard, and up to 8 if I take it a bit easier.

The Surface should be rather like this, but better. It has a case that turns into a touch keyboard, and another that turns into a keyboard with moving keys. It also has a kickstand to make it easy to stand on the desk. The two words that come to mind for me are “want” and “one”. The only snag with the Surface is that it isn’t in the shops yet. But when it is, I’ll be there, queuing up for a blue one.

Making Things

A gadget that makes gadgets is probably the ultimate gadget. So a few weeks ago I sold a whole bunch more cameras (I seem to do all my saving by means of the “camera bank”.) and ordered an Ultimaker. Peter reckoned that this was the best of the 3D printers and I was attracted to it by the level of detail that you could print with, and the fact that it came in a kit, which I could spend the upcoming bank holiday working on with Number One Son.

Several weeks later a heavy box arrived which contained motors, circuits and some lovely laser cut birch plywood which would be fitted together to make the finished printer. So, armed with the very detailed instructions and beautifully packaged and labelled pieces we set to work.

It was great fun. Like Lego, but bigger and with bits that light up, bits that get hot and bits that move. And you learn lots of new terms like “Bowden Tube”, “Peek insulator” and “STL file”. And at the end of it you have a thing that makes things. The principle is very simple. At one end you push a plastic fibre which goes down a tube to the “extruder head” which contains a heater and a very fine nozzle.

This is the finished product, I painted it blue. The machine “prints” in 3D by moving the head over a build surface, adding successive layers of extruded plastic to create the design you fed into it. It is fascinating to watch the head buzzing around. Number one son made a video of it printing out a Companion Cube here.

One of the great things about the printer is that it can print extra bits for itself. If you look at the picture above you can see a bright pink fan ducting on the print head which I printed and then fitted to replace the one that the printer ships with. The new duct does a better job of focusing the cool air onto the print so that it hardens more quickly. If I have an idea for a better design I’ll simply print that out and then fit it.

Tonight I decided to print out a new locking assembly for the “Bowden Tube”. This is the tube that guides the raw plastic fibre into the extruder head. I was especially interested in this because it contains a screw thread, and I wanted to see how this would turn out. The print did not go well, mainly because I left the printer heated for too long, and some fibre in the tube melted and formed a plug that stopped the flow. I had to strip down the print head, clean out the blockage and then rebuild everything. Two hours of messing around with bits and bobs. And I loved it. At the moment it is extruding very well, but I’ve got a little leak of plastic around the nozzle which I’ll have to seal up. I’m looking forward to adding some sealant and then trying again.

This is the assembly I printed tonight, with a knurled nut on top of the fitting and a thread that works really well. Perhaps I should get some different coloured plastic to work with…

The main reason I got my Ultimaker was not to print parts for it (which would be kind of recursive) but to make cases for other gadgets. The Gadgeteer platform provides a lovely way of making devices, but they will still need a box. As long as the box is smaller than 8 inches in any direction (the build volume of the Ulitimaker) I can design and print it. We already managed to print out a box for number one son’s Raspberry Pie device.

This is not a technology ready for prime time. But it is a tinkerers delight. You don’t just get to play with the bits, you get to make more bits to play with too. There might be people out there who will say that in the future everyone will have an Ultimaker, and that one day the machines will make themselves. This might happen at some point, but great as it is I can’t see my little blue box printing out a Stepper Motor or a Microcontroller any time soon. To me it is very similar to the very first TVs that were made by John Logie Baird. They worked by spinning disks and flashing lights and were thoroughly impractical for proper viewing. But they got people engaged with the idea of being able to view things over long distances. The Ultimaker is just like this. It is slow (although really fast for a 3D printer), noisy and not 100% reliable, but that doesn’t matter. What it does seems as magical as watching someone 100 miles away must have seemed in 1925. When people really figure out how to do this, how to make different colours and build more quickly, then I can see that there really will be one in every household. And another piece of Star Trek technology will have arrived in our lives.

We will be launching a spin off from Three Thing Game (Three Thing Thing) later this year when we will get people building gadgets using Gadgeteer (keep your diaries clear for the 27th – 28th of October folks) and I’ll bring along the printer so that we can make some boxes for whatever gets made.

Oh, and if you want to find out more about Gadgeteer, Peter has produced some superb posts about the platform.

Eurovision and Gadgeteer

Well, Sweden won, but I spend the evening in front of the telly getting a Sytech camera talking to a GHI Gadgeteer Spider board.

I’ve got the camera capture working and even managed a tiny bit of image processing before the final performance. Great fun.