Current Affairs (and Voltage)

I hate it when I plug something into something and I've no idea what is going on.  Is the device taking any power? How much? Is the supply holding up?

Some time back I ordered one of these. The price was amazing (and delivery was free). It arrived today and it works a treat. The case is a bit flimsy, but I'm not going to submit it to anything too rough, and so it should do just what I want.

What does it do? You plug it between a USB device and a power source and it tells you the voltage that the source is providing and the current the device is consuming. It can tell you if your phone is charging or not. It can tell you if your Raspberry Pi is taking too much current out of the adapter. For the price, well worth picking one up and adding it to your toolbox.

Home Made Minishift Spacers

I spent a very happy afternoon making up an ArachnidLabs MiniShift that I got a while back. At least I was very happy until I got to the point in the instructions where it said "Now, take one of the spacers and fit it to the circuit board..."

Of course I'd lost mine.

However, the good news is that I happen to have a 3D printer. And so I was able to design and print a set in a rather attractive blue colour and then continue the build. I've not tried firing them up yet. That's for next week.

Sony Web Enabled High Definition Walkman

This is not exactly why I got it, but it is nice to know that it works...

I have a bit of a thing about sound quality. When I was younger (and had much better ears) I was very into High Fidelity sound and would spend many happy hours fiddling with big vinyl disks, turntables, cartridges, amplifiers and speakers to get the best possible sound.

I've continued being a bit snobbish about recorded sound. Most audio devices around today actually sound extremely respectable, including of course my Lovely Lumia 1520. But I can always convince myself that there are better things out there.

Which brings us to the Sony Web Enabled Multimedia Walkman, or if you prefer, the NWZ-F886. This is best regarded as an Android phone without the phone bit, but with really good quality audio hardware and the ability to play uncompressed audio file at lots of bit rates.

I've been after an Android device for a while. I want to use it to remote control my camera (see above) and also as the target for Xamarin apps that I fancy having a go with. So I've invested in one. 

The sound quality is really, really good. The Sony comes with a pair of noise cancelling earbuds that work really well. I dragged some of my MP3 files onto it and they sound great. Then I used dbPowerAmp to rip some of my CDs into lossless FLAC files. These are audio files that are a lot bigger than compressed ones, but have all the data still present. The difference is definitely there. They sounded truly amazing. The next step is to download some high definition master tracks from somewhere like HDtracks and I'll have something that is far, far, better than my ability to hear it. 

The only pitfalls in my quests for the ultimate in audio are the cost of the files themselves, the fact that hardly any are available in the UK due to licencing issues and the limitation that the Sony device only has a comparatively paltry 32G of internal storage. Having said that, I once made the awful mistake of putting all my purchased audio onto one of my devices. This made random play a minefield containing some horrible stuff that I should have been ashamed of owning. By carefully curating the limited space I should be able to guarantee a great experience every time I press play.

The device itself is small and sleek. It runs Android apps well enough and has the usual Sony high standard of construction. Unfortunately it also has the usual Sony insanity of a completely bespoke USB cable that I am bound to lose sooner or later. At the moment I'm solving that problem by leaving the cable in the player at all times, but this makes it a bit less portable.

The trajectory that is making your phone the centre of everything means that things like portable music players are going to end up as fringe devices I guess, but this is a really, really good one. If you are serious about carrying high quality sound around with you it is well worth a look. 

Lego Mini

Oooh. Tempting. Sooo tempting.....

Sunday Hexapod

Spent yesterday afternoon watching Colombo and assembling the legs for a hexapod. As you do. Spent some of today putting the servos on the base, next thing to do is attach a battery pack and see what we can make it do...

Tricopter Flying over Cottingham

Yesterday we took number one son's home made tri-copter for another spin. Last time it flew very well, and so we thought we'd add a GoPro camera to see what kind of pictures we could get. We fitted the camera by the simple process of just sticking it on the front plate of the device. This seemed to work OK, although for the first few shots we had the battery wire in the frame.

Turned out that there was more than enough lift to take the camera into the air, although it is a tiny bit more wobbly than we'd have liked. The video came out pretty well, all things considered. 

Tricopter Flying

What happens when you strap three motors, a battery and some bits of electronics to some lumps of wood? You get something that flies, that's what. After overcoming our initial nerves from a while back we managed to get some quality flying time in on Sunday morning. The amazing thing is that it all worked.

Number one son now has a fully working tri-copter. It seems to be happy to hover on around a third power, which means that it should be up for camera lifting duties quite soon.  

Surface Pro 3 Please

I must admit I really fancy a Surface Pro 3. One thing about the tablets that I've used in the past is that although they have a stylus I hardly ever touch it. The reason is that the pen experience is just not compelling or useful enough. The pen functionality always seems to be tacked on to the user interface and it is never quite good enough to make it worth the effort. The ink doesn't line up with the pen tip, the resolution means that I end up writing text that is too large to fit on the screen and the business of writing is just not fun.

I think that the Surface Pro 3 will change that. The display is close to the surface and the pen is now active so that it can make a much better job of position tracking. This, along with a high resolution screen, means that I should be able to write tiny text if I want to. And the way that OneNote is opened by just pressing the button on the pen means that I should be able to pick up the device and start writing. 

The devices are on sale real soon, but they will not be shipping in the UK for a little while.

Which gives me time to start saving. 

Autographer Fun

The Autographer is a strange device. It is a little camera with no shutter button. The idea is that you clip it onto yourself and then head off and have interesting experiences. The Autographer will take a picture every now and then when it thinks something interesting is going on. It uses its compass, PIR sensor, accelerometer and GPS to keep track of what you are doing, and it has three levels of "alertness".

From a photography buff's point of view the pictures are nothing much to write home about. There is a 5 megapixel sensor, but the lens has a very wide angle of view, which means that you can often find lots of stuff in the frame. The thing that makes the Autographer interesting is that it lets you get pictures that you could not obtain any other way. And you just don't care that lots of them are rubbish. The 8G internal memory can store literally thousands of shots that might be taken during the day and there are smartphone, PC and Mac applications that let you pull out all the best shots and make them into animated gifs and videos. 

I wore the device during some of the "Wedding of the Year" and I'm very glad that I did. Some of the shots are lovely.

You can clip it to your shirt or hang it from a lanyard, but what I really wanted to do was stand it somewhere. Sadly it doesn't have any kind of stand, so I've designed and printed one, as you do.

This will screw onto one of those tiny tripods that you can get, which means you can use it for time lapse photography, something it does rather well. 

I've put the design on Thingiverse if you are lucky enough to have one of these neat little devices and want to stand it somewhere.

I'll post some pictures I've taken in some later blog posts.

Amazing Headphones

..and the red version are a perfect colour match to my Lovely Lumia 1520

There are actually not a lot of good things that come out of having your suitcase stolen when you travel. The only really good thing that came out of the whole episode was that I had to replace the headphones that were the sole "gadgety" thing that got taken. I'd heard very good things about the SoundMagic E10 phones and so I thought I'd get a pair.

They. Are. Amazing. Way better than the much more expensive ones that they replace. The bass is very solid, the high frequencies are smooth and the midrange is nice and clear. And you get seven different sizes of rubber earpiece, so there is a very good chance that you can get a good fit.

The only thing I don't like is the cable, which is attractive and sturdy looking but also transfers vibrations into your ears so that if you brush the wire against anything when you are wearing the phones you will hear quite loud crackling and rumbling sounds. But apart from that, they really are magic. 

Tricopter Nerves

Number one son was around over Easter and spent quite a chunk of time building a tri-copter. This is like a quad copter, but operating in reduced circumstances as far as rotor count is concerned. However, in some ways it is more interesting to fly, because the third rotor is pivoted so that you can use it to vector the thrust in a way that quad copters can't. 

Anyhoo, he started with just three bits of wood and a bag of motors and controllers and stuff, and I printed some parts to help hold it all together. By this evening he was ready to take it out into the field and see what happens. 

The answer, on this occasion, is not much unfortunately. Although the good news is that everything is plumbed together fine and it all worked as expected, the bad news is that a different kind of propeller will be required. I'm a bit sad that I won't be able to see the maiden flight of the device (it goes back down south tomorrow), but I think there is a good chance that it will come back to Hull in one piece at some point in the future. And I'm seriously tempted to have a go at building one myself. 

Nest Controller

I've fancied having a Nest controller for a while but they've only been available in the 'states. Then this week I found out that they are now out in the UK. It's taken a while for them to arrive here, mainly because of the differences between US and UK heating systems.

Mine arrived yesterday, complete with a set of instructions on how to install. I'm very tempted to have a go, but this would probably be a daft thing to do just before we go away for a week or so. But I think it will make a nice Easter project.  

Get a Multimeter. Preferably with a needle...

If you are at all serious about electronics you probably need to get a multimeter. This is a thing that lets you measure electrical items of various kinds, voltage, current and resistance. I got my first one a very long time ago. In fact, they were quite expensive and I actually ended up buying the bits and putting my own box around the thing. 

Nowadays you can get them very cheaply, and they tend to be digital. They show their readings as numbers. This is fine, but I much prefer one with a needle, like the one above. With a needle it is easy to see if something has just gone up or down. With digits you have to start comparing numbers. Most of the time when I'm testing a circuit I'm really checking to see if something is there or not and I don't really need an accurate value.

I thought you couldn't get cheap multimeters with needles on them, but it turns out I was wrong. You can get the above for less than five pounds from here. So I did. It works well enough and I'm already finding it useful to have around the office.

One important note though. As you can see above the dial has settings that indicate that the meter can read up to 1,000 volts. This is true enough, but you really, and I mean really should not be poking those kinds of probes into signals at that level, on account of a mistake making you suddenly, and electrically, not alive any more. For battery voltages and things like embedded controllers its fine, and it can also measure resistance.  But for high voltages I'd suggest you look at much higher specification tools that will have better insulated cables and probes.

A Headphone Amplifier in a Tin

I've been looking at little headphone amplifiers for a while. These are things that do a better job at driving your 'phones than the overworked, made for a price, components you find in most things with headphone outputs. To be fair, the output of my Lovely Lumia 1520 sounds splendid, particularly if I plug it into an amplifier, but as someone with pretensions to High Fidelity (tm), I thought that a little extra amplification might make things even better.

And then I found this on Tindie. I think I'm becoming addicted to Tindie, in that they have lovely stuff and buying from all over the world is very easy. Apart from the pesky import duty thing of course.

I must admit that the packaging had me won over before I looked into the quality of the electronics. The device is packed into an Altoids tin (you can choose your design) and the board is beautifully made and assembled. The total price, including import duty, is well less than a video game, and listening tests have revealed (at least to my ears) a more solid bass and clearer midrange to the sound.

If you are into sound quality, want a bit more volume to your music, or like the idea of having a tin packaged gadget like this, then I reckon they are well worth the money. 

Retro Fun at C4DI

Tonight it was time for some Retro Fun at C4DI. Nothing on the agenda as such, just bring along your retro gear and be prepared to tell its story. We had some great stuff turn up, including a laser disk system and a Theramin.

Peter had brought the Apple II (by the way, the missing key is the | key) and a Palm Pilot. Ian brought the Sinclair Scientific calculator and I brought the hand cranked calculator. (did you know that people that used these were actually called computers?).

You can play "How many of these did you own?" here. I had two, and I really, really wanted an Apple Newton....

It was very interesting to see just what people had brought. There were Sinclair Spectrums, Walkmen (Walkmans?), Amstrad Portable Computers and all kinds of tech. It is sobering to reflect that these were all state of the art in their time, and that the iPhone that you adore so much is destined to become just as retro as these gadgets in a few years time. 

Thanks to Jon for setting it up. The next meeting of the Hull Digital is Thursday 16th January, when they are having the first Hardware Meetup, which should be very interesting. 

Laser Cutter Purchase Chicken

Ian came around today and we played a kind of “dangerous purchase chicken”, each trying to persuade the other that what we really need in our lives is a laser cutting machine. Turns out you can get these from ebay for a few hundred pounds, which for a device with a 40 watt C02 laser is actually amazing value we reckon.

The one we looked at can cut paper, card, leather and most other non-metallic materials. Including fingers and thumbs I suppose. The vendor page shows a video of the machine happily burning through card, with the lid wide open and presumably all the safety interlocks (which I hope it has) turned off.

It would be nice to be able to precisely cut plastic parts and the device might be a nice complement to Una the 3D printer. But bearing in mind that the thing is water cooled and needs a hole cutting in the wall to install the vent that gets rid of all the nasty smoke,  I think I’ll pass for now.

Acer W3-810 at a knockdown price

After I buy something technical one of two things usually happens:

• They stop making it
• It plummets in price

I think with the Acer W3-810 tablet it might be both of them. Although it has only been out around six months I reckon that there is a refresh due and the price has collapsed accordingly, to a very interesting 179 pounds from PC World. This is stonkingly good value for a full fat Windows 8 tablet. Mine is now my travelling companion of choice. Eminently portable, excellent battery life for watching movies on the go and the ability to run splendid little programs live Live Write so that I can blog about what I see when I get there.

Downsides? Well, the 8.1 inch screen is not optimal if you are the sharing type, as the range of viewing angles is not the best, and the Atom processor and 2G of RAM means that it chugs a bit when running larger programs. I had Photoshop Lightroom on it for a while and the best thing you can say is that it gets there in the end. Mind you, having said that Lightroom can pretty much bring any machine to its knees just by importing a few pictures. I’ve heard of one brave soul running Visual Studio on it. Apparently it is possible, but of course with it being based on the 32 bit x86 architecture you will not be running any Windows Phone emulators any time soon…

If you are in the market for something portable and useful you could get a lot worse. If you think about it, that’s actually less money than a Nexus 7, for a machine that is actually properly productive, with Microsoft Office and the ability to print things out.

Acer Iconia W3 Tiny Windows 8 Tablet

I really should not be allowed up town just after I’ve got paid. Particularly if I then happen across an Acer Iconia W3 for a very tempting 250 quids. I had a careful look online and read a bunch of reviews that said the screen was horrible and it wasn’t up to much. And then I bought one anyway. Two reasons really. I’ve love to have Windows 8 in an 8.1 inch display form factor. And this is actually “full fat” Windows 8, in that it is running on an Intel Atom processor and so it is able to run LightRoom and Windows Live Writer. The one thing the reviews agreed on (even the unhappy ones) was that the battery life was good at well over 8 hours. I like that a lot. And to me the display looks fine.

It comes with a license for Office 2013 Home edition, which I’ve bumped up to the Premium one. I’m not going to be putting Visual Studio on the machine, but then again with only around 11G free (I got the penny pinching 32G version) it might not fit anyway. The thing is, I don’t see this as my primary developer machine. More something I can cart along with me and use to knock out blog posts with pictures.

I’d just about got everything working and then I broke it all by wiping the machine clean and loading up Windows 8.1. This has mostly worked, although at the moment the orientation sensor is lacking a proper driver so I can only use it in landscape mode, which is a pity.

The main reason for all that danger and excitement is that I wanted the much improved SkyDrive integration in Windows 8.1. The small amount of internal storage matters a lot less if I’ve got access to everything in the cloud and then I can mark “work in progress” folders as living on the device. Windows 8.1 does this really well, and there’s no need to install the desktop client thingy. And I can drop another 64G of storage into the micro SD slot if I want to take some movies or music with me.

At the price I reckon it is an absolute steal. The screen is a bit of an acquired taste. It looks wonderful if you can get your head into the correct position, otherwise the contrast dips and all kinds of weird colour schemes appear, although it remains useable. If you consider that you can’t get much of an iPad for that price you start to see just how much properly useful technology you get in a tiny package.

Another machine to wish for

My Surface Pro is now my computing weapon of choice. Very quick, hugely portable. I’ve taken to using it at work without the keyboard attached, plugged into my docking station. It does confuse folks who come into my office, to find me powering my desktop with what looks like a picture frame, but it works a treat.

The only things I don’t like are the 128G disk space and the 4G memory are a bit on the small side these days. Particularly when I’m running two Windows Phone emulators side by side (although they do both work). And the battery life could be a bit better.

Which is why I’m very pleased that Surface Pro 2 is now on the stocks. With an 8G ram version that has a 256G SSD. Where do I sign?

This does of course mean that towards the end of October there will probably be at least one Surface Pro 128 going on sale, I’m just not sure whether or not to leave the fancy skin on or not when I try to sell it.

Oh, and there are some nice fancy goodies coming along as well, including illuminated keyboards and a really neat docking station. 

Fun at C4DI

This is the view from the window at C4DI down in the Fruit Market part of Hull. This is definitely a region “on the grow”, what with Platform Expo and a bunch of other tech folks setting up shop around there. As you can see, it is a stone’s throw from The Deep, a fantastic looking building (although I don’t think they’d appreciate you throwing stones at it…)

Anyhoo, C4DI provide space for business to start, grow and flourish. For a monthly fee you can get access to a desk, power, a fast (and I mean really fast) network connection and ample coffee.

You are also surrounded by like minded folks, and so there is tremendous scope for mentoring and collaboration. Jon Moss, one of the folks behind the project, will be coming up to the university to talk about what they are doing as part of our Rather Useful Seminar series next semester. They have some amazing plans for the future.

Peter and I went down to C4DI to talk about taking part in session about 3D printing that we hope to set up in a month or so. While we there we sat in on a Skype call with Brendan Dawes, which was very illuminating. I know what I want to do when I grow up now….

My view of the call

Brendon takes stuff, fiddles with it to find out what it can do and then uses it to make interesting things. I sometimes build things “for no reason” or to see what they do, and I love the idea of being able to do that for real.  He has been doing some neat things with Electric Imp devices. I saw these a while back but the cloud based model that underpins them worried me a bit as I’ve bought a couple of devices (Chumby and Nabaztag rabbit) that turned into paperweights when their supporting companies went bust. However, if you think of them as a bit of fun you can have for less than the price of a video game, they start to get a lot more interesting.

I’m going to get one or two to play with when I get some free time. And I’ve paid for the new washing machine that I seem to need…