Amazon Lockers on the Hull Campus

Amazon are one of those companies that divide opinion a bit. Every now and then they hit the headlines for something unseemly that they are doing, or planning to do. Seems to me that they behave like every other huge company with lots of shareholders and stuff and a desire to stay in business. Like Starbucks, Google, Apple and so on. And they are very useful when you have an urgent desire for a particular kind of cable and an adapter that will let you attach Canon lenses to your Fuji camera.

Anyhoo, I placed the order today and I was pleased to find that there are now some Amazon lockers on the university campus in the Student's Union. I can get them delivered there and pick up the bits and bobs tomorrow, which is nice.

Windows 10 Celebration fun and frolics

Well, that was nice. Turns out that Microsoft can build operating systems and also organise great parties. We got there a couple of hours before the doors opened and got everything working just in time for the start. I was responsible for the "Lift Off" game and the LogoBlaster. The Lift Off game has one or two gameplay issues, but I was surprised (and pleased) to find that some folks worked out how the game worked and then got very competitive.....

The LogoBlaster worked incredibly well. This is my pairing of a Raspberry Pi running Windows 10 and a portable video projector. We ere using it to project Windows 10 logos on passers by. 

It was interesting to notice that some folks didn't really get what it was doing until I showed them where the pictures were coming from. We managed to get the Raspberry Pi to load the LogoBlaster program on boot up, so that the unit became completely wire free. I was able to happily wander round adding logos to passing people.

Demonstrating the power of Logo Blaster

Adding cheese to the surroundings

Shameless self promotion - and a hexapod robot

The best moment came when we pointed the LogoBlaster  at someone's head by mistake. And the results were awesome. He (I'm awfully sorry sir - I've forgotten your name) was even happy to pose for a while as we took some more pictures.

This came out really well. I've put a whole bunch more pictures on Flickr. You can find them here.

The event ran for four hours. By the end we were all thoroughly hoarse from talking to folks about what we had done. But it was wonderful. We packed up in double quick time and staggered back to the hotel. Thanks to Paul for inviting me and letting me be part of this event. Great fun. 

Put "Windows 10 on Everything" with my LogoBlaster

I've just arrived at the hotel where we're staying for the Windows 10 celebration event. I've unpacked a few gadgets...

I'm helping out on the Internet of Things front, and on Sunday night I had a great idea for a device I could demonstrate.  Which I've built. In 36 hours. Go me.

I call it the "Windows 10 Logo Blaster". It really can put "Windows 10 on everything". It's a Raspberry Pi coupled to my lovely little projector. It runs a Windows 10 application that lets you select logos and images to "blast" onto the surroundings.

These are the 3D printed components. A tray for the Raspberry Pi, a cover that supports the projector and a handle which contains the trigger buttons. I've learned a bit over the years, and I now make designs that are easy to construct. As opposed to ones which can contain the components, but you can't actually get them inside.....

You can see how it all fits together here. Its showing the Windows 10 boot screen on the wall. When the program is running it shows different logos that you can switch between by pressing the buttons on the handle.

It works a treat. Battery life isn't great, but it does work. And I really can put Windows 10 (or at least one of its logos, onto everything. Tonight we've been told to wear white shirts as part of the event dress code, which should make the images show up a treat........

I'll put the designs and the software up on Github when I get back to Hull. I'm amazed that we now have tools and software that will let me go from idea to product in such a short time.

I'm really looking forward to the event tonight. I just hope everything works.......

Projecting Myself

I don't have many vices really. I don't drink, smoke or gamble.. Number one wife says that I should start doing all these at once because it would be cheaper than what I do indulge in. And that is gadgets. 

I got another one today. Something I've always fancied owning but not got round to. It's a tiny portable projector from Maplin. The picture above doesn't really give you a sense of scale, but it is around the size of a couple of packets of cigarettes.  Really tiny.

And it works a treat. 

My reason for purchase is that I wanted to attach it to a Raspberry Pi. It works really well. In fact it is even better than you might think (if you think about these things). The projector contains a battery which lets it run for around 2 hours or so. But the battery can also be used to recharge connected devices. So you can power the Raspberry Pi from the projector. Most interesting.

The resolution is fine and the picture is bright enough to see even in a lit room.

I'm not saying you need one of these. But if you fancy one, it is a good one to get. 

Cut Price Robot Kit

These are all the bits that you get

I was up town visiting the Red5 gadget shop today (who'd have thought it) when I noticed they had robot kit at substantially less than half price. Of course I bought it. And I've already got plans for spending the money that I saved. Go me.

The robot is big version of the Hexbug tiny ones. It is remote controlled and is able to act intelligently. Sort of. A bit like me.

It's supposed to be suitable for 8 years and upwards, but I reckon you'd really need to be a few years than older than that or have a grown up assistant. There were a few stages where I could have used some help myself. Some of the parts are very similar to each other and their alignment is very important, something you only find out when you've built it and it doesn't work properly. Also the instructions can be hard to decipher, my advice would be use the ones you can find on the web site and zoom in on them a lot.

Reviews online are mixed, and I can see where the bad ones are coming from, but the robot is certainly impressive once it gets going. It has a definite preference for tiled floors, carpets cause it to get a bit stuck because its feet dig into the pile and make turning difficult. However, for the price I paid I reckon it is good value and building it was not a bad way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Vetinari Clock Complete

Tonight I thought I'd build my Vetinari clock. It's a silly thing, but great fun.

Lord Vetinari is a character in the Discworld series of books by the now sadly deceased Sir Terry Pratchett. Vetinari, a powerful ruler of the largest city on the Discworld, has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to unnerve people by ticking irregularly. However, it still keeps accurate time. 

You can get a kit of parts to convert any quartz controlled clock into a Vetinari clock. It uses a PIC microcontroller to generate a sequence of 32 pulses of different lengths which give the appearance of randomness. But the clock still keeps time accurately.

I ordered mine a way back and, after my expensive trip to Ikea on Sunday, I finally got a clock mechanism I thought worthy of the conversion. Tonight I put it together and carefully connected the outputs from the circuit to the driver coil in the clock mechanism. It works a treat. If you are a fan of Discworld who likes soldering you might have some fun with this.

Hmm. Perhaps a video of the clock would make more sense....

LED Table

So, I bought at Hatten table at Ikea yesterday and today I popped a 32x32 LED array into it. I'm quite pleased with the result. I think I'll have to make some proper mountings for this and put a Raspberry Pi in there too. Oooh. Project.

Gadget Show Live Fun and Games

Today we had the other half of our "Busy Weekend", driving off down to the NEC for the Gadget Show Live event. We've been to these a few times and they are always worth the trip.

And so it was this time.

This stand prompted one of the first of several "Want One" moments. The gadget in question is the HP Sprout. This is a re-imagining of the PC which brings novel user interfaces and 3D scanning to the fore. In front of you sits a touch sensitive workspace onto which the computer projects a display. The workspace is also viewed by a number of cameras, including ones that can measure depth. The upshot of this is that you can scan objects in 3D and colour and manipulate them in all kinds of interesting ways. It's a bit pricey, at around 2 grand, but you do get a high-spec PC with an i7 processor and big hard drive for your cash.

There wee lots of 3D printers for sale, with some extremely tempting prices.

This brought out the second "want one" of the day. It's the Dyson robot vacuum cleaner. It looks really interesting. It uses SLAM (Simultaneous Location and Mapping) technology to build a map of its environment to make sure that it cleans everything. If its battery gets low it will go and pick up some charge and then return to cleaning where it left off. I had a Roomba robot vacuum a while back which was basically a "bumper car" toy that just bounced off the furniture for a while.  This looks a whole lot more advanced. It's due for release next year, so perhaps I should start saving now..

They even had a whole bunch of BBC micros. The urge to go down there and type

10 GOTO 10

- was pretty hard to resist.

And of course there were lots of, er, gadgets for sale too.

Apple II Watch

This is completely awesome. I'm so going to build one:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Apple-II-Watch/

Bye Bye Android - Hello Again Windows Phone

Yesterday I waved bye bye to my Android phone and officially ended my experiment with the platform. One of the Android wear watches went with it (I've still got a Moto 360 if anyone is interested). The good news is that it went to a very happy recipient who I know will get a lot out of it. The better news is that I'm back on Windows Phone. I've learned quite a lot in the few months I've been using an Android phone and an Android Wear watch.

1. It doesn't really matter that much which kind of phone you have. They all work well and they all do the fundamentals. When I moved to Android I had this vision of all the new and exciting apps that I could run now I had the most popular mobile platform. True, I did download a few of these and play with them a while. But then I went back to doing the same things I've always done, which my Lovely Lumia supported very well indeed.
2. Android has some great bits (the way that you can bind actions to events is really, really nice) and some really clunky bits. For me the most irritating aspect of the design was the way that huge chunks of the screen were given over to things that didn't add any value and just took up space. And the mail and calendar applications seemed much more confusing and harder to use than their Windows Phone counterparts. The address book and phone user interface I found fiddly too. These comments only mean that I had these issues, they don't mean that you will of course.
3. Having notifications on your wrist is very, very nice. You might get a bit tired of the email ones, but knowing that you aren't going to miss a phone call or a text is rather pleasing and occasionally really useful.
4. The battery life of the current crop of Android wear devices is nowhere near good enough. Much as I loved the user experience and screen of the Moto 360 watch the fact that it conked out at around 5:00 pm made it pretty much useless. You can blame me for having the "ambient" mode turned on to force the screen to hang around longer, but I like using a watch as a watch I can look at and get the time instantly. When I'm giving lectures I like to glance at my watch to see how much time I've got left, with the Moto I couldn't do this (even in ambient mode it struggled), and with the Sony watch the screen was a bit hard to use in this situation. I should have had a look at the LG watch which has a lower power screen I suppose, but I really didn't like the styling of that one.

So, I'm now back on my Lovely Lumia 1520, running the Denim update and coupled to a Microsoft Band. The Band tells the time all the time and at the end of 18 hours of heavy use has around 60% of the battery left. Splendid.

Fixing your WiFi Radio

I'm quite proud of myself. I've managed to fix something. In the kitchen we have an internet radio which works quite well. We need one because there are no other radio signals that work properly there. But sometimes it stops working, It's taken me a while to figure out the cause of the problem, but finally I have the answer.

It's the microwave. 

The confusing thing is that because the radio uses a lot of buffering it doesn't stop as soon as the microwave comes on and blocks out the signal. The radio plays for a minute or so and then drops out. Then, when you turn the microwave off it takes a few seconds for the radio to re-establish connections with the server and start working again. 

I've checked on-line and apparently this is not an uncommon problem and the microwave radiation isn't hazardous as such, but it is irritating. 

For me the fix was quite easy. I just switched the WiFi channel from 6 to 10 and the problem has gone away. Go me. 

Consoles and Blu-Ray Players

So last night I settled down to watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's a fine movie. Nowhere near as good as the TV series or the book, but well worth a watch. However the picture quality was horrible. At first I thought the flickering screen and grainy image were part of a period recreation, but then I remembered it being perfectly fine in the cinema. 

I discovered, after some messing around, that game consoles don't make very good Blu-Ray players. I tried a couple of devices and the results were pretty horrid on both of them to be honest, with tearing images and lots of noise. This might be something to do with the rest of my system, but because I'm the kind of person I am, I thought I'd try getting a dedicated player to see if it was any better. 

Oh yes it was. The difference was like night and day. Much much better. And the good news is that a decent player can be had for a comparatively low price these days, not far off the price of a video game (which is how I price most things to be honest).

My advice, such as it is, would be to think beyond using your PS3 or whatnot as a player and look into getting a "proper" one. This also has the useful advantage of making it much easier to actually watch movies. Now I can just put the disk into the machine and within seconds be watching a whole bunch of trailers I can't skip. With the console I have to find the controller, wobble through a bunch of menus and, if I'm lucky, a firmware update before I get to see things that are on the disk but shouldn't be in my way.

Up until now I've had a kind of "everything is digital" mindset about things like DVD players and whatnot, but my experience has been that there is actually quite a lot of subjective shenanigans going on between the signal source and the display. 

Windows 10 Looks Wonderful

I wasn't able to watch much of the live presentation about Windows 10 today. We were down at Fudge having a really nice meal at a bargain price, thanks to their January seat sale (my tip, have the quiche - like a pie but without the lid, and a fantastic filling).

Anyhoo, I managed to capture the gist of the event, sneaking peeks of a live blog from the event on my phone in between courses. Which is probably the epitome of bad manners, but I really wanted to find out what was going on. 

It was awesome.

Some perspective here. I'm a Microsoft MVP. I like Microsoft stuff. So you would expect me to say nice things about stuff that comes from Redmond. But even so it was awesome.

There was a great balance between stuff that you can see fitting in with your life (universal apps that are built once and run on every platform in an appropriate way, Continuum that makes sure that you get the best experience whatever device you are using, Cortana everywhere, playing Xbox One games on your tablet/phone) and completely bonkers stuff that might just change your life completely (the Holographic headset). 

I've read up what I can on the headset and the only thing I truly, definitely know about it just right now is that I really, really want one. It is definitely a work in progress. I'm not sure that Microsoft can tell us exactly how they see it being used in the future. But kudos to the company for unveiling it as they did. If you want to watch back the event you can find it here. 

Microsoft now have compelling hardware, compelling software and real proper science fiction stuff. The next year is going to be very interesting. 

Making a Camera

I got a Konstructor camera for Christmas. It reminds me very much of the first camera I ever had, which was made of plastic, had a plastic lens and took photographs which were almost recognisable as the thing it had been pointed at. From the samples online this one has performance quite a bit better than that. But I'm not really looking for quality images here. I'm looking for interesting ones. And I think I'll get those. 

The camera  also reminds me of the Airfix models that I used to carefully construct when I was a kid,  bearing in mind it comes as a kit. I've just spent a very happy evening attaching Part A12 to P11 and whatnot, and with a bit of luck I'll have it finished tomorrow. It actually uses real, proper, 35mm film too. I've got a bunch of cassettes and over the weekend I plan to take some shots and get them developed. I used to love getting my pictures back from the labs and seeing how they come out, now I'll be able to do that again. 

Buy this Windows Tablet. Like now.

Now this is just crackers. A well sorted 7 inch screen Windows tablet PC with a workable processor, reasonable storage (which can be expanded) and even a monitor socket. For 69 pounds. It's made by Linx, a firm you won't have heard of. But don't let that stop you from getting one. 

The price is less than it used to cost to buy Windows. And it comes with a years worth of Office 365. Which also costs more than the tablet. And to complete the madness, if you have an old tablet to trade in you can get 30 pounds cash back on top.

Did I get one? You bet. I'm not planning to put Visual Studio on it. It only has 1G of RAM, but I've been running the office suite (which is thrown in too) quite comfortably. I'll put a few more programs on it (it uses an Intel chip so it runs all the proper code) and I'm expecting them to work just fine as long as I'm careful not to start them all at once.

The screen is bright and clear if a tiny bit grainy. The angle of view is good and the standard of construction just fine with a slim build and light weight. The only slight snag might be battery life, which is quoted at 4-6 hours, but everything else about the device screams "Buy Me".

An impoverished student looking for a cheap way to be able to take notes in lectures and write up reports could get one of these, a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and have a great little self contained device which they could even plug into a larger monitor for proper work.

Slap in a micro-SD card to supplement the 32G in the device (I have around 12G or so free at the moment) and you can load it up with media too if you want. It has OneDrive integration so you don't need to store much on the device itself and really cannot recommend it highly enough.  

I got mine from Staples in Hull, who are doing the 30 pound cashback deal too. It is presently discounted there from 99 to 69 pounds. I'd have been rather pleased to have such a neat device at 99 pounds. To find it this cheap is just amazing. We do live in interesting times. 

Flashing Lights and Drones at C4DI

Today we had another of our hardware meetups at c4di. Great fun was had by all who attended. We had two activities, playing with coloured leds or creating a Larson Scanner. Ross had brought along a little quadcopter with a video camera and much fun was had with that too. I'm not saying you should get one, but if you fancy making an investment you can find it here.

Grand Prix Sunday with Lights

Spent the afternoon watching the Grand Prix and making lights come on when we pressed buttons. Good times. 

Mouse Foolishness and Product Ideas

While I was in the 'states I got myself a new mouse. My beloved Presenter mouse from way back has reached the point of no return I think. Mind you, it must be quite a few years old now. The replacement one is a Sculpt Comfort Mouse with a fancy blue tag that you can use to scroll between open applications and open the start menu. A great match to my blue keyboard and a really nice device to use.

So nice that I nearly lost it. 

I left it in Lecture Theatre A after the last Rather Useful Seminar on Wednesday. I remembered this as I was walking past the theatre on Friday and thought I'd drop in and see if it was still there. It was, along with around 100 students who were expecting a lecturer, not someone who would bound up to the lecturn, exclaim "Ooooh Goody. And it's still working", show the bright blue light underneath to the assembled multitude and then leave cackling. 

Actually, I've just had a horrible thought. Perhaps there was somebody in there lecturing at the time I burst in. Oh well.

Which brings me to my business idea. It might have been done before. I don't know. But what I really needed was a program on my PC that told me when the Bluetooth mouse had gone out of range. We can do this with things like the Nokia Treasure Tag, so why not with mice?

(If you make a million from this idea good luck to you, just a few percent will keep me happy)

Organising Components

While I was up town recently I noticed these rather stylish boxes in Tesco that you can get for a reasonable price. 

I'd been looking for some way of storing my increasing collection of electrical components. I have this worrying (but, fortunately not very expensive) habit of searching ebay for the word Arduino and then being completely unable to resist buying things I find at amazing prices, post free from China.

My plan was to fill each box with envelopes containing particular components.  I stole the idea from the excellent Arachnid Labs blog. 

It works really well. When I want something I just have to flick through the envelopes to find it. The Computer Scientist in me will probably sort the envelopes into alphabetic order at some point, but for now I've not got enough devices to really make it necessary.I don't have any anti-static envelopes, so I just used ordinary stationary ones. 

Surface Pro 3 Review

Almost worth tidying my desktop for...

My Surface Pro 3 arrived earlier this week. I ordered it when they were released because I really, really wanted one. I'm going to have to sell lots of things to pay for it, but from the look of things it will replace my iPads and desktop machines. 

The hardware is lovely. It's as if they've listened to all the complaints about earlier versions and acted on them. The power plug is no longer designed to gouge lumps out of the expensive paintwork, the kick stand tips all the way back to make it work really well on your lap and the touch pad on the keyboard is actually usable (like it was on the original Type keyboard before they broke it with the 'improved' version). 

I've spent a happy evening or two loading software onto the machine and it has finally got all my working files from OneDrive. For this new machine I'm trying a new trick. I'm writing a log of all the software that I install and all the funny settings changes that I make to get things to work. This will be useful to me if I ever move to a new machine (it has been known). I always end up having to remember where I got that program from, or what it was that I did to make it work properly. And writing the log gives me something to do as the progress bars drag themselves across the screen.

I've not noticed any problems, except for one. The Surface Pro 3 has a feature called InstantGo. This makes the machine wake really quickly from sleep. It also enables a neat trick where you can start the machine and open up OneNote just by clicking the button on the active pen that comes with the machine (and is lovely by the way). Problem is that this feature doesn't work if you enable Hyper-V on the Surface.  So, why would you enable Hyper-V? Well, you need it to use the Windows Phone emulator among other things.

If you install Visual Studio 2013 it enables Hyper-V automatically, which causes a couple of bad things to happen. Firstly InstantGo (and Sleep) disappear from the Power Options, which become really confusing. Secondly the machine doesn't reconnect to the WiFi at all well. I had a nervous few minutes thinking I had a broken machine before I did some searching and found the cause of the issue. 

This is not a huge problem for me just right now. Without Hyper-V enabled I can debug Universal apps using the local machine (although the simulator doesn't work) and I can deploy programs into the phone to debug. To make life easier for myself I've written a couple of batch files that turn Hyper-V on or off and reboot the machine. I just right click on them and run them as administrator (or I could create a Start Menu shortcut that does that). This makes it easy for me to flip between the modes. If you have a use for them you can find them here. 

One thing about the Surface Pro 3 that is completely wonderful is the way that it works with Xinio. I signed up for Xinio a while back and earlier this week they had a 40% discount event (I think they have discounts quite frequently).  I managed to get subscriptions to four titles that I normally buy for around 45 quid for the year, which I reckon is very good value. 

Magazines look lovely on the screen and the pages are pretty much life sized. The 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen is just right for reading and the Surface itself weighs a bit less than one magazine, particularly if you unclip the keyboard. I think the days of me having a big pile of paper by the bed are now numbered. 

This really does look like the "everything device" I've been after for a while. I reckon that it should replace my desktop and I should be able to use it as a proper tablet too. The OneNote integration is very useful if you want to scribble a note or capture something off the screen and use it somewhere else. In fact it has left me looking at OneNote anew. I've never really got to grips with it, finally this platform might be the one that makes it part of my life.

If you are looking at your iPad and thinking "Wouldn't it be nice if I could actually use it to make things" then the Surface Pro is for you. I've got the i7 version (I'm going to have to sell a lot of things) but my old i5 Surface Pro 2 ran all the power applications I could throw at it, including Photoshop, Visual Studio, the Office Suite, FreeCad and Cura. Sometimes all at the same time. So I reckon you could quite comfortably get the i5 Surface Pro 3. 

I hope they sort out the Hyper-V issue. I've a feeling that a machine like this will be lapped up by serious developers and it is a shame that their lives are being made more difficult by this problem. But apart from that, strongly, strongly recommended.