Red faces at the hardware meetup

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We had our first in-person hardware meetup of the year tonight and it was a roaring success. The theme for the evening was “Thermal cameras” and Brian had brought along his thermal camera equipped Pi which has a really nifty screen. You can see it action above. Faces show up as bright red, with windows and other cold things dark blue.

Pretty much everyone had brought along some stuff to talk about. Ion had brought along some amazing creations, including a super accurate crystal controlled clock which he had built from scratch, including a custom designed four-layer printed circuit board.

Richard had brought his beautifully built “Completely Useless Machine”. To find out what it does you have to flick the switch.

I was going around making tiny printed portraits of people using the Kidizoom camera. You can just see one of Richard underneath his device above. It turns out that if you take a photo with the camera and then convert it in to a “colouring in” picture you get some nice looking line art printed out.

We’re going to try and meet up in person once a month from now on. If you’re in Hull and you fancy coming along it would be lovely to see you. I’ll be posting the details of the next meetup soon.

Thermal Camera Meetup next week

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We’re holding our first in-person meetup event of 2022 next week at the Makerspace in Hull. At this event we are going to take a look at what a thermal camera can do for you. Brian has got one running into a Raspberry Pi and has been doing some tests.

Of course we’ll be bringing along other bits of hardware to talk about and you are welcome to bring yours too.

Police Squad and Rust at the Hardware Meetup

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Another fun hardware group meetup last night. In between chats about Python, Rust and thermal cameras I mentioned the TV series Police Squad. You can find it on YouTube here. It is one of the funniest TV shows ever made. They only made 6 or so episodes for some reason - but in a way I’m pleased about this as it never got time to go off the boil or become stale. It is just continuous, brilliant, genius. Take a look and thank me later.

Oh, and the next hardware meetup is on the 3rd of Feb. Find out more here.

Christmas Meetup Postponed

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The in-person Christmas Meetup that we were going to have this week has been postponed. Well, it did have “probably” in the name…. I don’t see the situation with that nasty little virus getting any better and I’d hate it if someone fell ill because of a gathering I’d organised.

We will be meeting online on Thursday though, which is good news if you fancy joining us from afar. I’ll be wearing my tackiest Christmas Jumper and we will have a silly quiz plus all the usual chat. You can find details here.

Update: I’ve fixed the spelling….

Not Halloween Hardware Meetup

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Some of the gear on show. The black BANDS on the cube are due to the shutter speed of the photo.

We had our first Connected Humber Hardware Meetup for ages today. Those lovely people at Hull MakerSpace provided the venue. It was lovely to actually meet up with folks again. We had a great time. It was splendid to see some new faces as well. I’ve promised a bunch of lights in names unites to people (as long as your name is less than 6 characters long I can make it work).

It’s hard to make long term plans just at the moment, but we’ll definitely be having another in-person meetup at some point. If you want to come along to the next one (and maybe get lights in your name) you can keep track of what we are doing here.

It would be lovely to see you at our next Hardware Meetup

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In the “Good Old Days” (which are getting progressively gooder and older) we used to have a Hardware Meetup in person at c4di twice a month. We’ get together in the same room and talk about hardware and software and anything else we found interesting. Sometimes we even got within 2 meters of each other.

Happy days.

However, the good news is that the meetings are still going on. A few stalwarts are still meeting up twice a month, although now we do it online. We had a great meetup last night as it turns out. We talked about a whole bunch of stuff, what we are doing, what works, what doesn’t. SBL showed off fantastic progress on the Connected Humber Sensors site. It is now much snappier to load sensor readings.

If you want to come along to our meetups you can find details our our meetups on Mattermost here.

Robot Tracking and Python at the Hardware Meetup

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Another good hardware meetup. Brian was showing off a properly working robot tracking solution, which means that Hull Pixelbot Robot Rugby is getting closer…

StarbeamRainbowlabs was showing off a Raspberry Pi cluster in the making. Love the colours.

Karen had brought along some devices that she wanted to play with, including the one above. But what does it do?

Finally, Ben and myself did a bit of Micro Python. Each time we have a Hardware Meetup I’m producing a little briefing document about the subject. You can find these documents here.

Connected Humber Hardware Meetup

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Lots of activity tonight at the Connected Humber Hardware Meetup including circuit building, Raspberry Pi development and robot tracking (that’s the big camera rig at the back of the picture).

We also had lots of computer chat, which I love. As usual I left with a bunch of ideas for things to try out.

This is the inside of my LED cube with two panels joined together. I’ve printed the corners that link them. Now I just need some more corners and panels.

This is the two faces in action. Next step is to start writing my own programs rather than using the demo code.

This is Brian’s robot tracking software. He is using an overhead camera to track robot location using a specially printed robot hat. It’s getting quite good.

This is one of the robots being tracked. You can see the dot pattern on the top that the software is looking for. The square around the pattern is to stop the other leds on the robot from interfering with the image.

If you want to come to our next meetup in 2 weeks, when we will be taking a look at super-cheap Python powered devices, then you can sign up here.

And remember that we have a Facebook group for the hardware meetups too. You can join in the conversation here.

Hardware Group Meetup - Frekvens and LED Cubes

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I thought it might be fun to add some themes to Hardware Group meetups. The next meetup, on Thursday 20th of Feb, will be about Ikea Frekvens hardware, among other things. I’ll bring along my speaker, so folks can get an idea of how good it sounds.

I’ll also be bringing along my LED cube work in progress. I’m working on making a cube out of 64x64 led panels. The idea is to have a Raspberry Pi 4 inside, along with a fairly muscular battery, so that the device can be totally mobile, just a cube that lights up. I’ve got my panels, so now I’m printing out all the support pieces from this amazing design. I’ll be bringing my work in progress along to show off.

The event is free for anyone who fancies coming along. You can get tickets here.

Hardware Group Meetup

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On the way into the Hardware Meetup at c4di tonight I sprinted off to the waterfront, leaving Brian wondering what I was up to. There was a great big boat going down the estuary and I wanted to grab some pictures. Of course, but the time I got the big camera out and pointing in the right direction the boat had moved downstream a bit, but I still rather like the resulting shot.

We had some really good discussion about hardware and whatnot and Brian showed me how to get started making my own PCBs. The next meetup will be on the 20th of February and I’ll be publishing details soon.

Robot Tracking at the Hardware Meetup

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Tonight we did some robot tracking at the hardware meetup. This is all part of the “Robot Rugby” thing we are working on. Brian and I set up our cameras and got to work. Brian is reading QR codes from the top of the robot, I’m trying to find out if I can get position and orientation from two lit pixels on top of the robot.

We set up the supports (with copious duct tape) and started playing. Tests seem to indicate that I should be able to detect only the pixels on the robot by turning down the gain on the camera so that only very bright lights show up. Lots of work to do here, but we are making progress.