Connected Humber Meetup Dates

We’ve set the dates for the next Connected Humber Hardware Meetups. We meet at Hull Makerspace in person on the first Wednesday of the month. Then, 15 days later on Thursday evening we meet online - link here. I look forward to seeing you if you fancy dropping in.

July Meetups:

Wednesday 6th July from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 21st July from 6:00 pm online

August Meetups:

Wednesday 3rd August from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 18th August from 6:00 pm online

September Meetups:

Wednesday 7th September from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 22nd August from 6:00 pm online

October Meetups:

Wednesday 5th October from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 20th of October from 6:00 pm online

November Meetups:

Wednesday 2nd November from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 17th of November from 6:00 pm online

December Meetups:

Wednesday 7th December from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 22nd of December from 6:00 pm online

April Hardware Meetup was awesome

We had an awesome hardware meetup last night. I don’t measure the success of a meetup by the number of folk who turn up (although we were nicely quorate). I measure success by how much stuff gets passed around from person to person. Here are the things that we talked about. There were probably a few others that I missed.

• There is an awesome “Minecraft alike” program called Minetest that you can download and play with for free. It’s written in C# and Lydia of Starbeam Rainbow Labs fame has added some excellent extensions for it that you can find here.

• Karen has discovered origami on YouTube. It’s a great way to relax by making stuff. If you’ve ever fancied folding your own toilet, you can find the instructions here.

• You can use the Kidzoom printing camera to make wonderful little sketches of people by converting their portraits to “colouring in” pictures and printing them out on the built-in printer.

• The Furby Connect has a reset button hidden next to the battery compartment that can be used to bring the toy back from the grave. That, or we joggled the batteries when we were pressing the button. Either way, the Furby lived.

• You can make a flat piece of wood into a very flexible thing by cutting loads of slots in it with a laser cutter.

• 100% of the people who started writing a diary after I told them to say it is a very good idea. So starting a diary is either a very good idea or they are very polite people.

• There is a video arcade with lots of retro games machines in the basement of the Princess Quay shopping centre in the middle of Hull.

• The Badger 2040 e-ink display is as cute as a very cute thing.

• There is now a successor to the .NET Micro Framework. It’s called the .NET nanoframework. It lets you run and debug C# code from Visual Studio 2022 on devices like the ESP32. And it rocks.

• If you happen to need a mobile device to take round and check for LoRa gateways and map them for you, Brian has built one.

Thanks so much to Hull Makerspace for hosting the event. It was terrific fun. You only get these kind of things by actually meeting up in person. Here’s to the next one.

Hardware Meetup Thursday 6th

Hardware meetup tonight

We’re having an on-line Hardware Meetup tonight at 6:00 pm GMT. You can find out the details and join us here.

Red faces at the hardware meetup

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

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

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.

Magic Puzzles at the Hardware Meetup

We had another fun hardware meetup this evening. The conversation went all over the place, from Magic Puzzles (which look like fun) to Monzo bank accounts. The next chat will be in two weeks, on the 20th January at 6:00 pm GMT. You can join us here: https://mattermost.connectedhumber.org/default/channels/meetings

Christmas Meetup Tonight

Don’t forget the Connected Humber Christmas Hardware Meetup tonight at 6:00 pm. We will have all the usual chat plus a Silly Christmas Quiz which will be either stack of fun or a heap of fun, depending on how we manage our memory. Find the link to the meetup here.

Christmas Meetup Postponed

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….

Christmas Hardware Meetup

If you fancy coming along to see us out our meetup it would be lovely to see you. We’re going to be exploring the magic of the neopixel and make some twinkling lights. And eat some mince pies.

Not Halloween Hardware Meetup

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.

Connected Humber Meetup at Hull Makerspace

I think the poster says it all. I hope you see you there..

The benefits of groups

We had a great hardware group meetup this evening. One thing that these meetups have really brought home is just how useful it is to have other folks play with stuff that you’ve made. I got some lovely insights into the way that the MQTT topics should be organised for the Connected Little Boxes.

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

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.

Maketober Day 15: Making plans

We had a really good meetup of our little hardware group today. Adam came along and we talked about lots of lovely tech including proposals for a “bike thing” device for measuring road quality while you pedal. I really hope we can have a go at building one.

Hardware Meetup Interesting Chip

We had a great Hardware Meetup this week. If you ever want to join us, take a look at the MatterMost thread here for details of the next meeting on the 1st of October. One of the things we talked about was an amazing little processor that you can get for 94 pence for the smallest one. It looks very interesting. I think we’re going to order some.

Hardware Meetup now on Teams

Last night we had our first ever “Hardware Meetup on Teams”. There were only a few of us, but it went surprisingly well with only a few minutes spent saying “Can you hear me?” and “No.”.

If you want an invite to our next meetup, ping me an email at hardwaremeetup@robmiles.com and I’ll see what I can sort out.

Robot Tracking and Python at the Hardware Meetup

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

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.