Hull Pixelbot 2.0: The future is clear....

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I've spent today working on the 3d printed parts for the latest version of the Hull Pixelbot. I'm now using laser cut perspex for the larger parts, which makes the robot look great and should mean that I can start to make kits of parts available for anybody who wants a Hull Pixelbot of their own....

I was hoping that I could just use all the existing 3d printed parts for the rest of the robot, but it hasn't turned out quite like that. I've changed some sizes, and I've now added a speaker underneath the pixel so that the robots can make some noise. 

I've found some tiny speaker units which an Arduino can drive directly. It's not what you'd call HiFi, but it works.  They fit inside the pixel ring on top of the robot, which means that I've not had to increase the size of the robot to add sound. I've also got a mini-breadboard on the front of the robot to make it easier to add your own circuits. 

The design files for the laser cut parts, along with the customised 3d printed elements, will be going on GitHub soon. 

Writing DXF files from Python

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I spent a bit of today creating design files for the latest version of the Hull Pixelbot. This version is going to be laser cut from perspex. This should make it much easier to produce large numbers of robots. Of course I'm not using a CAD package to produce the designs. It's a matter of personal pride that the Hull Pixelbot is entirely a software creation, and the designs are actually built by a Python program. 

The 3D printable version of the designs is created by a program running inside the FreeCad drawing program, but for the laser cut version I'm trying something different. I've discovered the ezdxf library that enables you to create dxf files (the ones that can be used to tell the laser cutter what to cut) directly from Python. 

So, after a bit of fiddling around I've got the start of the designs for the top and bottom of the robot.

Perspex Pixelbots at c4di

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This is lovely. I've been pondering how to make Hull Pixelbots quickly (printing one takes around 8 hours or so) and then someone walks into the Hardware Meetup with a perspex pixelbot. 

Then Karl walks in with a laser cut chassis. He'd taken my stl files and converted them into flat components. Then he'd taken the designs to his work and got some prototypes cut out of perspex. The next step is to find out how much it will cost to get a bunch made. 

Reckitt Benckiser at c4di

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David Keel of c4di explains what we are about

Spent an afternoon talking about robots and chatbots. In other words, a good afternoon. We had folks from Reckitt Benckiser over to talk about a new partnership with c4di. We were showing off stuff what we had made and I brought along a few Hull Pixelbots. 

Another satisfice Hull Pixelbot customer...

I really love it when I show someone a bit of tech and they go "Oh, so that means we could use this for......." That's a big chunk of what c4di is all about, and there was a lot of it about this afternoon.

Then we went straight into a Hardware meetup. It was great to see everyone come along, Ross brought his beautifully made Hull Pixelbots and we had a good natter about how to control them. 

Great stuff. 

Hull Pixelbot Rumble at c4di today (Thursday)

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Finally, a blog post that isn't a thinly disguised plug for one of my books....

Anyhoo, today I'm plugging the Hardware Meetup at c4di tomorrow (Thursday). Ross is going to bring his robots, I'm going to bring some of mine, and we are going to do some robot things that might include rumbling.

You're welcome to come along and marvel. Sign up here. The meetups are in the ground floor of the awesome c4di building. We start at 6:00 pm and go on until 8:00 or until we run out of things to talk about (which usually means a bit later..)

If you've any interest in hardware (computer or otherwise) then it would be great to see you. 

Will Robots Take Over the World?

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So, today I did my half an hour on "Will Robots Take Over the World?". I stated of by saying I was fairly sure that then won't, but that they are already here and all around is in the devices that we use from day to day. From that it was a short hop into the joys of software and I finished off with a plug for the Hull Pixelbot and a demonstration from Chrystal Masie, Commander Custard and Aunty Violet, who responded well to commands from the audience. 

Thanks for being a great audience folks. You can find the slides for the talk here. 

Will Robots Take Over the World

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I've just discovered that I'm giving a talk about robots at the university on Monday 26th June. Or at least someone called Rob Miles has been booked to do 30 minutes on whether or not robots will take over the world as part of the Annual UCAS Exhibition which this year is in Hull. 

I probably said yes to it when I was drunk. Or something. 

Anyhoo, if you fancy coming along on Monday at 10:15 in LR13 in the Wilberforce Building on the University campus it would be lovely to see you. I will, of course, be showing off some robots of my own. And I'll be sober. Or something.

I don't teach at the university any more, but I retain a strong affection for the place where I spent my professional life. They even made me a Fellow of the University, which was very nice of them because I think it means I get to give talks like these. 

Pixelbots at CodePen

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Thanks to CodePen Hull for the picture of me holding up a phone to prove something worked.

Codepen is a great idea. Get together a bunch of people interested in code and have them tell each other what they are up to. There were six talks over the evening, ranging from a lovely looking Scrum development management tool, a splendid hosting framework, video game development, first steps in programming and the new application development pattern from Facebook.

I should have taken proper notes, but I was too busy thinking about my talk, which was right at the end. I think it went OK, even though at one point I was reduced to holding my phone up with a web page on it shouting "Look. It worked." As if anyone could tell.

I met up with some folks I've not seen for a while and it was lovely to have a catch up. We had pizzas and drinks and it was a great evening. It was great to see it so busy, but there's always room for a few more if you want to come along to the next one.

Anyhoo, I said I'd put the slide deck up and here it is. Including the answer to the competition question (which I'll probably have to change for next time).

I'm really looking forward to the next event. 

Hull Pixelbots at the Radio 1 Academy

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Radio 1 invited us to take part in the Radio 1 Academy this week, which was nice of them. There are four days of events encouraging folks to engage with the "creative" arts. I was especially pleased to be asked to go along because I do computer stuff, and I see this as incredibly creative.

I had a very happy day showing people the robots, letting them control then with their phone and then telling them that the "magic ingredient" (i.e. the bit that links everything together) costs two pounds fifty. Which is less than the price of a burger and chips.

With a bit of luck, a few people who had never thought of getting into programming will turn up at one of our c4di hardware meetups and get involved in making stuff. I took a bunch of pictures during the event, you can find them here. 

Rob wins "Elevator Pitch" at c4di

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Won a prize today for speaking in an elevator. Not done that before. Only at c4di. 

As I walked into the building yesterday I was asked if I'd like to take part in an "elevator pitch" competition. The idea behind an elevator pitch is that perhaps one day you'll find yourself in a lift with someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. So you've got the time it takes to get to the tenth floor to convince them to give you a hunk of money to let you follow your dream. 

I was told I had sixty seconds in the c4di elevator (up to the top and back down) to convince someone I'm worth backing. I wasn't really prepared for it, but I said I'd have a go, and off we went.

I'd got a Hull Pixelbot with me (Crystal Masie as it turned out) and so I decided to wax lyrical about the joys of building tiny connected robots. When I'd finished I asked how much time I had left to speak.

Forty more seconds. 

So I went on a bit more about getting people making and coding, and my dream of building an arena containing 100 Hull Pixelbots wandering around, just to see what they'd do.  Finally the time was up and I went back to my room to do battle with the Microsoft Bot Service. As you do. 

Today I found that I'd won the competition, which is awesome. I got a fantastic trophy and a lunch at Nibble. 

I love that c4di are doing things like this. You can watch the community of developers building up thanks to the efforts of Dee and Jess.  And getting practice telling people what you are doing and why it's a good idea is vitally important for professionals today. So everybody who took part has got something out of it. 

Great fun.

Loading FreeCad designs into Paint 3D

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I've got lots of things I've designed using the lovely FreeCAD program. I wanted to play with them in Paint 3D in Windows 10 Creators Edition. If you want to do this too, this is how:

FreeCad doesn't seem to support a format that Paint 3D understands. You'll need to use a converter program to do this. I've found a free program at NCH Software that seems to do the trick.  First thing you need to do is download and install the program. 

Then, in FreeCad, select all the elements of the model that you want to export in the editor. Then select File>Export from the FreeCad menu to display the Export Dialog:

Select the "Wavefront OBJ" file type as you can see above. Give the file a sensible name, and then click Save.

Now you need to convert the OBJ file into a 3MF file. Open up Spin 3D. Select Add File (the big plus) and add your file. You can add lots of files if you like. 

I've found that models need to be rotated for some reason (perhaps because the coordinate frames of reference are different). Click the Effects button in the bottom left to ask the Spin program to do this for you.

You want to rotate -90 degrees about the X axis. Click the "Apply Offsets to Objects" checkbox and then put -90 in the Rotation X box, as shown above. Then click OK to close the Effects dialog.

Make sure that you've got the output format set to 3md as you can see above, and then click the Convert button on the bottom right hand side of the Spin 3D window. Your design will now be converted into a 3mf file that you can import into Paint 3D. 

I even managed to put the design into the Remix 3D site for people to download and play with. You can find it here.

Hull Pixelbots on News at Ten Tonight

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ITN are doing a feature about Hull and c4di are in it. Yay! John asked me if they could get some shots of Hull Pixelbots in action. 

Could they ever.

They were most helpful. After they'd finished I asked If I could take a shot "For the blog". Not only were they happy to help, but the cameraman set up his camera again so that I could get a good looking result. 

As far as I know, the item is going out on News at Ten on ITV (that's channel 3 in old money) tonight. 

Update:

Well, the items came and went. And there were Hull PIxelbots there. Kind of "blink and you miss it" stuff, but even so it's still News at Ten....

Hull Pixelbots at the MVP Community Connection

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Today it was just a simple matter of driving to London, running a few robot races and then back again. And it all went beautifully. The event was held at the RAF Museum in Hendon. So I put the postcode into the satnav and headed out. The journey down was smooth enough, and after a while I was all set up, with just a bit of nervousness about the network connectivity. 

As it turned out, we had a few races and at least one winner. 

This is one of our happy winners, with his winning robot. After the racing it was back into the car, enter another postcode (the one for home) and head back. I got into Hull just after midnight. It was great to meet up with a bunch of folks that I'd not seem for a while and talk "proper shop".

Thanks to Claire for inviting me. 

Hull Raspberry Pi Jam

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Today I was in Hull doing a bit of shopping. As you do. I also dropped into Hull Central Library to give Matt a pixel for his Hull Pixelbot. He's written a lovely blog post about building a robot last Thursday, and I thought I'd give him something extra to work with.  Matt was helping at a Hull Rasp Jam event.

Libraries have changed a bit since we used to take the kids every week to swap their books for different ones. There are still books there, but you can also find crafting sessions, people playing chess and  Raspberry Pi events too. Great stuff. 

I wasn't able to stay long at the jam, but it was great to see lots of people engaging with technology and having fun doing it. I'll try and make a bit more time for the next one.