Eye-Fi Review

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Every now and then you come across something that must be powered by magic (or perhaps pixies), since there is obviously no other way you could make it work. Such a thing is the Eye-Fi SD memory card that also contains a WiFi adapter and a microcontroller. What it does is rather nice; it lets you transfer your pictures directly from your memory card into your computer without the tedious business of either plugging the camera into the computer or removing the card and reading it.

The Eye-Fi card looks like an ordinary 4G SD memory card and to the camera that is just what it is. However, when new photographs are taken and stored the card will wake up and try to send them over WiFi to a computer running the receiving software. I found that it just worked. There is an installation phase you have to go through where you plug the card (via a reader that is included) into your computer and tell it the name of your network and any security keys but once you have done that the pictures just appear on you computer as though by magic. Or pixies.

I don’t think the WiFi range is quite as good as a “proper” adapter, but it worked fine around our house. You also have to be careful not to turn the camera off (or let the camera turn itself off) before the card has finished sending pictures, but apart from that it works a treat. You can set up multiple WiFi networks and you can also configure it to only transfer pictures that you have marked as protected, so that you can use the camera to select which pictures get sent. It worked fine in both cameras I tried. It will definitely have an effect on battery life, but I didn’t notice anything untoward when I was playing with it.

I got the cheapest version, at 49 pounds, which just lets me transfer pictures to a waiting computer. More advanced (and expensive) versions of the card have a feature which lets you upload your snaps directly to Flickr, Facebook, Picassa or other photo sharing sites. This should be possible with the cheaper one, if you pay a ten dollars a year subscription, but at the moment this only works if you are US or Canada based.  There is also an option to have your pictures Geotagged as you upload them. This uses the location of the WiFi access point to transfer them. For a moment I thought they had managed to shoehorn a GPS system into the card, now that would have been very impressive...

Of course the device isn’t really magic. You can even take a look inside if you want to see how it does its stuff. However, it is very useful. Proper, professional, cameras can be fitted with WiFi adapters, but these cost an awful lot of money. I’m very tempted to splash out on the professional version of the card which also lets you transfer raw files as well as jpegs from your camera, which would be very nice. Maybe next year. As far as the card itself is concerned, I strongly recommend it.

Imagine Cup Entries Powered by Uncle Joes Mint Balls

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We sent off our our Imagine Cup Software Development competition entries today. Last day of the submissions, just before the deadline. Well, this is a student competition…. We haven’t sent in any Game Development entries yet, mainly because the deadline isn’t until next year.

We had a meeting earlier this week to finalise the entries and get things sorted. As a motivational aid I brought along a tin of Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls. There are a fantastic mint powered confection that have a great flavour and a wonderful inconsistency. Some are just sweet, some have just a hint of mint and some have loads. Very nice, and you can now get them at local stores (previously we used to go to Whitby to buy them). We even noticed last week in London that they had them in Harvey Nichols food hall. Very posh.

Anyhoo, I’m not sure if we are going to make the UK finals again this year (the list of finalists comes out early next year)  but you never know.

Xmas Bash

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Another Xmas Bash today. Pizza, pop, sweeties, Lego Rock Band, Buzz Quiz, Band Hero and Wii stuff.

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You set up all these attractions and all people want to do is the word search…

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Mind you, there were some good prizes…

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…some very intensive Team Fortress 2 sessions..

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.. with some Lego Rock Band..

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..and sweeties.

Thanks to everyone who came. It was a real blast. There are some more pictures on Flick, click on any image to find your way to my account. If you have any pictures of your own tag them HullXmasBash2009.

Project Working

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We had some of our project presentations today. For the last few weeks teams of students have been working for a fussy and uncommunicative customer (me) making a rather complicated solution.

I didn’t get to see all the presentations, but it was very nice to see people standing up and describing their designs, along with how they had worked together to produce working solutions.  Well done folks.

Marking Minesweeper

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Spent pretty much all of today playing MineSweeper. Around 23 times. All of the first year get 15 minutes each to show off their programs and so Mike, Simon and myself were looking at how well they had done implementing this classic game.

It never ceases to amaze me how different people find their own way to write a program to solve the same problem. Some worse than mine, some better than mine. And just about all of them working.

In fact, some of them should make an appearance on Xbox Live at some point. They really were that good.

Hull Digital Event

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We had the first Hull Digital event at the university today. People found their way to the department OK, because (or perhaps in spite of) the arrows that I stuck on the wall using borrowed blu-tack.

Anyhoo, we had two speakers and both were excellent.

Andrew Chalkley, from Cake Solutions  showed just how powerful Ruby on Rails is. He did this by creating a complete blog site, with comments and user authentication, in around fifteen minutes. The fusion of language and tools that you get with this framework looks very powerful, and well worth a look I reckon.

Then Craig Albeck took to the floor. Craig works for the Hull based company behind Omerta (a text based Mafia game) and ThirteenOne (a free on-line video gaming magazine which actually features some stuff by me). In a very interesting talk Craig spoke of his experiences in the market place and how to get out there and build a brand of your own. 

Great stuff. I’m looking forward to the next event.

Minesweeper Fun and Games

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The first year course is busy working on the Minesweeper programming problem that is the second piece of assessed coursework. This is proving to be a nice problem to solve, with a good mix of simple behaviours to play the game itself, and some more complex parts for those who want to get their teeth into something more challenging.

The marking starts on Thursday, I’m looking forward to seeing what folks have come up with.

Windows 7 on Artigo PC

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Some time back I got an Artigo PC to play with. This is a lovely little PC in a tiny box which will fit into the drive bay of a “proper” computer. It was supplied running Windows CE, which is a very nice operating system, but I wanted to do a bit more with it. I wanted to run Windows 7 on it.

I started small, with the Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP2. This is the latest version of Windows Embedded, basically a componentised version of Windows 7 where you can select just what you want in your installation. The idea is that you can make small footprint, customised, builds of windows for things like kiosk displays. My plan was to get maximum performance by just including the bits that I needed to let me watch recorded TV over the network and BBC iPlayer from the web.

It really is easy to install. If you have had horrid experiences of customising operating systems this will be a revelation.  You just boot your target device from the distribution image and then start selecting what you want to have in your custom Windows 7 deployment. There are a number of templates you can use as a starting point, or you can build your configuration from the ground up. You can pick which components that you want and the installer checks the dependencies and tells you the size of the footprint on the hard disk that you will end up with. The idea is that once you have made a machine that that works the way you want you can pull this back off the device and use it to manufacture as many more as you need. 

Works a treat. I quickly had a version of Windows 7 running with just Media Player and IE. This kind of thing would be great for use in open areas. It removes the need to worry what people might do with things like the command prompt, since there isn’t one there from the start.

The hardest bit of the job was upgrading the BIOS on the Artigo so that it would work with later versions of Windows. To do this I ended up making a boot floppy (I’ve not touched a floppy disk for years) and using that to boot the Artigo into Windows 95 and run the BIOS upgrade program.

If you fancy having a play with this you can get a free download of the entire thing by signing up on the Microsoft Connect link above, and the software will run for 180 days (until summer next year) so it might even be properly useful for a while.

As for me, I found that Windows 7 ran so well on my tiny machine that I thought I’d go for broke and put Windows 7 Ultimate on it. This worked very smoothly.  The only problem was with the drivers for the graphics display, where I’ve had to use the original ones that were designed for Windows XP. These mostly work, but at the moment the video playback is a bit choppy for full screen viewing, although it works fine in a reasonably sized window on the desktop.

Great fun though, and a very interesting exploration of where Windows Embedded is going in the future.