There will be a seminar on Presentation Skills on Wednesday 7th November at 1:15 pm in Lecture Theatre D (LTD) in the Robert Blackburn Building. Myself and David Grey will try to tell you how you can hone your presentation skills to win over an audience, or interview. I just hope we get the presentation right, otherwise we’ll look very silly.
Tonight we had a go at “The Most Complicated Game I’ve Ever Played”. It’s called “High Frontier” and boy is there a lot going on. The aim of the game is to colonise space, build up your fleet, explore planets and asteroids and boldly….. Well, you know the rest.
The board is full of incredibly detailed descriptions of places to try and reach using rockets which you need to carefully provision and fuel if you are going to get anywhere. I think it would take a day to play it properly, we only really managed to scratch the surface of the gameplay. But I did manage to colonise Mars, which I’m rather pleased about. The game is packed with proper science about space exploration, and much of the gameplay is really a simulation of the things you’d need to do if you really wanted to explore space. Great fun.
This isn’t a great picture, in more ways than one.
Today we put the finishing touches to the Pi Arcade table that I’ve been building. It was just a matter of fitting the wiring for the switches, fitting the Pi and then dropping the monitor into the slot. And finding out that it doesn’t work quite as well as I would like. The problem is not with the Pi, or the software, or the controls, or even the cardboard table top. The problem is with the monitor. Although the picture is good and the device runs cool thanks to its LED backlight, it doesn’t have the angle of view that you need to have if you want to sit and use the table as it is supposed to be used. You can see it in the photograph above. The bands at the top and bottom of the screen are supposed to be black and yet, from the angle of view that we have they look grey. The fact that most of the games that I want to play are on black backgrounds doesn’t help either so, while this is not a glorious failure, it is not quite the glorious success that I was after.
But it is of course not the end. Since I bought my monitor the price of IPS monitors (which use a better pixel switching technology) has dropped quite a bit. I’m going to put my LED monitor out there for sale (any takers?) and see what difference I get with one of those.
I guess you’d call this “integration testing”…
I was invited to a Platform Expo meeting in Hull today. One way to make an entrance is to arrive late and then sit right at the front. So I did. Chairing the meeting was Alan Johnson, Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle. The meeting was all about Platform Expo, an on-going effort to put Hull on the digital map. Now, I’m on record as not liking meetings much. But this one was different. Everyone was pointed in the direction. And every one added value to the effort.
We’ve got some great plans for the future, I’m looking forward to getting involved with them. If you are Hull student, all I can say at the moment is that there are some interesting things coming down the tracks….
On the way out I saw quite a nice sunset over the quayside.
Along with the release of Windows Phone 8, the Windows Phone 8 SDK is now available for free download. You can get it from here. With this you can create applications for the new Windows 8 devices and use lots of yummy new features. And they are yummy. I’m using a couple of them in a “groundbreaking new application” that I’m working on in top secret. It’s so secret that I’m only allowing myself to see every other character of the code. And no, the groundbreaking part is not that you can use it as a shovel.
Mild health warning.
You will need Windows 8 64 bit version to run the Windows Phone 8 SDK. Since the phone actually runs bits of Windows 8 this is quite understandable. The emulator also requires a processor that provides Second Level Address Translation or SLAT. No, I’ve no idea what that really means either, but I’m happy to nod and smile whenever it is mentioned. The bottom line is that if you have a processor with an i in the name, for example i3, i5 or i7 then you will be fine. If you have an older processor this might mean that you can’t run the emulator. You’ll also need to enable Hyper-V on your system, which sounds like something Captain Kirk would ask for, but actually is to do with the processor virtualisation that is now used for proper emulation. Of course, if all this fails you should be able to deploy and debug inside that Lumia 920 you are going to rush out and buy (but not before I’ve got mine). There is help on the download site about all this. There are also versions for Windows 7.1 development. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some downloading to do…
I call this composition “Surface and Space Cheese Battle”.
When the doorbell rings at 8:30 pm on the 30th of October you feel a certain trepidation about answering it. Particularly as we haven’t got any sweets in the house for Halloween yet. Sending kids away with a bread roll and a few length’s of spaghetti is probably not going to end well. Anyhoo, it wasn’t trick or treat, it was a harassed looking delivery chap with my Microsoft Surface. They promised delivery by the 30th of October and they just made it. By three and a half hours. I’m not that bothered about the delay to be honest, they did give me fifty quid to spend in the Surface hardware store to say sorry for not having the machine to me on Friday. I put it towards a “type Cover”, although I think I may have slightly wasted my money, as we shall see later. I’ve been playing with the Surface now for a couple of hours and so of course I feel totally qualified to write a complete, in-depth, review of the device. So here goes.
It works. It’s different from the iPad. I think I get what it is for, and I really like it. I love my iPad like I love my TV. It lets me consume stuff that other people have made. But try and produce something other than finger paintings or music and the iPad falls apart. I remember my bitter disappointment when I tried to use the iPad Pages word processor, with its much touted “Office Capability”, to make a document. I suppose I should have realised something was up when I discovered the price of Pages was much, much less than the equivalent component in Microsoft office. I didn’t actually want much, just a table in the middle of some text, but the way it went wrong was just horrible. And as for printing from the iPad, just don’t go there. Really.
The Surface has proper Microsoft Office built in. Proper. And it integrates with Skydrive directly. All the documents that I’ve put into the cloud are ready and waiting to be worked with. As for printing, it just saw the printers in my Homegroup right out of the box. The only slight bugbear is the lack of the Outlook component. I spent a futile thirty minutes trying to get the Surface Mail client to connect to the university email server before I discovered that the university email was down at the time. Now it is working OK the built in email application looks OK, but I do like Outlook.
I ordered the Surface without any great plans for it. My main aim was to have a test platform for any Metro style things that I might fancy writing. But it turns out to be much better than that. The tight integration with my documents means that it will now be my weapon of choice whenever I go away. And the micro-SD slot means that I can load it up with 64G of movies and anything I fancy when I go.
I got the touch keyboard cover with the device. This provides a cover and a keyboard at the same time. The magnetic attachment is extremely strong and positive and it wraps around the device very nicely.The word on the street about the touch keyboard was that it was OK, but took a while to get used to. I think this is wrong. It works very well right away. I’ve ordered the type cover too, as I do like having keys that move when you hit them, but I’d be quite happy to use the touch keyboard to knock out large documents. It is in a different league to typing on the screen, which is something I’ve never enjoyed doing.
Hardware wise the Surface is very nice. The black metal finish is very swish, although it does seem to be a bit of a fingerprint magnet. I can never understand why hardware makers don’t think about this a bit harder when they make these devices. Nothing makes a device look old and worn like a covering of smeary fingerprints. The standard of construction, and of the presentation in the box is very impressive. The power supply is larger than you might expect and even has a fuse in the plug. It puts out a fairly meaty amount of current and seems to be able to charge the machine pretty quickly. The effect is spoiled a bit by the label on the Power Supply itself, which looks like it was stuck on as an afterthought, and the magnetic coupling for the power connector is nowhere near as positive or strong as the one for the keyboard, which is sad.
The weirdest thing about the Surface is that if you put it alongside my Samsung Slate and asked folks to spot the Windows RT device, they’d have a hard time telling them apart at first. I wasn’t expecting a full desktop, much less a command prompt. And I can plug in memory cards and stuff using the USB adapter and they seem to just appear and work as usual. Of course the illusion breaks whenever you start looking for programs to run. The Surface will only run programs that have been created for Windows 8 RT, which is the version specially crafted for the ARM chip inside it. At the moment this is restricted to applications from the marketplace, of which there is not a huge number. Hopefully the future will bring a few more programs, I’m looking for a good image editor which supports raw camera files and a Metablogger poster (Live Writer would be perfect) and I’ll be a very happy bunny.
I said to myself when I ordered the Surface that I’d be selling the iPad once it arrived. Then I said “Yeah, right…”. But now I’m thinking I might be filling out forms on ebay after all. The way I work, I seem to spend much more time making stuff than I do consuming it. I actually enjoy writing things. Perhaps my favourite game program is Microsoft Word. If that’s true of you too, then you will love the Surface.
Malteser powered programming at Three Thing Game..
I’m still liking my Samsung Series 7 Slate a lot. I’ve had Windows 8 on it for a while now and most of the time it works great. The only problems that I’ve had have been related to the discovery of devices when docking and undocking. The operating system really doesn’t like surprises, particularly when it wakes up from being asleep. I've discovered that if I make sure the operating system is awake before putting it in and out of the docking station it seems to detect and load the new devices quite successfully. If I do this with the machine powered down results are less satisfactory, with USB drivers falling over and needing to be disabled and enabled before I can use the keyboard and mouse.
Me being me, and paranoid about damaging the machine through powering it wrongly, I make sure that the dock is powered off when I plug the machine in and out of it. There have been some reports of people damaging their machines if the dock is live when the slate is plugged into it. I’ve no idea if this is a common problem, but I’m playing safe out of cowardice.
The good news, at least I hope it is good news, is that Samsung have released a whole slew of driver updates for the Slate. These include new drivers for the graphics and the motherboard, along with a whole new BIOS. You can find them here, just get hold of the Download SW Update link on this page, extract the upgrade application and run it.
The upgrade application worked fine for me, although the BIOS update didn’t end well because after it my machine failed to boot, ending up stuck at the BIOS configuration screen. If you get this, find your way to the setting involving Boot options and disable the legacy boot option so that the UEFI Boot Support is enabled again. This seems to have been set back to a default during the upgrade process.
You can move around the BIOS screen using the buttons on the slate, but this will drive you completely nuts, so plug a USB keyboard into the machine and use that to set it up. Once I’d done the change my machine rebooted fine. I’ve not really had a chance to test out the docking behaviour, but at least I’ve not gone backwards by upgrading. I’ll post an update if I find out more.
I did all this just before my 9:15 lecture. It is a matter of personal pride (although I’m not really that proud of it in some ways) that i had the machine back working before I had to go and talk. Oh, and I have a spare machine too. Just in case….
We will be doing our next Rather Useful Seminar on the 31st of October on the subject of publishing and legality. Rob Singhe from the University Knowledge Exchange and Rob Penrose from Andrew Jacksons Solicitors will be joining me, Rob Miles in the Robert Blackburn Building. (Can you see a pattern forming here?)
More Robs than you can shake a stick at will be talking about the nature of copyright, steps you can take to help make sure that what you thought of stays yours, and Rather Useful things to consider when you get together, form a little group (which is probably really a company) and start selling your wares via App Store or Marketplace.
The session will be at the usual time and place, 1:15 pm Wednesday 31st October in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building. Teams from Three Thing Game who are thinking about selling what they have made are strongly advised to come along and take part.
I got back into the university around 7:15 this morning. I always feel terribly guilty about not staying the night but I did try it once and it really did not end well. All of the teams still there (we had lost a few by now) had stuff that worked and things to play. All the teams had made massive amounts of progress overnight, particularly some of the ones from the first year who only started with XNA this week. I’m just so impressed by what you have done from that starting point. Kudos.
I formed the judges into four teams who went around scoring. We also had four camera operators who captured the presentations on video. I’ll be cutting these presentations into a show reel later. I’m going to use some of the game music from the competition as a soundtrack. There was some ace stuff.
Each team of judges then picked their top two entries, who went forward into the final rounds. These lucky folks got to present their solutions to the audience.
Lee shows one of the T shirts, in front you can seen the prizes that we have this year. All good stuff, although I'm not sure about that shade of green to be honest...
The survivors….
This is ‘Three Game’O’Holics’, the first presenters, preparing to show off their game inspired by “Fighting, Desk, in a Dress”. This was an impressive take on the bouncy platform style game with a killer two player mode.
This is ‘No Method, No Class’. I got emails from these guys a week ago asking if I could hook them up with a team. They picked a name much better than the one I suggested and then went on to make a top eight game from “Caffeine, Monkey, under attack”. The gameplay and sound-effects were top notch, as waves of monkeys came in for the kill. The Caffeine High mode was just excellent.
If you want to get ahead, get a hat. Seemed to work for “Did you mean ‘Uncle Mikes Recursive Prolog Party?’” who had built a frantic space shooter game from “Fighting Toast Party”. They had random levels, fantastic zooming viewpoints, swarms of enemies and a real “just one one more try” style of gameplay.
Next up was ‘Sheerware Games’ showing off their Hyper Morph Windows Phone game, made from "Flying, Bombs, Tank". This had lashings of retro style, frantic shooting action and swarms of baddies to be despatched.
The Honeybadger crew took Ninja, mountains, defence and crafted an atmospheric game with invaders storming your castle and you letting loose with ninja inspired weaponry to see them off. With sunset powered game progression and lovely artwork this was a smashing phone game.
I reckon ‘Michael Jacksons Indian Takeaway’ is the best team name, although I have no idea what it really means. Their pun heavy title, “Spray of Duty Modern Warbear” was built on “Poptart, deodorant, teddy bear” and had a lone Teddy soldier using his deodorant to save off increasing numbers of invading poptarts of various flavours. With lovely shader powered plasma effects this looked superb.
Its rare to see all of the Battle Brothers looking happy at the same time, but they certainly were pleased to make top eight. They had created an astonishing looking space warfare game from the starting point of “Pirate, ship, spoon”. This had great 3D graphics and a space opera plot involving spoon based pirate contraband . Of course.
I could think of around twenty reasons why the game from ‘The Infamous Two Sirs’ would just not work. This had the most ambitious setup I've ever seen in a Three Thing Game. From the words “Goldfish, Plughole and Invasion” the team crafted a multi-player game experience involving a battle between Kinect controlled angler fish and Windows Phone powered goldfish. Everything worked. Wave your arms to move your angler fish and they dance around the phone screen. Marshal your goldfish on the phone and the player on the Kinect sees tasty goldfish coming into range....
As the judges left for their deliberations I thought to myself just how happy I was to not be in their shoes. But, after a lot of deliberation they managed to come up with a top three. Here they are in reverse order.
Third place went to Battle Brothers. Well done folks. And to think that the textures were designed by someone who had never done them before this competition. Amazing.
Honeybadger Productions clutching their Kinect sensor prizes. Well deserved and a game with great potential.
Sheerware get the big prize. Richly deserved and hard earned. The sheer (sorry) attention to detail in the game and the way it looked Marketplace Ready was very impressive.
Final prize of the day was the Peoples Choice Award. It was great to see the teams showing off their entries to each other. We got the scores off Survey Monkey and the voice of the people agreed with our judges, awarding Sheerware the prize.
Three Thing Game serves as a reminder to me why I love my job so much. The whole thing was just splendid. Special shout outs to Dave G. for fantastic lab support, Peter, David P, Martin, Simon, Mark, Kevin, Warren and Adam for all playing their parts in making this the best TTG we have ever had. Thanks also to Lee and David from Microsoft and Dean and Dominique from MonoGame for judging and giving the competition industry chops. And thanks to the students for turning up and being so gosh darned awesome. I hope you all got as much out of the occasion as I did. And we now all look forward to the next event…
This is the traditional “before” shot. We’ll see how many people are still smiling when we get to “after”.
Three Thing Game is something of an institution at our institution. If you see what I mean. Every one is slightly different, but all of them are a bit bonkers, in the nicest possible way. Some things stay the same: Three Things to base the game on, Four students in a team, 24 hours overnight to deliver.. but we like to ring the odd change here and there. The last couple of events we’ve held auctions for the “things” that will be the basis of the games. Next time, who knows.
Anyhoo, we started today at 11:00 with “masses’o’hardware” turning up in the Fenner Lab, along with loads of “keen to go through the mill” students. There is always a frantic couple of hours while things settle down, network addresses are assigned and multiple monitors adjusted appropriately. This time we also had expertise in the form of Dave Brown and Lee Stott from Microsoft and Dean Ellis and Dominique Louis from the Monogame team. I did a quick XNA lecture early in the afternoon and then the Microsoft and Monogame team took centre stage to describe the opportunities coming over the horizon with Windows 8 and MonoGame.
Apparently last week Microsoft launched a new operating system. I was quite surprised to find this out, you’d have thought there would have been something about it in the papers…. All joking aside (ho ho) I’ve been using Windows 8 for a while now. I’ve found it stable, useful and remarkably like Windows 7. It has changed the way I work for the better. Programs are now launched in seconds with a few key presses, rather than a hunt through folders. I’ve used the Metro style user interface a bit, but I really want to see it on a platform it was built for (for example Surface).
Anyhoo, the rules of the game for Windows 8 applications have changed. Good News: You can now sell applications for Windows 8 just like you can for Windows Phone. Bad News: The Windows 8 Metro Style user interface does not encompass the XNA that we know and love. Better News: You can use MonoGame, to create XNA applications that are Windows 8 Store compliant. Even Better News: MonoGame versions of your program can also be ported onto Android, iPhone, PS Vita and even the Raspberry Pi (coming soon).
Lee from Microsoft set out how Windows 8 can make your programs more interesting and marketable and then Dean and Dominique showed how easy it is to port an existing XNA game to the MonoGame framework. If you are an XNA developer you must, must, must, be looking at MonoGame. I reckon it is the future of XNA, and I’m jolly pleased to see it there, in such good health.
Once we’d had the presentations the development got going in earnest. I of course staggered around with the big camera and took a whole bunch of pictures which have found their way on to Flickr if you want to see all of them.
These guys are “Haribo Hardened”….
That should be enough keyboards...
These guys are so reading the right books...
None of these smiles are forced. For sure.
Lee and the Microsoft crew getting down with the Sheergame team.
We ordered 45 pizzas. And they all got eaten.
I staggered home around 10:45 leaving Martin and Simon to run the night shift. Judging tomorrow morning. Looking forward to it.
The picture is nothing much to do with Three Thing Game, but it is rather a nice one.
I spent half an hour today (and pretty much my entire photocopying allowance) printing out briefing documents and marking sheets for Three Thing Game tomorrow and Sunday. I’m not sure about much else, but we aren’t going to be short of paperwork…..
Just spent some time this evening making this. It’s the game board that we will be using for the course work this year on the programming course…..
We’ve had our final auction of this Three Thing Game. After a lot (and I mean a lot) of money changed hands the final thing mapping as as follows.
| Thing1 | Thing2 | Thing3 | |
| A Druish Princess | Invading | Marvel | wearing glasses |
| Aint no partly like a kambham-party | Steaming | Spam | copyright infringement |
| Beta Jester | Tron | Speed | attack |
| Battle Brothers | Something beginning with P | Ship | Spoon |
| Brayshawshank-Redemption | Pink | Nuts | In the rain |
| BRB | Snowing | Spendthrift | Banker |
| C Hash | Keyboard cat | Vampire | at midnight |
| Chicken Dippers | Chicken | Hamster | Parade |
| COMPUTER SCIENCE FC | Ghost | Yoghurt | Gangnam Style |
| Did you mean "Uncle Mikes Recursive Prolog Party?" | Fighting | Toast | Party |
| Double Jump | Atomic | Bath Sponge | Raider |
| Fresh Pot | Shark | Saxaphone | At the Zoo |
| Honeybadger Productions | Ninja | Mountains | Defence |
| Left 4 Dev | Cooking | Neon | Apocalypse |
| LightMass | Evil Wizard | Cricket Bat | in the graveyard |
| M.C.S. | Camel | Bus Stop | Werewolf |
| Men On A Mission | Sneaky | Assassin | With a moustache |
| Michael Jacksons Indian Takeaway | Poptart | Deoderant | Teddy Bear |
| Mr. Parse | Jelly | Orchestra | Four Letter Word |
| Mulan | Daft Punk | Rhymes with Truck | Pinball |
| No Method(), No Class{} | Caffeine | Monkey | under attack |
| Pigs Might Fly | Pirates | Duvet | racer |
| QWERTYUIOP | Lion | Skeleton | Swimming |
| Red Light:Green Light | Heroine | Nick Cage | wearing a tutu |
| Rusty Spoons | Roman | Motorboat | Pig |
| Sheerware Games | Flying | Bombs | Tank |
| SkyNet | Bungling | Bread | Pie |
| TBC | Zombie | Butler | Swimming Pool |
| Team HAL 9000 | Dragon | Spider | goes fishing |
| Team Plan B | Gazebo | Javelin | word processor |
| Team Titans | Lonely | Robots | find love |
| The C Hashes | clone | Vampire | Apocalypse |
| The Compilers | Underwater | Atom Bomb | bike ride |
| The Cosmic Corn Snacks | Students | Bishop | assault |
| The Infamous Two Sirs | Goldfish | Plug hole | Invasion |
| The Runners Up | Grunting | Spring | Light cycles |
| The Y-Nots! | Fruitcake | Banana | temptress |
| Three Men | Lightning | Kung Fu | plays piano |
| Three Game'o'holics | Fighting | Desk | In a Dress |
I think my favourite has got to be “Ghost Yoghurt Gangnam Style”. Can’t wait to see the game.
If I had one piece of advice for a Computer Science student I think it would be nothing to do with programming. Or even computers. It would simply be “Learn to write well”. This doesn’t mean I necessarily want to see short stories, or poems (although send them through if you like), it just means that the art of putting words our there that make sense is something you should work at.
In my experience the only way to get good at writing is to write a lot. Then write some more. Blogs are great for this, as are diaries. And Final Year Projects. Just set yourself the task of knocking out a few words a day and putting them somewhere where others can find and comment on them. Try writing in other styles, from the dry “It can be shown that” kind of report style to anything else you like, including murder mystery if you fancy having a go. And get used to revising your text after you have read it. Just because there are no wavy red lines on the page doesn’t mean it actually makes sense. Watch for repeated phrases that repeat themselves repeatedly. Try to find alternatives to make the text sound better. A good tip is to read out loud what you have just written. Anything that is not quite right will really sound that way.
Another tip is to read stuff by people who can write well. The BBC news site is pretty good for this, along with newspaper sites like the Times and the Guardian.
I’m not saying that Computer Scientists are now doing an English degree. What I’m really saying is that if you can express yourself in written words, this will pay off big time when you go for jobs.
What 20,000 pounds actually looks like. Of course you can't spend it in the shops...
Teams and their Two Things
We had our Thing Auction today. Last year we just managed to get through all the lots in the time that we had. This year we had more teams and just didn't make it. There was a time when I thought that we would get everything done, then a couple of mammoth bidding wars put us a bit behind schedule.
Never mind. We plan to run the "Third Thing Auction" just before the Rather Useful Seminar on Wednesday. That's at 1:15 pm in LTD on the Third Floor of the Robert Blackburn Building. The lecture is all about preparing for Three Thing Game, so it seems rather appropriate.
If any team really can't wait until then to get their hands on a thing, they can contact me and I'll dig one out for them.
It was fun though. The sound the crowd made when the thing "Keyboard cat" came out was wonderful.
I’m getting the hang of 3D printing now. I started off thinking that I would be using it to print cases for gadgets. I am doing that, but now I’m just printing out things that I find pleasing. Like the “Heart Gears” above from Thingiverse. I’ve been busy today writing quiz questions and auction stuff for Three Thing Game and in the background Una the Ultimaker has been turning out the parts above. It is a design that we saw at the exhibition yesterday and I really like it.
I’m not completely happy with the results (that will never happen) but on the whole I think it works well. The gears turn and the object turns into and out of a heart shape. I need to adjust the flow and layers slightly to get rid the gaps in the surfaces above.
The wristband of power. And a Lego watch
Another reason to go to London, apart from the Augmented Reality event yesterday, was to drop in on the 3D Printshow that was taking place in London this weekend. Ultimaker, the company that made my 3D printer, were there and I wanted to drop by and see how they were doing. I also wanted to see what was going on in this area. The answer is rather a lot. We arrived before the show opened, but there was already quite a queue snaking around the courtyard waiting to get in. Fortunately we weren’t waiting long and soon we were inside marvelling at the way this technology is moving forward. And boy, is it moving. I counted five 3D printers I’d never seen before, all printing away merrily in front of throngs of fascinated folks. Autodesk were there too, along with lots of other companies, some I’d heard of, some not.
The folks at Sculpteo will take your designs and make them. You can even design your artefacts on their web page.
They can even print in colour, and the quality is lovely.
There were some lovely examples of printing
This is a great piece of art. The heights of the keys show the popularity of the web sites behind them.
This was a very clever piece of 3D art. The cylindrical mirror in the middle shows a perfect image of a hand, reflecting the seriously distorted sculpture.
They had a band, and of course all their instruments had been printed…
At the Ultimaker stand they had a seriously impressive dual extruder printer which had turned out some incredible prints.
One major bonus was these folks being at the show. Formlabs might just have the future of 3D printing in their hands. They’ve built a 3D printer that uses an optical technology and special syrup that solidifies under UV light. The resolution is streets ahead of anything comparable at the price. Only snag I can see is that the raw material is a bit pricey, at 130 dollars a litre, but with a bit of luck this will drop over time. Some of the things they had printed were astonishingly good and because there is no messing around with hot and sticky plastic, their printer has a good chance of making it as an appliance.
There were lots of people selling ready made printers and claiming that they have a device for the mass market. I’m not convinced of this. I’d love to be proved wrong, but for now I still see it as a tinkerer’s toy. Ultimaker sell their machines as kits and I think that this is actually quite an honest thing to do. Once you have built the machine you end up with a pretty solid understanding of how it works and how to fix it when it goes wrong. And I reckon all the current crop of printers will go wrong I’m afraid. In a few years time, when the technology has settled down, maybe we will see it in the home, From the interest that I saw at the show, this is just a matter of time.
Audience shot. Thanks for being a super bunch.
I was up bright and early today. Well, early anyway. The taxi was picking me up at 5:45 to get me to the station for a train ride to London. I was giving a session at the “Creating Augmented Reality in Education” event. By 5:55 the taxi had still not turned up and a panic phone call to the company revealed that the driver was out there in the mist looking for my house. So, I told him where we could meet up and then, pausing only to step in a deep puddle, fill my shoes with muddy water and say a rude word loudly for the whole of the street to wake up to, I headed for the cab.
We made it to the train with minutes to spare and I got there just in time for the first session. There was a great range of stuff, from descriptions of work in Health Training to eye popping demos of flying dragons and Mars Rovers to thought provoking discussion of just how this stuff is going to change the way we interact with computers and also the world around us. The consensus would seem to be that the stuff is coming, it will change our lives, but we don’t quite know how yet. Perhaps our kids will tell us. The sessions were videoed and should be available at some point. Well worth a look.
I did a session on how the Kinect sensor works, and how the data it produces can be used to get interesting behaviours and applications. My finest moment was asking the chap at the back why he was waving a piece of card with the number “3” printed on it. “Because you have 3 minutes left” was the rather sensible reply.
Anyhoo, all the demos worked, and my shoes and socks dried up fine. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here. You can find a more detailed presentation with code descriptions, along with the demo code, here.
I spent tonight entering all the names of the teams into the master spread sheet and sending out the “welcome” emails. If you are in a team you should have heard from me. Turns out that we have 40 teams signed up and around 120 students taking part.
Going to be huge pizza order on Saturday Night……
Una getting star billing
Some time back I rather rashly promised to bring my 3D printer in for a Rather Useful Seminar. Well, today was that day. The weather was horrible. Just the kind of torrential downpour in which you want to carry your high precision printing device. Partly made of wood.
Anyhoo, thanks to help from Adam, a blue Ikea carrier bag (just about a perfect fit) and a big bin liner I managed to get Una the Ultimaker into the lecture theatre and so I started the seminar. As usual I’d prepared a slide deck and so I stated working through the background to 3D printing, talking about the different technologies and how they worked. Then I glanced at the audience. Nobody was looking at me. They were all staring transfixed at Una, who was sitting on the bench doing nothing.
So, that was that. It was straight over to the PC, draw something in Sketchup (a really great, free program), export it to an STL file, slice it with Cura and then get Una printing.
People love watching 3D printers do their stuff. In a world where pretty much everything has been made “Ho Hum” by technology there is something rather magical about a device that makes something appear from nothing. Una behaved herself very well. Once she’d printed the silly design I’d made in Sketchup we went on to print a tiny rocket, and she handled that with aplomb. Then it was back into the bag for the trip home. I’ve just unpacked her and she seems none the worse for the trip out.
I really like this device. It is well thought out and works a treat. And everyone seemed to really enjoy seeing her in action. I’ve put my slides on the Rather Useful Seminars site, but you would probably learn more by just searching YouTube for videos of Ultimakers…
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
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