Making 3D Pictures with Cura

Just found out that the lovely Cura software that I use to slice 3D models for the my lovely Ultimaker printer will also import images and then create 3D landscapes from them. It will assign the height of points on the surface to the brightness (or darkness) of the image. You can use it to make rather nice renderings of text. I've actually printed out the above and will be giving to one lucky person who registers for our Careers and Internships event next week.  I'm also going to print out some 3D Business Cards. 

The event is on April 2nd and there will be free food, drink, business cards and mugs and other merchandise. Just for turning up and maybe getting an internship or a career. 

You can register here.

Wireless works better with Wires

There is apparently a difference between seems to work, and actually working. I spent a good chunk of today finding this out. The devices you can see here are used to send wireless signals from one place to another. You put a signal into the input pin on the transmitter (the one at the top) and it emerges from the receiver.  People say they seem to work. So I thought I'd have a go with them.

The first thing I did needed to do was prove that the devices work so I wired up a couple of Arduino controllers and used the lovely VirtualWire library to waggle the wireless signals up and down and transfer data. It worked first time. Yay for me. 

I really wanted to use these devices to transmit signals to control some lights, so the next thing to do was write some code that turned the lights on when it received the appropriate commands. So I wrote that and ran it and it worked. But only once. Not so much yay.

So I built a theory that light software and the VirtualWire library were fighting over Arduino hardware and losing data as a result. And I spent a while trying isolate the usage of the signal pins that they use. And getting nowhere. 

And then I had a brainwave. I took out the wireless devices and replaced them with a piece of wire between the two Arduinos. And the program worked perfectly. Flickering lights and everything. 

Most confusing. After a bit of thought I reckon I've figured out what is happening. The receiver likes being given a nice healthy 5 volt supply. And when the program starts running it gets exactly that. But when I send the command to turn some lights on this causes the voltage to drop (taking current out of a system often causes this) and so the receiver stops working. I'm now working finding a few volts from somewhere to beef up performance.

Working with hardware devices is like this. You don't just have to get the software to behave, you also have to consider the electrical environment too. But I'm still having fun.

Extra Large Applicants Event

We had our last Saturday Applicants Day today, which was our biggest ever I reckon. We had overspill seating beyond the overspill seating, and Lecture Theatre A was pretty much full as you can see above. I reckon these folks are well on the way to becoming great students, they have already picked up the knack of sitting towards the back of the auditorium....

Anyhoo, a good time was had by everyone and now I can get used to not having to wear a suit on a Saturday. Thanks to all those who came along, I hope you have a good journey back and that the day was an interesting one. 

Mad March Hackathon

This evening I dropped around to see how the Mad March Hackathon was going.  It seemed to me that things were picking up nicely. The event was hosted by the Platform Expo crew and organised by James, one of our students.  I've got an open day tomorrow which means that I will need a considerable amount of beauty sleep tonight, but I stayed around long enough to make encouraging noises and take a few pictures. 

W'eve got some big plans for hackathon events in the future, it's great to see that they are as popular as ever. 

Computer Science at the Science Fair

The university has organised a rather spiffy Science Fair. I suggested to Robert that it might be fun to set up our shiny new Ultimaker 3D printer on the Computer Science stand. So we did.

We were a bit worried about just picking up the machine, carrying it across campus, dropping it onto a table and then firing it up. But it didn't seem to mind a bit, and has been happily printing out vases and gears all day today.

We also had the Occulus Rift and some 3D displays along with some digital art that also proved very popular.

I went over to see Robert at lunch time and the place was awash with students and folks from all over the place taking a look at the science that we do here.  

March C4DI You Really Should Be

David Gilson and Jon Moss, and a Media Centre

I really like the "Your Really Should Be" events at C4DI. And so do lots of other people it seems. The place was packed.

There were four speakers, starting with David Gilson who took as his stating point "You really should be looking at XBMC" (or Xbox Media Centre) to use its full title. XBMC is a media client that runs on most anything, from Raspberry Pi upwards and lets you spread media around your house. You can even start watching a movie downstairs, move upstairs and continue from exactly where you left off. You can integrate it with other media tools such as BBC iPlayer and replace shelves full of DVDs with a single mass storage server tucked behind the TV.  David took us through configuration and usage scenarios and had even brought along a Ouya video game console which he also uses as a media centre device. 

Chris Gooding - Telling us all to train our replacements

Next up was Chris Gooding.  He is definitely a man after my own heart. I've always thought of programmers as "Creatively Lazy" people. We will work surprisingly hard to find solutions that we convince ourselves will save time and effort in the long run. Chris argued for taking this to the next level. Rather than programming computers to do things for us, why not program people? He reckoned you really should be training your replacement. If you spend your time showing other folks how to do your job they can pitch in and do your work for you. And if your boss does the same thing (and they should) then this will result in expertise trickling down the workforce and making it easier to keep all the skills inside the company. Nice idea.

Jason Taylor. The text on the screen says "Take Risks, Throw Darts, Make Rubbish, Surprise Yourself". Amen.

Jason Taylor was next. He reckons that we should play more. Jason comes from an arts and product design background and gave a great talk about the benefits of just playing with stuff. I agree. Recently I've had a lot of fun playing with things just to see if I could make them do stuff. Hitting a specification and making the correct deliverable is all very well, but sometimes there is nothing nicer than just fiddling around with bits and bobs. I reckon this is particularly true of game development. Some of my best gameplay ideas have come from just starting with a few things on the screen, getting them moving and seeing what happens next. 

Mike Clarke on the automation trail.

Finally Mike Clarke gave us another slant on the "creatively lazy" aspect of developers. But he took the perspective that rather than training people we should be making every use of the tools that are available to us.

Rather than perform actions we should create scripts that do them automatically. This has two happy outcomes. One is that you can do the task a second time very easily. The other is that you now have a documentation of that task. If you start out with this approach when you begin to do a job it will really pay off further down the tracks. I heartily agree with this way of working. It is very often the case that you find yourself repeating something that you thought you'd only have to do once. If you've built that into an automated action you can repeat it very easily. 

Then, right at the end of the session we had our first ever C4DI rap. Alan O'Donohoe gave a pitch perfect (if you can do that in rap) rendition of why you should be engaging with technology in general and Rasperry Pi in particular. 

All in all a great evening, and as usual I left with a whole bunch of ideas.

John Connelly Talks Hull City Plan

Today we had a Rather Useful Seminar from John Connelly of C4DI. He came along and told us about the exciting developments centered around the Hull City Plan. I wish more students had been around to hear all about it. As it is, there are lots of interesting things coming along soon, including a "Three Thing Thing" application development hackathon that we are going to run based on data that the City Plan is making available. 

I reckon everyone who is interested in getting and using data from the area should sign up and get involved. There are lots of problems that are well worthy of an attack based on big data and novel solutions. You can sign up to be kept informed of the plans here. 

Get a Multimeter. Preferably with a needle...

If you are at all serious about electronics you probably need to get a multimeter. This is a thing that lets you measure electrical items of various kinds, voltage, current and resistance. I got my first one a very long time ago. In fact, they were quite expensive and I actually ended up buying the bits and putting my own box around the thing. 

Nowadays you can get them very cheaply, and they tend to be digital. They show their readings as numbers. This is fine, but I much prefer one with a needle, like the one above. With a needle it is easy to see if something has just gone up or down. With digits you have to start comparing numbers. Most of the time when I'm testing a circuit I'm really checking to see if something is there or not and I don't really need an accurate value.

I thought you couldn't get cheap multimeters with needles on them, but it turns out I was wrong. You can get the above for less than five pounds from here. So I did. It works well enough and I'm already finding it useful to have around the office.

One important note though. As you can see above the dial has settings that indicate that the meter can read up to 1,000 volts. This is true enough, but you really, and I mean really should not be poking those kinds of probes into signals at that level, on account of a mistake making you suddenly, and electrically, not alive any more. For battery voltages and things like embedded controllers its fine, and it can also measure resistance.  But for high voltages I'd suggest you look at much higher specification tools that will have better insulated cables and probes.

Rather Useful Seminars. Please Come Along

Last week our Rather Useful Seminar was a bit quiet.

Sad face.

I really want a good turnout for the one on Wednesday though. It should be very interesting, with John Connelly from C4DI coming along to talk about great plans for Hull as a digital city, followed by the "Rob and Dave" show, all about job finding technique. 

Find out more here: http://www.ratherusefulseminars.com/

Getting Started with Titanfall

I started playing with my copy of Titanfall today. Great fun, except for the way that the first skill you seem to have to pick up if you want to pilot a giant killing machine is running sideways on walls, something that I turned out to be spectacularly bad at. However, once I'd got past that obstacle and done my training missions (I found these fairly easy, which was pleasing) it was time for tea, and so I've not actually got into the game bit yet.

But the whole setup looks really, really great fun. Number one son got a copy over the weekend (and an Xbox One to play it on) and I'm looking forward to a few evenings walking a long way behind him watching him kill everything and pick up all the bonuses while I die for no good reason. Just like old days playing Halo together. 

Bristol Lumia Photo Challenge

I was in Bristol today. Very nice it was too. I'd taken my big posh camera and of course my Lovely Lumia 1520. Two of the pictures above were taken by the big posh camera and each is made out of three exposure HDR merges that have been quite heavily re-processed to get the best out of them. One of the pictures comes from my Lumia 1520, loaded from the raw image and given the tiniest amount of adjustment. 

Can you tell which is which? 

You'll Like Girls Like Robots

Girls Like Robots is a neat puzzle game for Windows Phone. It starts simply enough, making sure that girls get to sit next to robots rather than geeks, but as the number of protagonists increases and the arrangements change it can get a lot more head scratchingly difficult. 

The presentation and the background music are fine and dandy too. It is now down to 79 pence in the UK store. I paid quite a bit more for the game and considered it good value, at that price for such a well presented and well realised game it is a bit of a steal. 

An Ultimaker 2 in the Department

I've had my Ultimaker printer for nearly two years now. It was around now in 2012 that I ordered it, and the kit took around 6 weeks to arrive as they were very popular.

I've had a lot of fun with Una the Ultimaker. I've replaced her drive mechanism, print head, pulleys and print bed supports and added end caps and a bunch of other things. And I've printed one or two items as well. I like Una very much and most of the time she rewards me with good looking output.

Mr. Burns seems to approve

This week our departmental 3D printer arrived. They asked me what to get and of course I said we should get an Ultimaker. But I suggested we get an Ultimaker 2 as this is pre-built and looks to have moved the field on a bit. It took around 6 weeks to arrive as they are very popular, so some things haven't changed I suppose.

I set the new printer up in my office and had it working within half an hour or so of opening the box. It is fundamentally the same as Una, but is much more of an appliance.  It has lost a lot of the "home spun charm" of the original, but replaced this with a slickness that would make it much more viable as a printer that you get because you want to print stuff, rather than tinker with the printer itself.

Some design changes took me by surprise. You now set things like print temperature on the printer rather than in the slicing program. This actually makes a lot of sense, in that you will need to customise your printing for different kinds of fibre and you don't want to re-slice the model every time. The integration with Cura, the program that converts your designs ready for printing, is impressive and once I'd fed the fibre into the machine (the only tricky part of the setup) I was turning out prints that were at least as good as ones from Una. The only real problem for me was that the heated bed was set to a temperature which was much higher than it should be for the PLA plastic I was printing. I turned the temperature down to 60 degrees and things got a lot better. 

I do miss the sense of control that I have with Una. The print display on the Ultimaker 2 just tells you how much time is left on the print, rather than the other useful metrics that I get. However I'd be much happier leaving the new one to print on its own, something that I'm not keen to do with my printer. 

One major improvement with the Ultimaker 2 is the fan arrangement around the print head, which blows cooling air from both sides onto the object being printed, so that there is a better chance of the next print layer being put down onto solid plastic.

I really liked this, so I had a look around to see if I could find something similar for Una. I found this design and so tonight I spent a happy couple of hours installing some new fan ducts along with a pair of very posh fans that are completely silent in operation. I reckon this has made quite a difference to the printed output, the definition on both sides of my owl test piece is now much better than before. Previously the right hand side of the owl face was a bit of a mess because it faces away from the fan. Now things are a lot more symmetrical. 

The next step is to change the fan arrangement on Una to make her a bit quieter. The Ultimaker 2 is very quiet in operation and I want to get rid of the rattling fan that was supplied as part of my kit, and seems to be rattling even more now.

If you want to get a printer that represents state of the art in FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) printing then I reckon you'll do well with the Ultimaker 2. It produced some of the best prints I've ever seen right out of the box and is a very well presented package. 

The Power of the Poster

We had a Rather Useful Seminar today. Or rather we didn't. I'd sent around emails, blogged about the event and even tweeted. So I thought I was well covered for publicity.

But I hadn't put put up any posters, which turned out to be my undoing as hardly anybody turned up. Oh well. Lesson learned.

I've re-scheduled the event and put up posters. It is now after the talk by John Connelly of C4DI who is coming in next week to give an overview of the digital city plans for Hull.

You. Really. Should. Attend.

This is all part of the lead up to the conference at the start of April. You haven't heard? It's on the poster. You can find out more and sign up here.

Python Wrestling Time Out

We had our last "Wrestling with Python" event today. For the last six weeks or so we've been teaching teachers how to write Pythong programs. It's been great fun, although as a class they are a bit badly behaved, and I have had to shout at them once or twice to be quiet......

Anyhoo, today everyone who came along got completion certificates and went away happy. Or at least I hope they did. |f you want to find out what we were up to you can download the slides and the lab notes from here.

One of the things that we mentioned was PyScripter. This is a great tool for Python development on the PC. You can navigate your source code and it provides debugging support too. You can put breakpoints into the program, single step through the code and view the contents of variables. It is a free download and makes you into a much more effective developer.  Well worth a look. 

We have some plans for Python games in schools a bit later in the year. It's going to be great fun. 

Stand Up on Friday 21st March

I've mentioned this before, but it is getting closer now.  On Friday 21st of March I'm doing some stand up comedy as part of the Geeks vs. Nerds. You can buy tickets here or on the door. Tickets will also be sold in the Students Union on the Hull University Campus every Thursday and Friday at 12-2pm.

I know my name is not actually on the poster. Maybe next time.....

Update: Unfortunately it looks like the event has been cancelled. I'm very sorry about this. Anyone who has bought tickets can get refunds, go to the site for details. The good news is that I hadn't got around to hiring the clown costume so no money lost.....

Hornsea is Wonderful

I said to Emily yesterday that if the weather is nice on Sunday we'd probably head for Hornsea. 

It is and we did. Of course I took the camera.

Cheque Mate. And Open Day

I was in the bank paying in a cheque  this morning. Ages ago I wrote some stuff about Learning to Program a PIC in C and last week I got what will probably be the last royalty payment as the plan is to open up the content and make it freely available. I'll let you all know when it is released.

Anyhoo I was stood at the machine and looking baffled, as only I can do, and this nice assistant ended up having to come over and point out that the "Payments and Transfers" button was the one you press to pay a cheque in.  Which I found most confusing. Why can't it just be have "PAY IN A CHEQUE" written on it in large friendly letters.

I was thinking about this before I did my talk to the Open Day crowd. They were expecting to hear from someone who is versed in the latest technology and able to bend all machines to his will. Oh well.

Return of the Rather Useful Seminars

We are back with a sequence of presentations that are tailored at the professional world. All the presentations are at the same time as usual, 1:15 on Wednesday, but the venue has shifted to Lecture Theatre A on the ground floor, underneath LTD.

March 12th : Personal Presentation – Rob Miles and David Grey

This seminar is a lead in to our Careers and Internships Conference on April 2nd. The event is aimed at any students who are interested in internship and employment opportunities. We've got a lot of employers who are really keen to meet up with students to discuss ways forward.

For the conference  we expect everyone to be suited up and looking their best. In this session Rob and David will run through tips and tricks to look good in these situations and how to present yourself to the max.

You can sign up for the conference (free business cards, info-pack and mug) at this seminar too. 

March 19th : Open Data in Hull – The City Engine – John Connelly C4DI

Turns out that Hull is a really exciting place to be just at the moment. With the interest in the area generated by the successful City of Culture bid, high performance fibre optic networking, new startup incubators and lots of other things coming together the future is very interesting. One fascinating local development is the ongoing availability of lots of local information from Hull City Council. This has the potential to drive lots of new and innovative application ideas. 

John Connelly has been intimately involved with this huge project and will be talking about how the data is becoming available and how you can get involved. We are planning to run a "Three Thing Thing" competition at the very end of this semester where we will be turning everyone loose on data feeds to see what they can come up with.

March 26th : BBC iPlayer and the Video Factory - Phil Cluff BBC

We love it when our ex students come back and tell us what they have been up to. Phil Cluff graduated a few years ago and is now Principal Software Engineer & Team Lead, FM Media Services at the BBC. If you want to find out how iPlayer works, how it was built and where it is going then you should come along and see. 

April 2nd :  Careers and Internships Conference

This is not a Rather Useful Seminar. But we hope it will be more than just Rather Useful. Especially if you are looking for an internship or a job at some point in your future. You might not know this, but Hull turns out to be quite a hotbed of digital based companies who have a healthy appetite for bright young minds. The aim of the conference is to put these two together and get some sparks flying.

If you are looking at the upcoming summer and thinking it might be good to get something lucrative going in the form of a paid internship, or you are looking at your upcoming future and wondering just what goes on in these parts, then you must, must come along. We've got loads of local employers coming along, we'll have talks on local industry and where it is going and you'll get a free bunch of business cards to pass out while you are there. And a nice ceramic mug to serve as a memento of the occasion when your life changed direction. 

This event will start at 1:00 pm on Wednesday 2nd April and run through until around 4:00 pm. We start in LTA with a keynote and presentations before moving upstairs to 312 for a mini-expo. 

Arduino Fun and Games at C4DI

We had some great fun at C4DI tonight. We were all playing with Arduinos and trying to get lights flashing, make strange buzzing noises (with a little sounder that is part of the kit) and then reading buttons and reacting to input.

C4DI turns out to be a great environment to do this kind of thing. I'm really grateful to them for letting us have access to such a well set up area. It is a great place to do little sessions like this.

I think the mood of the night was best summed up by one chap who had come along to take part. We'd given him one of the loan kits to work with and at the end of the session he handed it back in again because on the strength of the evening he was going to get a device of his own.  

The next session will be on Thursday 3rd of April at the same time, same place. I'll bring along a Mars Bar for the best thing that anyone has made. The fun will start at 6:00 with setup/show and tell, and then we'll begin the practical stuff at 6:30. 

Keep an eye on the Hull Digital Meetup calendar to register for the event. If you want to have a go at the labs you can find all the notes here.