Yesterday we drove over to the Humber Bridge County park and had a marvellous work though the trees and down to Hessle Foreshore. It still amazes me that we have lived in Hull all these years and only started going to this splendid place quite recently. It was a lovely afternoon and the sunlight across the estuary was very pretty. We grabbed a coffee at The Humber Park and then sat on the terrace watching the sun go down over the sea. Well worth the trip.
I did something today I’ve never done before. I soldered a couple of surface mount components onto our latest environmental monitor control board. They are the transistor and the resistor towards the top of the picture. The trick (at least for me) was to get one pin anchored and then work my way around applying a drop of solder paste to each terminal and then heating it up until it melted and formed the joint. I was using a hot air gun (not a very good one) and it took a while to heat things up but at least it worked.
The transistor will control the power to the particle sensor and make it possible for us to make a sensor that consumes only a tiny amount of power when it is not active.
While I was in Ikea buying beds I also bought something I’ve fancied owning for a while. I got myself an abacus. I’m going to try to learn how to use it so that come the apocalypse I’ll still be able to do sums.
I thought that bonfire night would be interesting, and so it turned out. Above are particle counts from one of our sensors in Hull. From the looks of things most of the air particle action was in the days before bonfire night which kind of makes sense, bearing in mind that was the weekend. These numbers are not definitive (after all this is just one sensor) but I’ve seen similar changes in the readings on other sensors around the city.
You can find these readings and compare sensors on the sensor site here.
This evening we had a most excellent hardware meetup at c4di. We had a new member turn up and say Hi, Adam was there too and we had some great discussion about moving forward with Air Quality and lots of other stuff. Everyone who turned looked like they’d just come from standing under a waterfall, which they had.
I really must start taking pictures of these gatherings, but I’m usually so busy chatting that I forget to. Which means you’ll have to put up with one of my vaguely artistic efforts at the top of this post.
The next Hardware Meetup is on the 14th November at 6:00 pm at c4di. Let’s hope for better weather.
I was assembling an Ikea bed today. I rather like assembling their furniture. Their instructions are very good, once you take the time to understand them. I failed on one bit and had to undo some parts I’d put in the wrong place. It wasn’t hard, but you had to focus a bit. And it gave me an idea.
You may have noticed that in the UK we are having an election. This will probably decide nothing and do little to arrest the spiral of once Great Britain into irrelevance. In the old days this country was a great place to be. Nowadays it is just a great place to be rich. Anyhoo, I think I’ve hit upon the perfect test for any would-be political leaders. I’d ask them to do what I just did. Take the instructions, work out what they mean and then build something. If you can’t you’re not allowed near the levers of power. Better yet, make them work in teams to do it.
From what I’ve seen of the present crop that should get rid of a pretty large number of them.
I quite like Heltec devices. They have a rough and ready quality to their construction, but their designs are well thought out and once you get your head around how they work you can use them as the basis for some neat devices. Four Heltec LoRa devices are presently powering our Air Quality sensors in Hull.
Heltec have just released a new device, the Cube Cell. It has LoRa built in and it has a stupidly low power consumption when in standby. It also has the electronics that allow the direct attachment of a solar panel.
It’s a more constrained platform than the devices based on the ESP32. There is no WiFi or Bluetooth, In fact the processor is built into the LoRa chip. You can find out more here.
In terms of what we want to do with our environmental sensors it looks very interesting. We should be able to port most of the code that we’ve written over to the platform as it is programmed in C++ using the Arduiono IDE. I’ve ordered one, it will be interesting to see what it is like when it arrives.
Some people look forward to bonfire night because they want to see the fireworks.
I want to see what happens to the readings from our particle sensors.
If you think about it (and I have) there are more things that we don’t know than things that we do. This book identifies 1001 questions and then tries to find reasons why we can’t answer them. It’s actually three books in one and there is loads of stuff in there.
It’s not the kind of thing you read from cover to cover, but it is rather nice to dive in and stretch your thoughts in strange directions. The unknowns are spread across a wide range of categories and the writing style is very approachable.
If I have an issue with this book it is only that it doesn’t provide any answers. There’s a distinct lack of closure. However, I can’t complain too much, since it is only doing what it says on the tin.
I got the book in WH Smiths for six pounds. At that prices it is a nice diversion.
They’re putting a new bridge in today over the A63. When I went there was nothing much to see, but they’ve had to close the road, with the result that it is a lot more empty than is usual for a Saturday morning.
“Just type in the EID number of your device” said chap at the other end of the support chat. “It’s the 32 digit number that you can get from the About page” he added helpfully.
No worries then.
Maybe it’s my advanced age, but I really hate typing in great big numbers like this. Particularly where the consequences of getting it wrong are that nothing will work. So, I came up with a solution:
Take picture of the About page on your phone and crop out just the digits in the image.
Transfer it to your PC.
Drop into an empty Word document as an image.
Set the image to be behind the text.
Then type the digits on top of the numbers in the image until it looks right (see above).
Then cut the completed text out of the document and paste it into the chat window.
Worked for me.
I thought I’d have a play with my Lego Mindstorms Rubik Cube solver. But the controller is broken. I’ve tried everything. I’ve put in some new batteries, then another set in case the new ones were broken.
I’ve even taken the back off and had a look inside (always guaranteed to fix anything I find). It’s really complicated in there, and beautifully made.
But it doesn’t work.
Oh well. I’ll have to solve the cube myself…
The Addams Family movie is OK. It’s not great. It’s not bad. It’s OK. There are some good bits, there are some predictable bits. The voice acting is very good indeed and the story is nicely played out.
As I was watching it I was struck by the fact that the art direction was good, but I’ve seen better resources and animation in some video games. But then, these days, I guess that video games have bigger budgets than some movies, so it makes sense. If you go expecting an Addams Family movie you’ll not be disappointed, but that’s about as far as it goes.
Here’s a programming tip for you. If you have a bug and you’re not sure why (or even where) it is occurring, spend some time writing comments in the code as you work through what it is supposed to do.
This is a great way to “explain to yourself” what the program does and it might even be useful information in the future. You never know. You can also spend some quality time refactoring the code so that variable and function names properly reflect what they are used for.
I like this approach because you then don’t look back on the time spent debugging as wasted. When you find the mistake that you made you can at least reflect that fixing it made the code better.
Long blog title. But it’s true. You might be surprised to learn quite a bit of my work involves cutting and and pasting. Particularly for screenshots. For a long time my weapon of choice has been the Windows Snipping Tool, which if you read the name quickly sounds a lot more exciting than it is.
Anyhoo, me and the Snipping tool have got along fine over the years and I was worried when I saw a warning message that it was being replaced. I was even more worried when I discovered that the new tool provides no easy way to capture the contents of a particular window on the screen. However, I can relax now. Because the latest Windows 10 upgrade has introduced a fantastic new way to grab, annotate and save parts of the screen. You don’t even need to start a special program. Just hit the three keys SHFT+WINDOWS+S to bring up a snipping menu, grab the thing that you want and then either paste it straight into your target using CTRL+V or open up the image editor to annotate it and save it into a file.
It works a treat. Worth knowing about.
I didn’t intend to get hooked on the Apple ecosystem but here we are. What can I say? The stuff just works.
The latest iPhones are very nice. They have almost caught up with my Lovely Lumia 1520 which I still have. I get it out every now and then, marvel at the design and the UI and then sadly put it back in the drawer.
I’ve just signed up for Apple Arcade. It costs around the same as a packet of cigarettes a month and I can share it with number one wife, who has found a bunch of nice casual games including one that lets you mess around with Jane Austen text.
I really like Assemble with Care, which has a bunch of beautifully built 3D models to play with.
And Speed Demons is great high sped fun. You can use your favourite XBOX or PS4 controller with your iPhone, which seems so wrong but actually works really well.
You can get a free month to see if you like it. If you have an Apple device it is worth playing with.
I was in Ryman’s in Hull today looking for cheap AA batteries (I have lot of robots to feed) and I came across a tiny handheld video game that had been massively reduced in price. Always a sign of quality I find.
However, the promise of 150 games for a tenner was too hard to resist. So I invested in one. Note that I never say “bought”, always “invested in”. Buying something means that the money is gone for ever, whereas an investment has the potential to go up in value over time. Although I think that it is unlikely in this case.
Anyhoo, the game is not bad. The hardware works well and the screen is bright and clear. There are indeed 150 games. I was expecting a bunch of dodgy ports of old 8 bit favourites but the reality is a bit different. It’s rather like someone has locked a programmer in a room and said “You can come out after you’ve written 150 games”. The range of gameplay types is interesting. They are all very casual. None have any instructions and so for me a lot of the fun comes from figuring out just what your are supposed to do. And if you get bored or irritated by one you just move on to another. I’ve had quite a bit of fun with this already and I think I’ve recovered my investment.
You really should read this book. It’s not a happy tale, although there are moments of pure heroism.
It tells the story of the worst nuclear accident the world has ever seen, when a Russian nuclear reactor exploded in April 1986. I can vividly remember seeing news footage of helicopters swarming over the doomed reactor building, along with reports that everything was under control. It was not, and this book tells why and how. The level of detail, and the access to those directly involved, is hugely impressive.
The book serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen if you let economics and political expediency ride roughshod over safety. It has eerie parallels with some recent events. Read it.
A while back I ordered a TTGO camera from Ali Express. It came today and it is lovely. It is similar to the ESP32 webcam that I bought a while back, but it has a PIR sensor and a BME 280 environmental sensor along with a nifty OLED display.
It is supplied with firmware that sets it up as an Access Point. If you connect to it you can view the image and control it from the web page that it serves out. I think it is running the same software as I loaded into the earlier device, but it is nice to have it on the device at the end.
It works extremely well. I’ve printed a little case for it from a design I found on Thingiverse and now I’m looking forward to having a play. They say it can do facial recognition, which is very interesting, and it might be a good device for our Humber Care Tech Challenge entry.
Update: I’ve found a nice blog post here on how to use this device as a fridge alarm. This shows how to put the processor to sleep and trigger wakeup using the PIR sensor.
We went to see the new Shaun the Sheep movie tonight. This builds nicely on the TV show and the earlier film to add an interplanetary element, with a cute alien stranded on the farm. The story bounces along nicely through a whole bunch of lovely set pieces and some excellent voice acting (but no script). Great fun for all ages. Just go and see it.
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.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
