Minecraft Earth

I’m not as into Minecraft as I probably should be. If I want to have fun I tend to fire up Visual Studio Code. Sad but true.

Anyhoo, I’m fascinated by the idea of Minecraft Earth and today I fired it up and had a go. It’s free to download and play on your mobile device (Android or Apple) and it works a treat.

You find yourself in a Lego Mindstorms version of your surroundings and as you wander around you can pick up bricks, pigs and chickens. Just like in real life.

You can use what you have picked up to build things (perhaps not the chickens though).

Your creations are presented using augmented reality so you can plonk them on the living room floor and then walk around them, adding bricks and poking ducks, as is your want.

If you’re prepared to walk about a bit you can gather quite a bit of loot and some locations have challenges associated with them.

If you love Minecraft you’ll love this. If you don’t love Minecraft it might convert you.

Comic Con in Birmingham

I’m never quite sure why I go to Comic Con in Birmingham. It’s quite a drive, there and back from Hull in a day. And the most expensive thing I ended up buying was the ticket for the car park. But we had a wonderful time. It’s rather like being at a great fancy dress party, where they also sell lots of interesting things.

Each time I think about making a costume, and each year I don’t do much - although last year I did buy what was the basis of the “Air Quality Top Hat”.

I’m not sure if I’ll be going in a costume next year, but I am sure I’ll be going..

.NET on the Raspberry Pi

I ran some .NET code on a Raspberry Pi today. I was gobsmacked to find out how easy it is to do that. The hardest part was getting the compiled program from the PC onto the Pi itself, and that was really easy with VNC. In no time at all I had an ASP server siting on the Pi and serving out pages. Most impressive. I used these instructions here.

The Aeronauts is a great film

Last night we went to see “The Aeronauts”. It’s the story of a balloon trip. Just a simple up and down. Except that it is not that simple. It says that it was “Inspired by real events”. I’m OK with that, but they must have been really brave souls to go and do this for real. It’s proper edge of the seat stuff. And the acting and the effects are just spot on. Well worth a trip I reckon.

New Lego Mindstorms Brick

Sometimes you can only solve a hardware by buying a replacement.

I’ve got a new EV3 brick for my Lego. This one has the rechargeable battery, which is nice and should reduce my battery spend.

I’m going to have a go at putting Python on it.

MVP Summit booked

I didn’t manage to get to the MVP Summit this year.

Sad face.

But I’ve just signed up to go next year.

Happy face.

I’m really looking forward to meeting up with lots of friends from around the world and apologising for being English.

Visit Hessle foreshore

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.

Achievement unlocked - soldering surface mount components

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.

Got my own abacus

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.

Bonfire night particle counts

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.

Really good hardware meetup at c4di

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.

The Ikea test

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.

Heltec Cube Cell

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.

Looking forward to fireworks

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.

A book of things that nobody knows...

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.

Empty road

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.

Adventures in Data Entry

“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:

1. Take picture of the About page on your phone and crop out just the digits in the image.

2. Transfer it to your PC.

3. Drop into an empty Word document as an image.

4. Set the image to be behind the text.

5. Then type the digits on top of the numbers in the image until it looks right (see above).

6. Then cut the completed text out of the document and paste it into the chat window.

Worked for me.

Broken Mindstorms

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…

Addams Family Movie

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.

Debug Code by Writing Comments

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.