Bitcoin boilers

Bitcoin mining, where powerful computers solve mathematical puzzles to generate money that is almost probably real, is consuming an increasing amount of power around the world. As all the power that goes into the computer comes out as heat, it seems to me that it would be sensible to make good use of this power.

Why not make “bitcoin boilers” that use heat from the computers to do something useful? That way you could get paid for having a hot shower. I’m not sure about all the detail - I’m strictly an ideas man here - but I think it is worth a try.

Raspberry Pi Wide Angle Zoom Lens

Pimoroni now stock a new lens for the Raspberry Pi HD camera. This one is a zoom wide angle lens. I’ve been impressed with the quality of the longer focus lens that I got a while back, so I thought I’d invest in the new one too. The price is very reasonable at 15 pounds.

The quality is very good. Focussing is fun. It is not a “pure zoom” in that if you change the zoom settings to move closer or further away from the subject you will have to refocus. And sometimes (at least on mine) I can’t find focus positions for some zoom settings. But the bokeh (the effect you get when things are out of focus) is rather nice in a blurry kind of a way

The artistic view..

I’m using mine to give an overhead view of my work area for videos. If you want to do this you’ll need to set the camera up so that it gives you a full desktop view. This is the command that I use:

raspistill -t 0 -p 0,0,1920,1080

This makes the viewfinder image from the camera fill my video output, you can change width and height values to match the display values you are using.

The lens will focus very close, which makes it ideal for viewing components and circuits. If you have the Raspberry Pi HD camera unit it is well worth a look.

Decaying Digital Ownership

I bought a CD last week. It’s one that I already “own” having bought it from the iTunes store a few years ago. Unfortunately, the 10 tracks that I thought I’d paid for turned into 2. This is probably due to licensing changes that should not in any way be my problem. I suppose there are some weaselly terms and conditions somewhere that make this quite OK.

Anyhoo, the CD arrived today. I had to find a CD-ROM drive and then use iTunes to rip the music onto my PC, and thence to Apple music share so that it reappeared on my phone. So, after spending only 9 pounds plus a bit of messing around I’m back where I should have been if Apple had kept the promise that buying something actually means buying something. Modern life eh?

Red Nose Day video now available

Pete has put up the video of my Red Nose Day lecture in rhyme. With a special guest. You can find the video here.

Creampie Canon Fail

Showing bravery in the face of whipped cream….

Well, the lecture was a great success. Except for the “Creampie Canon”. Which kind of failed. It was mostly my fault. In the excitement I forgot to attach the trigger so that the firing mechanism didn’t work. In the second attempt the actual mechanism fell to bits.

At this point I was determined not to allow my shoddy workmanship to let me off the hook, pie in the face wise. So I did what I thought was the right thing, which was to fire the canon at myself.

That worked fine. Although I also got whipped cream over the keyboard and a few other devices that are now going to need cleaning. If you want to be part of the event by giving me some money donations are still open. You can donate here:

Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme

The lecture is tonight. You can find our more, tune in and donate here.

Update: The video is now available. Enjoy.

Connected Little Boxes in HackSpace Magazine

If you pick up the April edition of HackSpace magazine and take a look at page 94 you’ll find a description of my Connected Little Boxes and how you can make them. You can find out more here.

Apologies to Una

I need to apologise to Una my Ultimaker. Last week I gave her a new print head. But I didn’t include one of the more important elements, an internal fan to keep her print head cool. So she overheated and blocked. I’ve just ordered a teeny tiny fan from China which should sort that out.

Dedicated clip key

I’ve just discovered that my lovely new ergonomic keyboard has another fantastic feature. It has a dedicated key to start the screen clip program. This. Is. Awesome. No more Shift+Windows+S for me, just press this one key and you can clip and save what you like. Not life changing perhaps, but certainly “life making a bit easier”.

Writer's Blockhead

I’ve just spent the entire day writing content for my Red Nose Day lecture in rhyme on Friday. I’ve now got around 45 seconds of content. Go me.

The Pie Face Canon

As part of my Red Nose Day presentation I’m making a remote controlled “pie face canon”. The pie flinging mechanism is a canon from a pie face game that you load up with whipped cream and then fire. I want to people to be able to control it from the internets and maybe even hit me in the face with it. No idea why. Perhaps it is the technical challenge.

And technical challenge it is. The biggest problem is that when the mechanism is cocked the back tension from the spring loaded piston is considerable, so you have to pull quite hard on the trigger to fire it. And Lego Technic is not very good at pulling hard on things. What happens instead is that the mechanism comes apart. Which is fun to watch but ultimately not that useful.

In typical idiot fashion I solved all the easy problems first. I can move the canon up and down and left and right by remote control. But I can’t fire it yet. A proper engineer (which might be me next time - who knows?) would have solved the mission critical part first and then added the gold plating later. At the moment it works sometimes..

Driven mad by pixels

There’s a scene you see in lots of movies where the camera pans across a selection of crazy drawings and formulae, to imply the emerging madness of some deranged character or other. I feel that I’ve just lived through that. I’ve been trying to make my pixels move over surfaces in my Connected Little Boxes. I don’t want them to “snap” from one pixel to another, I want adjacent pixels to fade up and fade down to give the impression of the light moving. I want it to work in both “1D” (a line of lights) and “2D” (a grid). I’m sure there are off the shelf solutions for this but I want to roll my own. I’ve finally finished it. It was one of those occasions where actually knowing some trigonometry was really useful.

Editing Begin to Code with JavaScript

We’ve started the editing pass for Begin to Code with JavaScript. I love this part of the job. I’ve got fantastic copy and technical editors and it is like having a conversation with a couple of folks who really know what they are doing and making the book better. The book should be out later in the year.

Is this the end?

Just before it all went wrong…..

I spent yesterday completely rebuilding the print head of Una the Ultimaker so that she now has an Ultimaker 2 print head. She rewarded me with some lovely prints. Today the print head has just blocked itself. Oh well.

In praise of wired keyboards

I’ve been buying keyboards again. My latest one has two things I really like. Twenty pounds off and a wire. I think some things really need a wire and keyboards are one of the. I’ve used a Bluetooth one for a while on the desktop and it works mostly fine. Except that when you first try to use it your keypresses get ignored as it sets up the connection, and all the indicators are barely visible because of battery worries.

This one is a Microsoft Ergnomic design which seems pretty much perfect. It even comes with a great riser which means that i can rest my elbows on the chair arms, my wrists on the padded keyboard front deck and then just let my fingers do the moving around.

It has all the keys in the right places. The left hand shift key is a bit small (only normal key sized) and there is a rather pointless Microsoft Office key at the bottom taking up space that I’m sure could be better used. But all the function keys are full size and the extra keys along the top are mostly useful. And the action is very pleasing to type on.

At the moment the price is very attractive I reckon. One of the smartest things I did around twenty five years ago was to get into ergnomic keyboards. I think that if I hadn’t I’d not be typing as freely as I am today.

What makes a professional developer?

One of the things I used to get asked by students years ago was “What makes a professional developer?". I thought I’d have a go at answering the question:

It turns out that the difference between an “amateur” and a “professional” developer is that the professional developer gets paid for their work. You become a professional developer just by selling something that you’ve made. A successful professional developer is one who creates happy customers. Consider this application:

connectToWiFi(ssid, password);
connectToMQTT(host, username, password);
while(true) {
    float x = fetchReading();
    sendToMQTT(x);
    delay(10000);
}

This is code for a data logger. It connects to the Wi-Fi and an MQTT broker and then reads and sends data values every 10 seconds. It works (which is the nicest thing you can say about a program).

The problems appear when you consider questions like “What would happen if the Wi-Fi connection fails?”. In the code above the sendToMQTT function would get stuck and the device would need to be turned off and on to get it to work again.

You might be happy to live with this, but your customer might not. Your customer would be even more upset if they only found this out after they have lost thousands of data readings because their network failed for a few seconds.

A “professional” developer would have to do one of two things: make sure that the customer knows about this “product feature” beforehand, or make the device deal with network failures.

“Going pro” means that you will have to spend more time looking for things to worry about before your customer does, but it will also lead to an improvement in everything you make.

Battle Tags Game - now with dice play

I’ve tweaked the rules of the Battle Tags game to include a dice. This adds a bit of chance to the game, although there is still room for skill and bluffing. The die also makes for a nice test of your 3D printer’s abilities. You can find the designs here.

Judging at MedHack 2021

I had a great time today helping with the judging of the MedHack Hull event. Over the weekend teams had been working away on their ideas (although it wasn’t all work and no play, they found time for some Pictionary and Among Us. Over lunch I got to chat with them about their entries.

It was great. I took away a number of things from the event. First you can totally do these things online very successfully. The organisation was top notch and the teams all used Discord to talk to each other and the judges. All I had to do was enter the chat group, fire up my webcam, admit I knew nothing and then wait to be told all about their idea. Then I popped some writeup into a shared spreadsheet and moved on to the next team.

All the teams were wonderful. There was a huge range of different ideas all centred around the medical theme. I’ve watched a lot of presentations over the years and one thing that struck me today was how we have moved on in the quality of presentation skills (or perhaps this was just a very good bunch). Either way, It was great fun. I told as many teams as I could that they should make participation in these events “pay for themselves” by making sure that they form part of the “brand” that they should be building as they go through life.

Kudos to the folks at Hull for organising the event. I hope that they run it again next year.

Talking Connected Little Boxes at MedHack 2021

Today I did my session about Connect Little Boxes for MedHack 2021. It seemed to go OK. By that I mean that most of it worked (although I did have one jaw dropping moment where I shared a screen that showed an image of the screen being shared, which led to a very impressive “Hall of Mirrors” effect.

Thanks for being a great audience folks. If you are not sure what Connected Little Boxes are and why you want one (or two) you can find our more at my Lecture in Rhyme on Friday 19th of March. Keep an eye out for more announcements coming soon.

It would be lovely to see you at our next Hardware Meetup

In the “Good Old Days” (which are getting progressively gooder and older) we used to have a Hardware Meetup in person at c4di twice a month. We’ get together in the same room and talk about hardware and software and anything else we found interesting. Sometimes we even got within 2 meters of each other.

Happy days.

However, the good news is that the meetings are still going on. A few stalwarts are still meeting up twice a month, although now we do it online. We had a great meetup last night as it turns out. We talked about a whole bunch of stuff, what we are doing, what works, what doesn’t. SBL showed off fantastic progress on the Connected Humber Sensors site. It is now much snappier to load sensor readings.

If you want to come along to our meetups you can find details our our meetups on Mattermost here.