I’ve made a tiny video to show what the PICO Musical cheesebox can do. If you want to make one of your own I’m going to put all the code and designs up on GitHub and it will all be explained in an upcoming article in HackSpace magazine.
The Raspberry Pi PICO is turning into a “consumable” device for me. They are small and cheap enough to spread all over the place, have a huge pin count and, best of all, you can program them in Python. I’ve just bought another batch.
The PICO MIDI CheeseBox now looks even more “boxy” after I discovered a supplier of wood effect “sticky backed plastic”. There’s quite a lot in the roll that I bought. I reckon I’ve got enough to make around 50 more.
In other news, we had to eat the cheese today as the entire fridge/house was starting to smell of camembert. It was very nice though.
I’ve been wondering for a while what my PICL musical instrument reminds me of. Today it hit me like a lump of cheese. It looks like a cheesebox. I was so excited about this realisation that I shot out to the shops to find some camembert to compare it with…..
I’m making some documentation for my little music box. Settings for the box are managed by setting pixel colours to represent different values. Above you can see the settings for the red (tune) track. You hold down the tune button and then step through the settings on each note key. I made the diagram above using Inkscape. It is an awesome program. In a trice I’d found a way of making a circle of perfectly spaced buttons, then I was creating blocks of text filled with the appropriate colours and lining them up together.
Inkscape drawings are represented as SVG files so you can enlarge and transform them as much as you like. The program is a free download and there are versions for lots of different platforms. The learning curve is a bit steep, but the internet is full of videos describing how to do things (for example draw 12 circles in a ring as above).
When I was doing programming lectures I used to go on about how creative programming is. I also make the point in the introduction to my latest book (subtle plug). I’ve just spent all of today proving the point. The weather has been horrible, so we were forced to stay indoors and do stuff. So I wrote some more code.
My silly little PICO music box can now store multiple rhythm tracks which can be made to run at different speeds. It has a full setting editor using coloured pixels. I rather enjoy playing with it to make little looping sound sequences.
It’s a strange and wonderful feeling when something that you are making starts to take on a life of its own. I’m sure that artists and musicians get it, programmers get it too. Big time.
I was going through a memory card from a camera and I found these pictures that I’d completely forgotten about.
I think that the true reason for the existence of the internet is so that you can share pictures of your shed. Here’s mine. I didn’t build it. Neil came round and in the space of a couple of hours managed to do well what it would have taken me a day to do badly.
I’ve had a really splendid day writing code. I’ve got loads of video games and other stuff to play with, but I’ve ignored all of them in favour of making some Circuit Python. With occasional stops for tea breaks of course.
Took a bunch of stuff to the tip again today. I wonder if council tips have “frequent tipper” schemes. If so, I’d probably be up for a silver award.
Actually we don’t own a shed as such just yet. Rather, we’ve got a collection of pieces of wood which one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) will be fixed together to form a shed-type building. The pieces arrived this morning at 6:45 am. At 6:55 it started to rain for the first time in a while. So I was out in the wet before breakfast trying to cover over the really big bits of wood so that they would remain dry enough for painting.
Fortunately I seemed to manage it and later on in the day when the rain had stopped and the sun came out I was able to give all the woodwork two coats of hopefully waterproof paint.
I seem to have written 500 lines of Python which is now running inside a Raspberry Pi PICO. I’ve no real idea how much space this occupies on the device, all I can say is that it works really well. I’m using the Thonny IDE which has a setting for Circuit Python and works a treat.
I’m building a MIDI keyboard device (that’s what the box here is for). One of the great things about this is that the when you use the Adafruit adafruit_bus_device and adafruit_midi libraries from here you have a MIDI device that works with MIDI applications on your PC (I’m using Pure Data), but you also retain the serial port connection from the PC to the device. So you can write Python to send MIDI messages at the same time as use the console for talking to your program. Very useful and rather fun. And I’m loving writing Python again.
Not everything that Lego touches turns to gold. Lego Vidiyo has not been the success that Lego hoped and figures and sets are now on the market at temptingly low prices.
The idea of the product is very good. Place animated mini-figures in augmented reality pop videos and control the action using collectable tiles that you scan with your phone or tablet camera. Add in some stage sets that can be incorporated into the videos, tie in with the music publishers so that there’s a good range of 1 minute music clips and you’d think they would be on to a winner.
And I think they would have been, if the application that underpins the whole thing had been a bit better. As it is, the program ls clunky to use, insists on downloading stuff when you start it up and has a confusing interface. The videos are great fun, the sharing element is well implemented and safe for kids, but the whole thing is just that bit too painful to enjoy using.
This has of course not stopped me from picking up a bunch of figures and sets at knock down prices. After all, Lego is Lego. Although I’ve not managed to pick up the party llama yet.
Lego say that they are only resting the project for now. I hope this is true. I think it has massive potential once they’ve sorted out the software side.
Now have a working box with lights and buttons. It is quite pleasing of itself. But what does it do?
A week or so we were wondering where all the butterflies have got to this year. It seems that they have just turned up..
This iteration is not going too well….
If you’ve got an Xbox game pass you can already play 12 minutes. If you haven’t, it is still worth getting and having a go. You won’t play it for the graphics though. They are fit for purpose, but viewed close up they fall apart a bit. On the rare occasions that you can see the characters in close up they look a bit scary. The gameplay is essentially a bunch of repeated attempts for a “happy ending” in a situation which doesn’t seem to allow for one. Well, what would you do if cop showed up and accused your wife of murder a few minutes into an evening at home?
Play it right and everyone ends up happy (I hope). Play it wrong and you get thrown back to the start with hopefully a bit more knowledge about what is going on. Some parts drag a bit, you end up trying everything on everything, but so far it has been making sense and we are making progress
This type of game is best played as a group effort, as you can all pitch in and make suggestions. There’s an apparently dodgy plot twist right at the end that we haven’t met up with yet, but we’ve enjoyed the game enough so far for it not to matter. It’s worth mentioning the voice acting, which is very good - with proper actors building a nice atmosphere.
What better place for a birthday lunch than Thieving Harry’s. It wasn’t my birthday, but I still had a great meal. If you are in Hull and you haven’t been there, you should. If you aren’t in Hull you should make a special trip. It’s one of my “pin” places. I reckon that you could randomly stick a pin in the menu to pick an item and it would always be delicious. It’s worked for me several times….
For all of you who’ve bought Begin to Code with JavaScript (it must be selling well because at the moment the only one you can get is the digital version) I’ve re-organised all the videos so that they are keyed to the pages in the book. You can find all the videos here.
I’ve printed a part with the right sized holes, fitted the switches and the pixel ring and wired it up. And it lives (or at least lights up red). Now I have some software to write.
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
