One of the great things about 3d printing is the way that you can iterate your designs very quickly. The picture above shows my progress towards a little plastic clip that will hold the led panel onto the front of the case for the “Chocolate Synthbox” that I’m building. The first one (on the far left) was a bit too large. Over the next three I refined the hole size and the height of the “claw” part of the clip until it fits and can be tightened down. Great fun.
Found out today that ebay had made me one of their “80% of selling fees” offers, expires at midnight. So, if you need a broken Apple Homepod, sticky Logitech remote control or an unused Nest thermostat, just head for ebay and go nuts.
A lot of today was about printing. I set out to print the top of the box I designed yesterday. I fired up Edna the Ender and she just got on with it. I’ve only just started using the printer after quite a long break. I figured the best thing was to not fiddle with anything, do an auto-bed level and then start printing. In olden days I’d have spent a while manually re-levelling the print bed and, after a lot of messing around, get myself back to the same place I was when I started. These days I’m older and wiser, so I just assume that nothing has changed and let the printer get on with it. It was one of my longer prints, at around 8 hours, but It seems to have worked well.
Print the box tomorrow.
I think I’m feeling better. I’m making things again.
I’ve decided that I need to complete the meal that started with the MIDI Cheesebox and Crackers MIDI Controller. So I’ve started work on a Chocolate Synthbox. This going to be a Raspberry Pi powered synthesizer that you can plug the other two devices into. It’ll have built in stereo speakers, a flashy matrix display and a couple of rotary encoders. I’m going to use a Raspberry Pi PICO to do all the low level interfacing and link it to a Pure Data patch running in the Pi that will make all the sounds.
I’ve had a lovely day today designing the case you can see above. The idea is to get it right first time, as the printing times for a box this big are a bit long.
With a bit of luck I should get it working in time to reveal it to the world at emf in June.
In his younger days my father-in-law worked on the Concorde based in Bristol giving tours around the plane. The aircraft now lives in a spiffy new museum but I’ve got very fond memories of visiting the plane when it was parked on the BAE site and having him show us around.
There is now a rather good simulation of Concorde for Microsoft Flight Simulator available. We got it running on the Xbox and it is great fun. Just about all of the controls work and there are some useful automatic controls for things like fuel weight distribution (a big thing on this plane) . It turned out to be a really good way to reminisce together (you can walk around the cabin as well as the cockpit) and we could even take the plane up for a flight, which was not something that they were allowed to do in Bristol.
Concorde was a classic piece of engineering the like of which we will never see again. It is nice to see it being kept alive like this.
The world is a crazy place. On one side the price of everything is going up. On another you can get a workable Windows laptop for less than 80 pounds. It runs Windows 10 quite handily. I bought one earlier this month. It was originally sold as a “Minecraft machine” and came with a copy of Minecraft and a years subscription to Microsoft Office 365. If you want to buy that flavour for the bargain price of 159 pounds you can get it from Smyths toyshop here. If you can do without Minecraft or Office you can pick it up for the amazing figure of 80 pounds from here.
There are not new machines, they are “reconditioned”. I bought one as a first computer for number one granddaughter and I must admit I was tempted to hang onto it because it is so darned nice. With 4G of memory it runs Windows 10 quite speedily on its quad core Celeron N3450. The biggest weakness is the hard drive. It uses a 64G SD card as the main storage so you won’t have space to load a lot of stuff with only 28G available for your files. However, there is micro-SD slot if you want more storage and a couple of USB slots for connectivity.
If you are after a “disposable” machine that you wouldn’t mind if you dropped in the bath or left on the bus this would be perfect. I even like the Minecraft green colour of the case (it is also available in Minecraft blue) which I think will endear it to the intended user. It arrived speedily with Windows 10S pre-installed. If you look carefully you can tell it has been used a bit, but everything works just fine. The screen is bright but lacks a bit of contrast. The battery life is not great, but workable.
The only snag that I can see is that the processor in the Minecraft laptop I received is the Intel N3450 which doesn’t appear on the list of Windows 11 compatible processors and Windows Upgrade says that it can’t be upgraded to Windows 11. This is where things get a tiny bit confusing, the page for the Minecraft Geobook 140 on the Smyths site states that a Windows 11 upgrade is possible. This is because there are two versions of the Geobook 140 in circulation. One uses the Intel N3450 and the other uses the Intel N4020 (which is Windows 11 compatible). For my purposes Windows 10 is fine, so this is fine with me.
The amazing news is that the N4020 version of the Geobook 140 is available for even less money here. You can get it for only 70 pounds. In fact I’ve just bought one to take to emf.
This has to be one of the coolest looking cameras I own. I found it while we were searching the loft for PlayStation 2 games. I bought it cheap just as Olympus stopped making it. I even managed to track down the cool flashgun that matches it. I reckon that for me it is about the closest thing that I will ever get to jewellery…
It takes pretty good pictures too.
Turning Red is a wonderful little film about a girl who turns into a giant red panda when she gets stressed. It covers some themes that don’t get that much of a mention in animated movies and is all the better for that. It has a properly heart-warming story and some splendid animation. Strongly recommended.
I’m doing some work with this little thing. The aim is to make it work with my Bluetooth printer so that I can take pictures and print them. While I was getting it going I got frustrated by the way that the camera connection kept failing.
At first I thought it was a brownout problem caused by insufficient power over the usb connection. I’ve got a fix for that here.
But no, even with a healthy power supply the problem kept recurring. So I tried something different. I turned the speed of the CPU. My theory was that if the camera was being a bit slow responding to requests from the ESP32 it might be a good idea to slow those requests down a bit.
It worked a treat. You can see how to do it in the Arduino SDK above. This does of course mean that the program will respond a tad slower but I’ve not found that to be a problem. If you’ve got intermittent behaviour in your device you might like to try it. It has the added useful side-effect of reducing power consumption.
Hullraisers is a sitcom set in Hull. It’s based on an Israeli show called Little Mom and was adapted by and stars Lucy Beaumont. It is a bit bawdy and very funny. It was filmed in Hull and gave us lots of “we know where that is” moments as we watched it .The lighting makes Hull look anything but grey. Every scene is packed with colour. As someone who has lived here for a very long time I reckon the accents are all spot on and the inherent friendliness of Hull folks shows up a treat.
Well worth a watch.
Turns out that the Kidizoom printing camera is a great way to print clues for an easter egg hunt…
Lego are billing their bonsai tree kit as “their most therapeutic kit yet”. I’m not sure about that, but I did rather enjoy building it. There are two variants. A green one and the blossom one you can see above. Fun fact, some of the blossoms are actually little tiny frogs, there are 101 of them in the model.
We went out for a drive today. I’m not allowed to get behind the wheel just yet. So I was able to sit in the passenger seat and take pictures through the window of the scenery as it shot past. The images took a bit of tidying up, but I’m not unhappy with the results.
Tunic is a fun isometric platformer type game that is available on lots of platforms and on Xbox Game Pass. It reminds me a bit of the famous "Knight Lore” Spectrum game from way back. One of the best bits is the way that the game is provided with a manual, but you have to decode the symbols and hieroglyphics in it to work out how to use the various game elements that you encounter. It builds a nice atmosphere as you guide a little fox around a big, beautifully drawn, environment.
If you have Game Pass you really should have a go.
Another trip out today. This time to Hammonds of Hull, a department store turned food hall and shared workspace that’s just opened in the middle of Hull (the clue is in the name). It’s a very nice place to shop for foodie things, drink excellent coffee and grab a meal from one of the vendors. We did all three during our trip up town. The conversion of the store has been done with taste and style and I can see it being a hit with folks visiting, living or working in the centre of Hull.
Simply Piano is an awesome application. Over the last few months it’s taken me from “someone who can hardly play to the piano” to “someone who can hardly play the piano except for ‘The Entertainer’”.
Simply Piano can use the microphone in the iPad to listen to the notes that you play, but a MIDI connection to the program is much more reliable. It also means that you can practise while wearing headphones, something number one wife prefers.
Unfortunately recent “upgrades” to iPad OS have made it much harder to use this. It seems that iPad is now having problems recognising USB MIDI connections from some devices. If you, like me, are having problems the best recommendation I can make is to get hold of a MIDI adapter that uses the big round DIN connectors to link to your keyboard. I made the change and it now works for me.
Had my first trip out today. Took the big camera to grab some in-focus images.
This might do for the cover of the next C# Yellow Book
Not to be used for a “Guess the name of the flower” competition.
I mentioned a while back that I’ve been playing with a film camera. I got the pictures back from the lab and there seems to be a problem with the focus. Distant things are great, but close ups are horribly blurred. Oh well. I think that focussing screen and the film are out of alignment. The good news is that some of the pictures look really nice anyway. I don’t think I’ll be taking many more film pictures (the cost of film seems to have rocketed since I last bought any) but if I do I’ll be making some adjustments to the focus..
There are few better illustrations of the law of diminishing returns in movies than the Matrix series. The first one was flat out awesome. It was the first DVD I ever bought and we played it to death on my PlayStation 2. with Dolby surround sound through dodgy speakers.
The sequel was OK. The third? Don’t ask.
And now, quite a while later, we have the fourth one. We watched it this evening. All the actors they have allowed back seem to have aged incredibly well. The plot was as wacky as ever and the production as glossy. They even recreated a few of my favourite scenes, which was nice. Newcomers to the franchise might be wondering what the fuss is all about. But for the rest of us I’d say that it was a lot of fun and not as bad as it could have been. Worth a look.
We had an awesome hardware meetup last night. I don’t measure the success of a meetup by the number of folk who turn up (although we were nicely quorate). I measure success by how much stuff gets passed around from person to person. Here are the things that we talked about. There were probably a few others that I missed.
There is an awesome “Minecraft alike” program called Minetest that you can download and play with for free. It’s written in C# and Lydia of Starbeam Rainbow Labs fame has added some excellent extensions for it that you can find here.
Karen has discovered origami on YouTube. It’s a great way to relax by making stuff. If you’ve ever fancied folding your own toilet, you can find the instructions here.
You can use the Kidzoom printing camera to make wonderful little sketches of people by converting their portraits to “colouring in” pictures and printing them out on the built-in printer.
The Furby Connect has a reset button hidden next to the battery compartment that can be used to bring the toy back from the grave. That, or we joggled the batteries when we were pressing the button. Either way, the Furby lived.
You can make a flat piece of wood into a very flexible thing by cutting loads of slots in it with a laser cutter.
100% of the people who started writing a diary after I told them to say it is a very good idea. So starting a diary is either a very good idea or they are very polite people.
There is a video arcade with lots of retro games machines in the basement of the Princess Quay shopping centre in the middle of Hull.
The Badger 2040 e-ink display is as cute as a very cute thing.
There is now a successor to the .NET Micro Framework. It’s called the .NET nanoframework. It lets you run and debug C# code from Visual Studio 2022 on devices like the ESP32. And it rocks.
If you happen to need a mobile device to take round and check for LoRa gateways and map them for you, Brian has built one.
Thanks so much to Hull Makerspace for hosting the event. It was terrific fun. You only get these kind of things by actually meeting up in person. Here’s to the next one.
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
