I’ve just shipped an article (in time for the deadline - yay!) which means I’ve totally lost interest in doing all the things that I was doing when I should have been writing it. The PICO MIDI Cheesebox settings saving will just have to wait a bit longer.
I hate it when I can’t get things to work. The Lora board I was playing with yesterday has all the hallmarks of a great product. It is excellent value and has some lovely hardware features. But when I try to send a message to a Lora TTN gateway all the addresses end up garbled. Fortunately Brian has also bought the same board and it doesn’t work for him either, so I feel a bit less alone now…
I seem to have a compulsion to do something completely unnecessary whenever faced with a deadline. However, today I had a stern talk with myself about getting things done and as a result I’ve made some good progress on a review of a rather nice Lora board for the PICO. The hardware is lovely, the only problem is that it doesn’t work for me……
Took some time off from my CheeseBox MIDI displacement activity for a walk in the park…
I’ve got lots of things that I need to do today. So I’ve spent all my time trying to store the MIDI cheesebox state in JSON inside the PICO.
As you do.
I’m really looking forward to emfcamp this year. I went to the last one four years ago and it was excellent. Last time I attended lots of splendid sessions and just enjoyed the atmosphere. This time I’m presenting as well. I’m going to be showing off my Chocolate Synthbox synthesizer and describing how you could build one of your own. It’s going to be great fun. Trust me.
There are lots of other great sessions too. You can find the complete list here.
We went out for lunch today. I took a camera along but I think I’d be very hard pushed to create a better picture than the one above that I took with my phone.
I like making things slim and low profile. Yesterday I discovered that I’d overdone this, when it turned out that I couldn’t fit the lid onto a box I’d just spent five hours printing. There were two ways to fix this. One way would be to spend a while finding the right-angled header pins, solder them into a new PICO and then spend another while transferring all the wires from one device to another. The other way would be to just bend all the pins flat on the existing device. Guess which I did? 'm not proud of this solution. But I'm very proud that it works.
Did you know that there are two sizes of 8x8 neopixel panels? I do now, having bought a new one and discovered that it is too small to fit over the pixels in the box I’ve just printed. Wah.
And then I discovered that the box I’d just managed to print was too small to take the PICO and the connections. The lid wouldn’t fit properly. As you can see, I have managed to fix this problem though. I’ll tell you how I did it tomorrow.
I drop in on Hackaday every now and then to see what folks are up to. I’ve just discovered that they have done a write up of the PICO Chord Keyboard which is rather nice. Thanks folks.
One of my golden rules about 3D printing is:
“As soon as you start to think of your 3D printer as an appliance it will go wrong. “
Today I made that mistake. And on Friday 13th too. I was rewarded with the above.
The good news is that all I had to do was adjust the Z offset to make the print nozzle a bit closer to the print surface and all is well.
There should be a special place in hell for people who design booking sites that don’t work properly on mobile devices. I’m talking about you, Hull City Theatre folks. Hull City and Hull New Theatre are both lovely venues. But getting tickets to go to performances is always a fraught business. For a start the booking page is a stinker to use on a phone or tablet. Then it insists that you log in before you can buy anything. And when you get to the final page you discover that you’ve been charged an extra booking fee for using this “service”.
Ugh.
I love working with PureData on the Raspberry Pi. But there are one or two issues. You can see a partiularly irritation one above. When you create a new window in PureData the window is positioned so that the top of the window us underneath the task bar. This means that you can’t click on the top of the window to move it around the screen. I’ve been racking my brains for ages to find a way to get the window into a more useable position. It turns out that the solution is really simple. If you hold down the ALT key and then click anywhere in a window you can then drag that window around the screen.
Wonderful when you know it….
Achievement unlocked. Number one son tells me that my Raspberry Pi PICO keyboard made the Raspberry Pi news feed last month.
If you’re wondering who Ben Everard is, he’s the editor of Hackspace magazine, which published the article about the keyboard. You can find it here.
I never thought I’d be running Visual Studio Code on a Raspberry Pi. But now you can. The Raspberry Pi 4 is just about powerful enough to make it useable. Normally I’d be using remote Visual Studio Code from my PC, but for some environments - in this case using the Raspberry Pi PICO in-circuit debugger - you have to work on the Pi itself.
I tried this and was surprised just how horrible it was. Keystrokes were talking seconds to register. It turns out that there is a fix for this. You need to turn of hardware acceleration in Visual Studio Code. Open it up, use CTRL+SHIFT+P to open the command window and type: Preferences: Configure Runtime Arguments
This opens up a configuration file which contains a property called disable-hardware-acceleration which is normally commented out. Remove the comments so that the line “lights up” as below. Then quit Visual Studio and restart it. And you should find the user interface properly useable.
I’m connecting to the Pi on my PC via a VNC connection. It might be that working this way interferes with the way that graphics are rendered too, but it is easy to reverse if you find it makes things worse.
Out and about with number one grand-daughter (5 years old). She told me that she’d just got an “invisible laptop”. I’ve been thinking about this. I wonder what happens when she presses the delete key?
Went on our first proper “up town” shopping trip for ages today. In the Lego store they were selling Muppet mini-figures. Managed to get this chap. It says a lot about me that I’m very pleased about this.
This week I got a call from John who has been building some more air quality sensors for deployment around Cottingham. These connect via WiFi and are designed to wake up, sample the data, and then go back to sleep for a while. Such are my data management skills that it took me a few minutes to find the original files and build the firmware. My software worked fine, but it looks like the BME280 sensors that we are trying to use are not working. I’ve seen this problem with these before. People are quite happy to label all kinds of other devices as BME280 compatible, or change the I2C addresses of them. Anyway, hopefully we’ll get some working ones soon and do a bit more air quality monitoring.
Today I had the magical experience of finding a Raspberry Pi 4 that I’d forgotten I had. It was bought for playing retro games but I never used it much. So it’s been moved into the Chocolate Synthbox where it works really well. Transferring the program code was very easy. I just removed the sd card from the existing device and popped it in my “found” one.
It just worked. The only problem was that ssh (which provides the secure terminal connection between my desktop PC and the synthbox) got upset because some of the properties of the network connection hardware were different after the swap. If you ever have this problem the solution is quite simple. Open up a command shell and navigate to the folder .ssh folder.
cd .ssh
Now use notepad (or your editor of choice) to open up the known hosts file:
notepad known_hosts
Now you have to delete the line of the hosts file that refers to the machine named in the sd card that you have just moved. Next time you try to connect to that machine the ssh command will make a new entry in the file for the new machine.
I was moving the card between one Raspberry Pi 4 and another. I’m not sure what would happen if you moved it to a different model of Pi.
More tulips today. Not a horrible joke this time, just a picture of some from Burnby Hall. I took along a camera and a flash gun to take the pictures this time. I like the effect of using flash on pictures even when there is plenty of natural light. In this shot the flowers seem to “pop” of the background quite nicely.
This the same picture, but it looks different. For this one I pointed the flash directly at the subject which produced a lot of unwanted shadows. The first shot had the flash pointed at the ceiling giving a “bounce” effect which I prefer for this kind of shot.
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
