On Tour Board Game

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We’ve just had another in-person board game night. The novelty of being in the same room as everyone is starting to wear off a bit, but it is still much more fun than online. We played a game called “On Tour” which is all about planning routes over the USA or Europe. You take it in turns to throw dice to get numbers you have to place on a map to form a route of continuously ascending values.

I was spectacularly bad at it. I think this was because I made some bad decisions early on which destroyed any prospect of making progress. The game itself is beautifully produced and the artwork is very well done. Don’t expect to finish the game in 20 minutes like the rules say though. It took us a couple of hours to get complete all the routes. Perhaps we’ll be a bit faster next time. And maybe I won’t put adjacent values at opposite sides of a continent.

Baking with Surface Mount

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This was the kit. The tweezers were very useful.

Today we got around to actually using my little oven. I’d bought a syringe with solder paste, some tweezers, a bunch of switches and a bunch of leds to solder in place. First step was to solder put solder paste on all the connection pads. This involved squirting the paste out of the syringe onto the board, and then using the tweezers to place a component on each pad. Pro-tip, hold the syringe like you were going to stab someone with it, and then use your thumb to force out the solder. There’s a delay between you pressing the plunger and the solder coming out, so give a quick pulse of a squeeze and then wait for something to arrive at the end of the needle. If you squeeze continuously you get a stream of solder, and you don’t want that.

I was a bit stingy with my solder paste, which meant that I never got the magical “surface tension” moment where the components swing into place. Instead mine drifted around a bit.

I also got a temperature gun to check the temperature of the oven plate, but this didn’t work well because the cover is shiny. In the end we just set the temperature to 170 degrees and popped the board on for 20 seconds. Stuff melted, but there was a pleasing lack of smoke and funny smells.

This is what it looked like when it was finished…

The image above might not be correct. Actually it looked pretty tidy and all the components were stuck on the board. Next step is to solder the PICO on the reverse of the board and then test everything.

Circus Fun

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I didn’t think we still had such things as circuses. But we do. We went to see one today. Circus Zyair are doing a very good job of keeping the circus traditions alive. There was a mix of acrobatics, clowning and at the end some death defying motorbiking which came as a bit of a surprise to us, especially as we happened to be sat a few feet from the ramp from which the bikes few into the tent. Well worth a trip. Especially impressive if you are five and a half years old apparently.

Lucy May Walker and Nerina Pallot at Cottingham Folk Festival

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Had a great night out at Cottingham Folk Festival. We saw Lucy May Walker and Nerina Pallot perform in the parish church. They were both awesome. Lucy (or is it Lucy May) was up first. Just her and a guitar in front of an audience who hadn’t paid to see her and were probably wondering who she was. Such is the life of a support act. Anyhoo, she gave a fantastically assured performance. Her audience banter was right on-point and she ripped through her set with aplomb. Catchy songs sung from the heart.

Then it was time for the main attraction. I first heard Nerina Pallot via number one daughter who had some of her music back in the day. Her voice was in amazing form. Some new stuff and some of the older stuff, which sounded as clear and tuneful as the songs I’d listened to as I refreshed my memory in advance of the night.

It’s amazing that we get such good people allong to our little village like this. Thanks to everyone for making it happen. It really was a great night out. It was so good I forgot to take any pictures….

Tricky Mine Finder

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We’ve played a bit of “Mine Finder” now, and it turns out to be a bit too easy. Once you know the colours you can narrow down the mine position quite easily. So, today I present “tricky mine finder”. When the game starts you don’t know which colour represents which distance. In the screenshot above the squares one space from the mine are light blue. It took me 14 tries to get it. If you want to have a go yourself you can find the game here.

Welcome to Mine Finder

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This is my first version of the “Mine Finder” application that I’m using as an example of programmatically made HTML elements. You click on a cell and it tells you how far the cell is from the mine. The idea is to either find the mine or take it in turns to try and avoid it. The game is quite fun to play.

Each of the cells in the grid is an HTML button which is created by a nested for loop in the program. I’m quite pleased with the code that makes the grid: 

let container = document.getElementById("buttonPar");

  for (let y = 0; y < height; y++) {
    for (let x = 0; x < width; x++) {
      let newButton = document.createElement("button");
      newButton.className = "upButton";
      newButton.setAttribute("x", x);
      newButton.setAttribute("y", y);
      newButton.textContent = "X";
      newButton.setAttribute("onClick", "doButtonClicked(this);");
      container.appendChild(newButton);
    }
    let lineBreak = document.createElement("br");
    container.appendChild(lineBreak);
  }

All the buttons are assigned to the same event handler and each button is given attributes that give the position of the button in the grid. I like this because we can make the grid any size that we want and the program still works. It’s probably not the best way to make a game like this, you should really use a canvas I guess, but it was quite fun to write.

Had an idea

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I remember ages ago listening to a radio interview with two members of Abba. They were asked how they did their song writing. They said it was a bit like being someone hunting a bear. You just had to hang around outside the cave and wait for the bear to come out. A melody might appear at any time, you just had to be ready for it. For them I think this meant sitting in the studio fiddling with this and that, waiting for the tune to turn up.

I think that writing is a bit like that too. I’ve just had quite a nice idea for an example program for the book I’m writing at the moment (gosh - that sounds pretentious - but it’s true). I’ve no clue where it came from, just I’ve spent the whole day putting down bits and bobs and this idea just popped up, mostly fully formed.

The weird, backwards nature of blog reading, where you’re reading episodes successively further into the past, means that you’ll probably see the idea before you discover where it came from, but I’m OK with that. Just remember not to stress if you can’t come up with an idea for something. Just fiddle with things around the issue for a while and, with a bit of luck, something will pop into your head...

Rob at Dot Net North

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I’m back on the road again. Dot Net North have kindly invited me to be the speaker at their first in-person event since the pandemic kicked off. Really looking forward to the event. I’m going to be talking about making music with hardware. There will be devices you can build, devices you can marvel at and hopefully devices that work in front of an audience.

The event is in Manchester on the evening of Tuesday 20th September. You can sign up here.

Back to the Forbidden Corner

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The buildings have eyes here

We went to the Forbidden Corner a few years ago. Today we went again. It still rocks. They don’t give you a map. They give you a page with pictures of things that you might see on the way round and then just turn you loose. It’s probably the worst place in the world where you could say “Let’s split up and search the place”. You might never meet again…..

It is in a beautiful area and we were blessed with lovely weather (although it did get a bit hot in the afternoon). If you’ve not been, an you’ve got kids you want to amuse, it is a great place to visit. The café is great too. You have to book in advance though.