Lithium AA Batteries

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I took quite a few pictures with the Mint RF70 camera over Christmas. Most of them came out, which I was very pleased about. However, I’ve noticed another “foible” the camera has. It eats batteries. If you leave it switched off in a camera bag for a couple of weeks, when you go to use it there is a good chance its batteries will be flat. This is a bit of a pain, and rather expensive.

I wondered about using rechargeable batteries and then I ran up against another “foible”. The RF70 is very fussy about the batteries you feed it. I tried some conventional rechargeable cells and the camera didn’t even switch on. I think this is down to the design decision to only use two batteries to power it. Most cameras of this type use four which can provide twice as much power. Sometimes when you turn on the flash the batteries give up before the flash has charged, resulting in no flash and a wasted picture. And the picture ejection process sometimes sounds like the camera is about to give up the ghost. You have to make sure that the batteries you get are up to the task.

I think I’ve found a solution though. There are now people making rechargeable AA batteries based on Lithium cells. These provide a proper 1.5 volt output and they can produce up to three amps of power. They need a special charger but I figured that rechargeable batteries that can generate 1.5 volts were a good idea for other projects so I got some. They work very well. The flash fires every time and the picture ejection process sounds almost sprightly. I’m not sure how long they will last in the camera but I’ve had a set in there for a week and all is well so far. Worth a look if you want long-lasting, high power AA cells you can recharge.

Double Aibo Fun

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I mentioned a while back that one of the robot dogs has a broken battery and I was getting a new one. It arrived today. Above is the battery we got. We just had to drop a couple of flat topped cells into it. They can be found here. We were able to have both dogs wandering around which was rather nice.

I took the picture with the Mint RF70 instant camera using the built-in flash. I’m quite happy with this one.

Using a Hannimex pro550 Flash with a Mint RF70

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Something of a minority interest here folks. But, as I’ve said before, My Blog. Anyhoo, I finally got around to making an adapter to plug the big flash gun on the right into the funky camera on the left. I’d been a bit nervous about doing this because when you stick a plug into something you instantly have a new way of breaking it. I was worried that waggling the plug might damage the camera socket. Fortunately Switch Electronics (based in Hull) had exactly what I needed for the princely sum of 66 pence. It’s a right angle plug that fits nice and flush on the camera and doesn’t look like it will do any damage.

Note that if you do decide to use a plug like this, make sure that you fit the round rubber ring (you and see it on the left hand side of the image above) over the wire before you solder the wire onto the plug. The ring holds the case on. If, like me, you forget this important detail any people in the room with you will learn some “interesting new words” when you realise that you now have to take off the plug you have just soldered on so that the ring can be fitted. Fortunately I was able to get the ring around the plug on the other end of the cable, but you might not be so lucky.

I got the flash going and figured out how to use it. It has automatic and manual modes. When “white” is selected you get full power. Set the dial on the side to the speed of your film (remember film?) and then you can measure the required aperture against the distance your subject is away from the flash. Set it to green and you can fix the aperture (remember aperture?) and the flash will measure the light reflected from your subject and make the exposure right. Red does the same job, but at higher power so you can use a smaller aperture.

I took some pictures that came out really well. They are of people, so they won’t be appearing in the blog (company policy) but take it from me that the combination works a treat. Especially if you point the flash at the ceiling so that the light is spread out.

One final tip. Don’t look directly at the flash when testing it. This can leave you with coloured blobs in your vision for the next hour or so…..

CMD inside PowerShell

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This post is for all the old-timers out there who have fond memories of the MS-DOS command prompt and have bother remembering all the new-fangled (but awfully powerful) PowerShell commands in Windows. You can get back all your command prompt goodness by with the command cmd, which starts a command processor with all the old style commands. As you can see above.

I’ve just had to use this when while deploying a web application to a Linux-powered device. I had a bunch of image files that had the extension “.jpg” which were referred to in the code as “.JPG”. The Windows filestore doesn’t mind this. But Linux does. So all my image links were broken. What I wanted to do was rename all the extensions. You can probably do this in PowerShell. But I can definitely do it in MS-DOS:

rename *.jpg *.JPG

So it was in with the old, out with the rename and the site now works. And I, not for the first time, must try to focus on greater consistency in my coding….

Getting started with JavaScript and hardware is super easy

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I’m writing the final chapter of the book at the moment. I’m calling it “JavaScript technologies”. The idea is to leave the reader with some ideas of things that they can do with JavaScript that they might not expect. For example, how about a website that you can visit to turn a light on and off?

This has turned out to be a wonderful example of how simple it is to deploy complex technology today. You can start with an empty Raspberry Pi and a memory card and within a few minutes you an have a device that you can attach to your home network and access remotely. You can make the device host a web server, wire up a few pins (see above) and have a site you can access with the browser in your phone to make the light work. Completely amazing.

Dead Dog

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After the success of the debut of “Bluey” at the hardware meetup last week I thought I’d get my other robot dog, “Digby II” working. Unfortunately he is not well. His 20 year old battery has finally given up the ghost so we are down to being a one-dog family. There are people who will put new cells into an old battery. You can also make your own battery controller and build your own batteries. Or you can get a battery made for you. I’ve gone for the last option. This should solve the problem and make it really easy to replace the batteries if they wear out again. Hopefully we can get the dogs back in action together before Christmas.

Getting a Notion

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One of the takeaways from the DDD event a while back was that I need to take a look at Notion. At the moment I manage my life using a single Word document and a few carefully named folders. That has been showing strain for a while. I’d really like to do proper project management and also keep track of things I’ve found out about stuff. I think that Notion will do all this, and probably a lot more, so I’ve signed up and installed a bunch of copies on machines around the place. I think this is going to be fun.

ChatGPT vs Eliza - round 2

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After yesterday's post I asked ChatGPT to compare ChatGPT and Eliza. It wrote this:

ChatpGPT and Eliza are both AI-powered conversational systems, but they are quite different in terms of their capabilities and intended uses.

ChatpGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI that is capable of generating human-like text in response to input from a user. It can be used for a variety of purposes, including generating creative writing, responding to customer inquiries, or engaging in conversation with users.

Eliza, on the other hand, is a much simpler program that was developed in the 1960s. It uses a set of rules and patterns to generate responses to user input, and is intended primarily as a demonstration of how computers can simulate conversation. Unlike ChatpGPT, Eliza is not capable of generating original text and is only able to produce responses based on the rules that it has been programmed with.

Overall, ChatpGPT is a much more advanced and capable system than Eliza, but Eliza has its own unique place in the history of AI.

You could believe a person wrote this, just like you could believe Eliza was a psychiatrist. But if you look closer you see a well put together pastiche of a few facts gleaned from the web, plus one paragraph straight from the sales brochure. It’s cleverly done. But I still don’t think it’s clever.