This is probably the biggest thing I’ve ever built..
I’ve finally reached the point where I’m letting people lose on the newly created Connected Little Boxes portal. You can use the portal to set up your Connected Little Box devices and create behaviours for them. If you want to have a go with it, let me know and I’ll see if I can sort something out.
It cost a lot less than a video game….
Just bought the cutest little camera. This one is a Mamiya-16. It takes photographs on 16mm film in tiny little cartridges. Now I have to get some cartridges and some film. Should be fun.
Taken outside Brid Comicon
If you don’t want to start a blog, start a diary. Actually a diary is a good idea whatever you do. You can use it as a record to write your blog from. And a diary is useful place to unload stuff. Bad things seem to lose their potency when you write them down. If you have things to do, the act of writing them down makes you feel as if you’re already taking steps towards doing them. I also write down what I’ve been doing during the day. This is useful so that I can go back and discover when I made that change that broke everything, and why. It is also useful because if I start thinking “I didn’t get much done today” I can look back and recall that I actually did quite a lot. This is what I spent today doing:
Investigated the reset behaviour of the espTool code and discovered it to be identical to the code I’m using. One device seems to be just hard to reset. Others work fine.
Put the partition and bootloader files into the esp32 firmware folder
Created GetFileArrayFromUrls which loads the files for flashing
Created a firmwareLocations object which holds the file references for the different devices.
Added a behaviour that displays an appropriate message if the firmware for a device cannot be found.
Tested the boot behaviour on Wemos D1 Mini, Wemos D1 ESP32 and DOIT 32 devices.
Tested the boot behaviour on a device which has had its flash cleared.
Added a reset behaviour to the end of the flashing process.
Fixed the behaviour when a serial port cannot be opened.
Added a behaviour that displays messages after reset.
Made the host website behaviour on the device light the led when it starts running.
Adding a workflow to manage the flash complete process.
I’m doing some work on flashing Connected Little Boxes from a browser. It’s been quite fun.
This might be the same picture as last time..
A while back I got a completely unrequested tractor matchy-matchy game. I filled in a web form and sent a message asking why I’d received them. Today (of course) I received another copy of the game. I think that their standard response to a question about an order is just to send another one (although they probably don’t do this with real tractors). At any rate, I’m not going to bother them again.
I’m actually quite proud of this
A while back I did some pottery painting in Leeds. I thought you might like to see the result.
I’ve been to Comicon in Birmingham before. But I’ve never been to the one in Bridlington. Today I fixed that. It was wonderful. I took along a camera (of course) in this case the Mamiya 645. This is a medium format roll film camera that weighs a ton. It weighs even more when you add a large flash gun to it. The good news is that the folks in cosplay were very impressed with the camera. The better news is that some of the pictures came out quite well. I’m really taken with these two heroes of the rebellion.
I also rather like this shot of Gotham’s finest. The whole event was great. There were some lovely stands selling really nice stuff, along with some great artists. It’s obviously very popular, by mid afternoon the Spa Hall in Bridlington was packed. My tip, arrive a little before the start and grab a coffee and “the scone of the day” (so named because it looks like it will take you around a day to eat it). We’ll be there next year. Wonderful stuff.
..not that we had it in colour
While I was looking up the Elite game for yesterday’s blog post I discovered that you can now access the entire, fully documented, source code for the game. This is awesome. You can find it here. The same person has also Revs and Aviator. Amazing.
I need to clean the film a bit
I took this picture up town today using a Minox B “spy” camera. Considering that the film had been sliced down to 9mm wide, rolled into a Minox cassette (twice because the first time didn’t work) and then unrolled and processed, it hasn’t come out too badly.
If you are ever lucky enough to get one of these to play with (they are great fun) make sure that you set the frame counter to zero before you load the film. The camera has a very clever mechanism that changes the amount the film winds on as the number of pictures increases. This compensates for the change in thickness of the take-up spool as more film is wound on. However, if you set this wrong (like I did) you end up with a bunch of overlapping frames (where the camera didn’t wind on as much as it thought it needed too) followed by a bunch of “spaced out” frames. Worth knowing for next time…
I’m sure it all means something
Starfield is a big game apparently. I spent some time watching number one son play yesterday. Strange things are abroad in the universe. You start off as a lowly recruit who is for some reason sent off to do something really scary and dangerous with inevitable (if hard to fathom) results. The game looks nice enough. The environments are incredibly detailed with lots of things to explore. But when the first significant attack is from, of all things, space pirates (which we had in Elite nearly 40 years ago), you have to wonder a bit about the originality of the premise. Apparently it does pick up speed a bit later on and start to get much more interesting. But from what I saw I was left wondering where they had spent all the time and effort that has gone into this game.
I was very bad at this game
We had our first Hardware Meetup at Hull Makerspace today. There was a good turnout and lots of stories were exchanged. Alifee was there making a Hull City Council Bus Sign play pong. The signs used to be in the bus station, but now the Makerspace has a bunch and lets anyone with an interest in electronics and interfacing have a go with them. Alifee has connected an Arduino and to a sign and got a game running. You can find out more on GitHub.
It was great to see people old and new turning up. Our next Meetup will be on Wednesday 4th of October. If you fancy coming along it would be lovely to see you. We start at around 5:30pm or so at the Makerspace on the top floor of Hull City Main Library.
Nothing to do with CS50 but it was taken a while back…
Next year marks the fiftieth year of Computer Science teaching at Hull. I’ve been involved with this for a while: first as a student and then (and for a bit longer) as a member of staff. A committee has been formed (always a good way to get things done) and I’ve been invited to join it (always a good way to do something or other). We are presently deciding what to do and making plans. It’s going to be fun.
If you are forming the opinion that my life at the moment consists entirely of going to nice places and taking photographs of them, you may well be right. I think the proper name for this is “holiday”. Today it was the turn of Castle Howard.
They had the fountains running, which was nice
We go to the bridge a lot. And why not
This afternoon was unexpectedly nice. So we went to the Humber Bridge. Of course I took a camera.
There were even some flowers growing right down on the foreshore
There was a whole community of small traction engines
After a shaky start when the Whitby event was cancelled owing to bad weather our steam engine summer has gone from strength to strength. Today finds us at the Yorkshire Traction Engine Rally which was completely awesome in every way. We had great weather, lots of things going on and and lots and lots of steam.
A very nice piece of kit
I was playing with a zoom lens which was fun to use but very hard to hold still. The lens was made before we had things like image stabilisation.
Love the line about flying airships
I probably shouldn’t let too many people know about this one, and from the crowd there today it seems that the secret is probably out there anyway, but the café in Ferens Art Gallery in the middle of Hull is a very nice place to get lunch. Great prices, great food and great service. And a chance to look at some wonderful artwork while you are there. When we went they had an Open Art Exhibition which was fantastic. You’d look at a lovely piece of work and then discover it was made by a six year old. Gives you hope for the future.
That should last the month….
Film photography is expensive. Unless you compare its price with things like beer, at which point it starts to look like quite good value. If you want a good place to get cheap inexpensive film stock I can recommend S&J Foto who have Fomapan black and white film at rather good prices (although you do have to remember that the prices shown on their pages don’t include 20% vat).
Spent a chunk of today car cleaning. Some bits required the use of a toothbrush. Not that the car has any teeth.
The game is quite fun though….
Every now and then something happens that makes your world rock slightly on its axis. I had one such moment last week when a courier turned up with a large box. Which contained a tiny deck of cards adorned with pictures of tractors. It’s a very nice implementation of the pelmanism game. Only one thing wrong really. I’ve never ordered such a game. In fact I don’t even own a tractor (or have any plans to get one). I’ve carefully checked the order. My name and address are all properly entered. I’m not sure where this has come from. I’ve contacted the supplier to try and find out what is going on. Most strange.
Not entirely factual…
We watched the Tetris movie last night. It’s really good. There seems to be a glut of “commercial” movies around at the moment. I think there is a even a “Beanie Baby” film around somewhere. Shudder….
However, the thing about the Tetris story is that the story is quite a bit stranger than fiction. Although it isn’t quite as strange as the fiction in the film. There definitely weren’t any car chases or May Day Parade shenanigans in real life. Worth a watch though. And if it piques your interest (great word “pique”) you should take a look at the excellent “Tetris: The Games People Play” by Brian “Box” Brown. This tells the story of the game as a brilliantly drawn cartoon.
Of course the real reason for me mentioning the Tetris movie is so I can reprise my one claim to fame, when I actually had my picture taken by the inventor of Tetris. Not with, by…
I was in Russia at the time, helping to run Microsoft’s Imagine Cup. I had just entered the judging room and noticed Alexey Pajitnov in the corner. He was helping out with the game judging. I was trying to think of a way of telling him how much I liked his game that he had not heard before when one of the student team members came in. The student saw me and decided that he really wanted a picture of himself with the famous Rob Miles of the Imagine Cup. He handed his phone to Mr. Pajitnov and asked him to take the photo. It is probably out there somewhere. And I never did get to say hello…
Not sure about the passer-by
If you think my life has turned into a succession of days when I take an old camera out, rattle off a few snaps and then rush home and process them, you might not be far wrong. But then again, I am supposed to be on holiday. Or something. Yesterday it was the turn of the super-heavy Pentax 67 camera. This takes amazing pictures every now and then. I’d wanted one for ages and this year I’ve managed to get one of the earliest versions. I’m painfully aware of the possibility that the next time I wind on to the next frame there will be a twang or a whizzing sound and that will be that. But today all went well. We had a wander round the Fruit Market in Hull and we were blessed with nice light and some very impressive clouds. I’ve just got the shots off the scanner…..
Spurn lifeboat looking good
Hull tidal Barrier
The Deep
Humber Street
Developed in Rodinol 1+50 for 9 minutes. Negatives look quite dense, but otherwise OK. The last shot ran off the end of the film, so I might want to position the next film 1cm or so before the arrow mark in the camera next time I use it.
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.
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