Magazine Takeover

They are both jolly good reads

I’m in two magazines this month. Which is nice. If you pick up a copy of the latest HackSpace magazine you will find my article about creating a PICO Powered Bluetooth remote control for a light. This is known as the “milkshake” project because I put the device in an empty milkshake container. Delicious. Then, in MagPi magazine you can find a reprint of my article about making a chord keyboard. This is known as the “missing wires” project because I forgot to add some of the wiring to the design.

Back in the saddle...

I’m going back to university. Just a little bit. I’m helping out with a MEng project. It will be nice to be back in the hallowed halls of learning once again. And the best thing is that, what with the turnover in students over the years, none of them have heard any of my jokes yet….

Auction Packed

Well, why wouldn’t you want one of these….

I now see myself as a proper camera collector. Why have one camera that will do what you want when you can have lots of them, each of which does something different? Most of my camera buying action takes place on eBay, but today I had a taste of real life auctioning courtesy of Flints who run online auctions every now and then. I’ve been in the market for a large press camera that takes 4x5 negatives and they had one for sale that appeared only slightly broken. So I fired up the browser, logged into the site and hovered the cursor over the “Bid now” button.

It was great fun to watch. The auctioneer did a splendid job of keeping the whole thing moving along at a good pace, which was kind of important as there were around 500 lots to sell. After a couple of speculative bids on things that I wasn’t that bothered about “my” camera came up in lot 117. I was holding myself to all kinds of promises about not getting carried away and set a rigorous upper price limit. However, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. Nobody else seemed that bothered about the camera and so I got it for a smidge under the suggested lowest price. And that was that.

I watched the auction for a bit longer, but I was very good and didn’t buy anything else. The prices of items did seem impressive, but you had to remember that each item attracts a 30% premium that you had to pay on the sale price, plus VAT and carriage. My camera ended up costing me quite a bit more than the price I bid, but I reckon it is still a bit of a bargain. I’m rather looking forward to it arriving.

Scarborough Less Fair

Taken with the phone. Oh the shame of it….

Today we were looking forward to spending some more time exploring Scarborough. But the weather had other ideas. Yesterday’s sunshine was replaced with grey drizzle, so we had to resort to pitching camp in a very nice café until it was time to catch the train home. But we’ll definitely be back.

Constant Companions at Scarborough

This is a very clever poster.

We went to Scarborough today to see Constant Companions, a new play by Alan Ayckbourn. It’s a very human production about what happens when people and androids get together. For me it was a play of two halves. The first half was part farce and wry social commentary. The second part then runs the stories forward to their “logical” and somewhat heart rending conclusions, leaving me with lots to think about as we headed out of the theatre. The acting and staging were superb and the whole thing added up to the best night out that we’ve had in ages. Pro-tip: get your drinks and ice cream delivered to your seat during the interval for that “properly spoiled” experience.

The play is on for a little while longer. Seats are very keenly priced, the theatre and the staff are lovely and Scarborough is a great place to visit. Go see.

Agile Octopus Display Lives

Not used Silk filament before. I rather like it

Did the final design of the Agile Octopus Tarff Display case today and printed it out. It looks quite good. Even in pink.

Double Jabbed

This is my standard camera test picture. I think it got the exposure around perfect.

Had both my flu and Covid jabs yesterday. Today both my arms feel like lead weights, but I still managed to take an old camera out for a walk and grab some shots.

Tokyo Game Show in VR

Worth a visit

We went to Tokyo Game Show tonight. It was great fun. It’s no substitute for the real thing, but it is worth the effort. To make it work I connected my Quest 2 to my PC and then fired up the program you can download from here. After a few large downloads and a quick registration I was good to go. I fired up the PC game from the Quest and I was then able to find the server where number one son was connected and then we went around together. I usually use the Quest as a free-standing device, it was interesting to see what it is capable of with a proper PC behind it.

There are a number of different levels in the VR show. Each one has a bunch of game stands. I took loads of pictures with my in viewer camera, but I’ve no idea where they ended up. It’s not enormous, we managed to get around the stuff in an hour or so, but it is worth a visit.

Device Configuration using Web Pages

You need to use Edge or Chrome

I’ve had a lot of fun making the Agile Octopus Tariff display. It works a treat. The device is powered by a Raspberry Pi PICO-W which connects to your Wi-Fi and grabs the tariff information from the Octopus server. However, the display needs to be configured with Wi-Fi settings and the web address of the tariff information. You can do this by editing the MicroPython code in the device, but I wanted something easier. I wanted you to be able to take a display and configure it anywhere. So I’ve built a web page which connects your browser to the device over a serial connection. The display sends a little chunk of JSON to the webpage which builds a web page which will accept the configuration data. You make your changes, hit “Submit” and the values are all sent back to the display.

You can find the page here. The GitHub page with the source code for the project is here.

Dominion Calc. Version 2

What do you do if Dominion crashes at the end of the game and you’ve no idea who won? Up until recently the only solution was to decide that the last two hour’s of gameplay didn’t actually happen. But now you can copy the game log out of the browser window and paste it into DominionCalc which will try to work out all the scores.

The first version I made was a bit simple, but I’ve upgraded it to add more gameplay. I don’t think it is perfect, there might be scoring reports that it doesn’t know about, but at least you’ll have something to brag about. The new version adds proper player names and a summary at the end. Although I still think there might be a bug in it, what with me being reported as last player….

I’ve also put the code on GitHub for anyone who might be interested.

Unbearably witty

While we were up town we noticed a new Escape Room had opened up. “I’d not heard about that” my wife observed. “Perhaps the word hasn’t got out yet” I replied.

Go me.

Network isolation

I hate it when hardware manufacturers spoil their products by skimping on one, crucial component. Take NetGear for example. They make quite good network hardware, but then they add the cheapest possible power supplies they can find. This means (for me at least) that every few years I have to buy a new 12 volt power supply to replace the one that just went pop.

I’ve just had to do it again. One of the routers in my network failed. The good news is that when this happens my eero network converts one of the Wi-Fi repeaters into a network receiver and so the network keeps going - just a lot slower than it used to. It can take me a while to discover that the network is broken in this way, I usually discover things are not right when I have to do an update to Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Playing with e-ink

This is a very good price for electricity..

I’m making a little device that shows the prices of the Agile Octopus Tariff. I’ve got it working on an LCD panel and today I thought I’d get it going on an e-ink device. The one I’m using is made by Pimoroni. You plug your PICO or PICO-W into the back, load up their code and off it goes. I’m really impressed by the quality of the display, although it can take quite a while to update.

The display above shows the current price per kilowatt/hour and a little histogram showing how the price will change for the remainder of the day. It turns out that the important thing with e-ink displays is to minimise the number of redraws that you do. I’ve made a little set of display items which manage their particular elements and only redraw when their contents change. All the code will be upon GitHub once I’ve made it work.

York Trip

AT least the rain didn’t put out his torches

Got to use my bus pass today for the first time. I expected the driver to salute or something, but he just shrugged and dropped a fiver off the ticket price. Which is what counts I suppose. York was looking nice, even in the rain.

Connected Little Boxes portal now live

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.

Mamiya-16 Camera for more spying

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.

Write down what you've done

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.

Stalked by tractors.. again

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.

Got my burger back

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.

Bridlington Comicon

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.