Pentax ME Super

I think I may be in the grip of a camera buying addiction. Ebay don’t help. They keep sending me emails telling me about things that have dropped in price that I might be interested in. As a result of one such message I seem to have bought a Pentax ME Super for fifteen pounds. It’s in the post at the moment.

The camera is cheap because it lacks a winding lever - making it hard to test. So I’ve also spent ten pounds on a winding lever. My reasoning is that the winding lever works I might have a functioning camera. If it doesn’t I can simply take the camera to pieces and sell the bits. Looking at the price of the parts, this might even be a profitable enterprise. I’m just hoping that these are not the rationalisations of an addict.

Computer Science Christmas Party

We had a splendid time at the Hull University Computer Science departmental Christmas party yesterday. David handed out a quiz from Instant Quizzes which was excellent fun, including a round where we had to identify chocolate bars from pictures of their interiors. And I was part of the winning time - whose chocolate bar knowledge eclipsed even mine.

Camera Battery Complications

They’ve covered every wrong way to do it

If you, like me, have been wondering why your Olympus OM2n camera (you know - the one you bought yourself for Christmas despite having promised not to get any more cameras this year) doesn’t seem to be measuring light very accurately you might be interested in this snippet.

You often find people using LR44 alkaline batteries to power cameras like this. After all, they fit in the hole, the meter needle moves about a bit and the batteries are easy and cheap to get hold of. But they are also a bad idea because these batteries only put out around 1.5 volts when they are brand new. Their output voltage steadily drops over their life, which makes the meter progressively less accurate over time. The fix is to get proper SR44 batteries which are exactly the same size but use a different technology which lasts a bit longer and holds its voltage right to the end.

Renaissance Man

Today, amongst other great achievements, I fitted a toilet seat and bought some pies. And I did thoroughly wash my hands in between.

Robot Rugby fun and games

Ready to rumble

I took the robots into the university to take part in the Computer Science Christmas Bash. There was quite a bit of interest, in spite of competing attractions in the form of lots of video games and a hard fought game of Risk going on at the same time. I think I need to make the gameplay a bit more compelling and come up with a better way of letting players test and deploy their code before the game starts. Great fun though.

Rugby Ready Robots

Ready for action

Took some robots into the university today. The MQTT server port has been opened up and now all the robots work perfectly. Rugby tomorrow….

Robot Backstories

Colonel White

This is her backstory

I’m getting the robots ready for the rugby match tomorrow. I’m giving each robot a backstory. Because everyone has a backstory…

Safemaking with the Bambu P1S

somewhere safe to put all the money I haven’t got

One of the great things about having the Bambu printer is that I seem to be able to decide to print something and then just print it. Even if the thing is large. Today I had a go at printing this bank vault. It just worked.

These are the main parts

I was expecting a bunch of problems and a ten hour wait. After all, I’ve been printing for a very long time. What I got was all the important bits printed before lunch.

The lock contains a surprisngly complicated latch

I had the whole thing built by mid afternoon. The design cost me a couple of quid or so and it was very well worth it. I even got instructions telling me how to assemble the different parts.

Raspberry Pi Popup in Leeds

I bought a new mousemat too

We were in Leeds today Christmas shopping. I was really pleased to see a Raspberry Pi popup in Victoria Gate. We went in and had a look around. I tried to impress the staff by showing them my by-line in a copy of HackSpace magazine they had on sale. I think it worked. They did give me a free sticker.

The store was excellent. The staff were great and it was lovely to be able to take a proper look at some devices I’ve only ever seen in pictures up to now. I hope they open it again.

Network testing - half way there

Took some robots into the university today and introduced them to the campus network. The good news is that they managed to connect using the passwords I’d been supplied with. The bad news is that the MQTT connection (the way that commands are sent to the robots) didn’t work. Oh well, I think a port in the university firewall will need to be opened…

Rehabilitating Robots

“Old Red” goes back a way…

Spent a big chunk of today upgrading the firmware in the robots and getting them ready for robot rugby next week. The are going to be connected to the Hull University Wi-Fi network so that they can be controlled in the game.

Using the second serial port connection on the ESP8266

Perhaps not many of you have had problems with the serial port connections on your ESP8266 devices. But I’m going to write this down anyway. Here’s the problem:

The ESP8266 has one and a half serial ports. But I want my ESP8266 to use serial connections to two different devices:

• I want to be able to connect my computer to the ESP8266 so that I can load programs into the device and set configuration options.

• I want the ESP8266 to be able to talk to a Pixelbot robot and tell it what to do.

Connecting the ESP8266 serial signals to the robot processor breaks the serial connection to the computer. So if I want to connect my robot to the my PC I have to unplug connections on the robot itself. Which is tiresome. So instead I’m using a little know feature of the ESP8266. It can swap the serial connections to different processor pins. So I can connect the robot serial signals to GPIO 13 (TX) and GPIO 15 (RX) and, once my program has started running I can call a function to swap the serial signals over to these pins.

Serial.swap();

After swap has been called code in the robot using the serial port will send messages out of the alternate pins. When the robot starts up it looks for messages on the original connection and if it doesn’t see anything it swaps the connection. This makes it much easier to use. This is the kind of kludge I’m proud of.

Remember what this is?

So many buttons, so little time

Just bought a super-cheap camcorder. The low price is reflected by the lack of battery and the fact that when you press the transport buttons the wrong thing happens. But it works. Now I can go back and explore old videos made over thirty years ago.

If they still work.

Robot Rugby is coming

Do you want to be able to play rugby with robots? I do. To that end I’ve spent the day building a web backend for a system that will host a rugby game and allow players to drop program code into their robotic rugby players and tell them what to do.

I’m not sure how much fun it would be to play rugby with robots. But I’ve had great fun which I think is perhaps the most important thing here…

Snow Joke

We had some snow today. Not much, but enough to send me out into the cold shovelling first thing in the morning. I was very proud that our drive was clear and everybody in the rest of the street had snow on theirs.

Then the sun came out and all the snow melted away before lunchtime.

HULLCS50 is a thing

Official celebration light. I’ll put the plans on thingiverse so you can make one of your own and link it to the event server

The Department of Computer Science in the University of Hull will be 50 years old soon. We’ll be celebrating this event at the university over the weekend of the 10th-12th May 2024. We are going to have an anniversary Three Thing Game, Welcome Party Redux, Robot Rugby and guest speakers. Plus campus tours and chipspice. Put the date in your diary and keep watching the skies (or my blog) for more news.

Comicon with the Mamiya

Black and white dark side

I carried my carefully weighed camera all around Comicon today. It was great. Pro tip: Check your coat in at the cloakroom so that you don’t have to carry it all round the show. It will be the best two pounds you spend on the day.

I took a few pictures. I’m particular pleased with this shot of “The Northern Vader” and a couple of his chums. I was using a large flash on a bracket to the side of the camera. I think it worked very well.

Casual Buzz

There were some cries of surprise when the flash went off in a manner rather similar to a nuclear explosion. But I’d already got the photograph by then….

Dalek central control

I’ve got some more shots in the camera. I’ll develop those when I’ve finished the film off.

Heading to Birmingham

Tomorrow is Comicon at the NEC in Birmingham. In the olden days we used to drive there and back in one day. But nowadays we tend to arrive a day early and spend a night in a hotel. With that in mind I can strongly recommend the Premier Inn Solihull (Hockley Heath M42). The staff are lovely, the rooms are big and clean the meal out was great. Show day tomorrow.

Weighing cameras

Spent this afternoon weighing camera bags to help me decide which to take to Comicon tomorrow. Which is in no way sad.

Redphone in HackSpace magazine

I’ve bought another phone so that I can try to make them call each other

Issue 73 of HackSpace magazine has my red phone article in it. This is where I take an old telephone, rip out all the electronics and replace them with a Raspberry Pi. I then have something which can call me up and say menacing things to me..