Super Pentax ME Super

Should really have cleared up the marks on the negative

Today I developed the first film from my “super cheap broken Pentax”. The pictures game out great, including some of the family.

The camera even managed to pull some detail out of the foreground

If you are thinking of doing some film photography you could do a lot worse than pick up a cheap old Pentax like the ME super and run a film through it. These things were made a long time ago, but they are pretty hard to break. Some film SLRs (for example the Pentax K1000) sell for silly high prices, but you can pick up a Pentax ME Super for less than the price of a video game. Not because it is a particularly bad camera, but because it is less fashionable to be seen with. You get automatic exposure and a nice pocketable form factor. And if it breaks you can sell the bits.

Ghosts with legs

I do like the multicoloured silk filament

If you’ve got a bunch of people coming to see you it is always nice to print them their own ghost with legs.

Mystery Object

Of course its something to do with photography..

Just ordered one of these. What do you think it might be for?

Christmas Shopping

I think the meter is working OK now

Today found us in Hull shopping for Christmas presents. Hull tip number 1: There are some lovely gift shops in the Fruit Market in Humber Street. Hull tip number 2: Have lunch in Ferens Art Gallery café. We had a great time and I took some pictures which actually came out OK.

A nicely exposed Hull Deep

Murder Mystery Night

Well, that was fun. Tonight we had a murder mystery event; “Death by Chocolate”. We all gathered together and tried to work out who dunnit. Nobody guessed the guilty party. But it was hilarious. I thought I’d managed to map the folks attending onto roles that I thought suited them well. Me, I was a ventriloquist’s dummy….

Pentax ME Super arrives

It actually looks qute tidy

The broken Pentax ME Super that I bought by mistake arrived today, as did the replacement winder arm. They were a perfect fit, once I worked out that the fixings were all “left-hand thread”. Most screws and bolts are tightened by turning them clockwise, but sometimes this is reversed. The way that the winder lever on the camera works, each time you wind the film on the mechanism turns in a direction that would tend to loosen a clockwise tightened bolt. So they made the winder lever tighten the other way.

The camera itself seems to work fine, although it looks as if it has been sat on or wacked hard on the top (or both) at some time in its life. I’m going to put a film through it to see how it goes.

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…