ChatGPT and HueForge
/I might even have a go at printing some of these.
Rob Miles on the web. Also available in Real Life (tm)
I might even have a go at printing some of these.
Spent some of today trying to build a “birthday present robot” for an important guest. Fell massively at the first fence when it turned out that our kit was lacking the P8 axle you can see above. We had two P6’s, but that doesn’t really help. The good news is that there are lots of these kinds of kits and they are quite cheap. The replacement should arrive tomorrow.
One member of the family has a new favourite TV show. It’s “The Dengineers” from the BBC. We were watching it together and I noticed they had an HP Sprout in the cast. They were using it as part of their design process. I nearly fell off my chair. I’ve had a Sprout for ages. It still works, although successive Windows 10 updates have taken their toll and it’s no longer as sprightly as it used to be.
I was planning on popping the machine in eBay but it since it is now cool in the eyes of at least on family member I’m probably going to hang on to it for a while.
Spent a big chunk of today wrangling with HTML. As a result the website for the Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary Celebrations is now live. We’ve not set up registration just yet, but at least this will let you clear space in your diaries and get an idea of what is going on.
It’s going to be awesome.
I’ve got backups of all my pictures. Obviously. But it would be a pain to have to go and find them. And when the power supply for the drive that holds 3 terrabytes of images suddenly goes pop you can forgive me a certain amount of nervousness.
I’ve ordered a replacement.
I took the Kinect sensor over to Hull Makerspace this evening. I’m still working on the latest release, so I used the previous code (ten years old) running on my Surface Pro 3 (ten years old).
It worked, but it wasn’t a particularly pleasant experience. Things ran, but very slowly.
Brian brought in a 3D printer he is donating to the space and fun was had by the few of us who turned up. Next meetup is Wednesday 21st Feb. All about photography.
I’m writing some rendering code at the moment for the Kinect Carbonizer. This takes a 3D photograph of you using a 3D sensor and then gives you a file for your 3D printer. I thought it might be fun to create a 3D preview of the object. Above you can see my first attempt. I think I need to work at scaling….
Woke up this morning to the best of news. My session proposal for DDD North has been accepted. Yay! I’m going to be talking about ChatGPT and how it will change your life. Probably. Registration will be open soon, along with the full programme for the day. Really looking forward to it.
I spent today fiddling with vertexes, vectors and triangles. Along with the odd sine wave. You can see the result above. I’m actually quite proud of it.
I put my OP-1 up for sale earlier in the week. I’ve now sold it, which is good news because I’ve already bought the camera it is helping to pay for…..
I’ve made a tiny video about the Red Telephone. It was quite fun to make. Perhaps I’ll make a few more now that I’ve cleared the desk……
I was chatting today about student projects. As you do. I was wondering if there should be a period at the start of a project where folks should spend a while just flailing around with stuff. I find that when I’m starting a new project I tend to spend a while trying things and finding that they don’t work. At the time I’m doing this I can get a bit stressed because I don’t seem to be making any progress. However, after a while I find that things start to fit together a bit and some of the things I discovered while I was flailing around turn out to be useful. And other things might end up being used in a totally different context.
I’m now a lot more relaxed about flailing. I see time spent failing as actually useful. Of course flailing is only fun if the pressure level is lower. If the deadline is tomorrow flailing is no fun at all. But, if you manage your time correctly (top tip: always start before when you think you should) then you should be able to factor in a couple of days of flailing. I even suggested that there might be a formal period in a development project for some unstructured flailing around. Maybe flailing could become a thing. Here are my top tips for flailing:
Do it at the very start of the project, not when the deadline is close
Keep a very good log of what you’re doing. If you are using ChatGPT (a useful ally in the flailing process) you can ask it to summarise what you have just done and then you can drop that into your log.
As soon as you find an approach that you think might work, you are allowed to stop flailing and move onto the next phase.
Don’t regard it as a waste of time. It’s not. But if you have flailed for a while and nothing pops up it is best to step back from the project for a while (as long as you have time) and then come back to it.
I’m writing some C# for the first time in a while. And I love it. It’s code I wrote ten years ago, and it seems like yesterday. Visual Studio Code is a great place to work, but Visual Studio 2022 just blows it away for sheer usability. Nothing to load or add - everything you need under your fingertips.
I love writing Python - it’s fun to just write a program and see what it does. JavaScript is amazing in the way that you can use it to create mostly working solutions really, really quickly. And C++ and C are hilarious if you want to tickle hardware directly and don’t mind things suddenly stopping for no reason.
But with C# you feel like you’re using a really well crafted tool to create your code. All of your silly mistakes are caught before it gets to run. The debugging experience in Visual Studio is sublime. And I love building UIs with XAML.
I’m going to have to get back into the C# habit.
I bought a rubber hammer today. I used to have one, but it must have bounced away somewhere. I’ve got some shelves coming today that you just put together with a rubber hammer and so I thought I’d get one. Perhaps the best 3.50 I’ve spent in a while.
When the shelves arrive I plan to answer the door with the hammer in my hand and say “Aha! At last you’re here. Now I can begin…”
Then again, perhaps not.
I bought my Teenage Engineering OP-1 few years back when I thought I might be a musician. This has turned out not to be the case (through no fault of the device itself). I now think I might be a photographer (so stay tuned for a few years hence when I think I might be something else and start selling all my cameras).
Anyhoo, in a bid to fund my photographic excess I’ve popped my OP-1 on eBay. I’ve hardly used it much (it is like new) and I think the price is reasonable. If I decide I want to get back into music I can always sell a couple of cameras and buy another one. You can find it here.
I’ve bought another camera. It’s ten years old and wonderful. I had to buy a lens to go with it and I happened across the TTArtisan APS-C 25mm F2. You can get this for the frankly silly price of 69.00 pounds.
The lens is metal bodied, immaculately presented and has a metal screw-on lens cap for extra class (although it makes it a bit harder to use). It’s manual focus and aperture, so you’ll have to adjust the settings yourself, but the quality of the output is wonderful. You would have to spend a lot of money to better it.
Went out for a French themed meal this evening. It was really, really, nice. If it was me running the gig I’d have had pictures of the Eiffel Tower everywhere, loud accordion music playing and the servers smoking Gauloises cigarettes and being surly. But they didn’t. Just great food and drink. Which was probably for the best.
Got a message from Chris over on YouTube. He’s built my PICO Chord Keyboard design (it worked - phew) and he was wondering if there was a way to stop it appearing as a storage device each time it is plugged in. This is a very useful feature of Circuit Python - it’s how you get the program code onto the device - but it can be irritating, as well as giving folks access to your device that you might not want. I sent a reply and then I thought I’d share it on the blog:
You can stop the device appearing as a usb storage by editing the boot.py file (or adding one if it is not there) on the device. Put the following in there:
import usb_cdc
import board
# Disable USB mass storage
storage.disable_usb_drive()
This should stop the device appearing as a file-store. But remember that if you do this it will be tricky to update the code in the device. You'd have to wipe the EEPROM to get your PICO back to a state when you can change the files.
More details here: https://docs.circuitpython.org/en/latest/shared-bindings/storage/index.html
My Hull Pixelbot rugby article is in this month’s HackSpace magazine. It tells you how to add WiFi to your Raspberry Pi PICO powered robot and then control the robot from a web page. And maybe make a rugby team out of them.
And if you pick up a copy of the Raspberry Pi MagPi magazine (also a cracking read) you will find my article on making a haunted red telephone.
Ages ago I bought a cheap old camera, just to get the lenses that came with it. Then I put a film in the camera just to see if it would work. It didn’t. The the pictures through the viewfinder looked sharp but the finished prints were full of blur. Now that I’m back into photography (in what seems like a big way) I thought I’d see about replacing the dodgy camera; a Canon 650, with another, less dodgy one. So I did. The replacement cost me ten pounds and came with a smart little case. I took it out for a walk today and shot a bunch of pictures.
This camera works a treat. It is fully automatic. It focusses, works out the exposure and even winds the film on after each shot. And it seems to be getting it all right too. I was using a “nifty fifty” (a prime lens with a 50mm focal length) that I happened to have lying around for these shots and they came out lovely and sharp. It allows full manual control too, if you want to make your pictures the hard way.
The whole thing brought home just how cheaply you can get into analogue photography. There is nothing wrong with the Canon 650 except hat it is out of fashion. It is very plasticky and a bit of an ugly lump. But that was the fashion in 1987 when it was released. As a first camera I think it would be hard to beat. You’ll have to find a lens for it (search for “canon ef 50mm”) and you will find that they tend to cost a bit more than the camera. However, you should be able to get started for less than the price of a modern video game. And there is always the chance that if you ask around the family someone might confess to having an old camera like this in the back of a wardrobe somewhere.
I’m certainly going to use my 650 quite a bit. While I quite like the process of working out the exposure and getting the focus right, it is rather nice to have a camera just do all that stuff for you every now and then.
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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