Happy gardening

Today I dug up a big plant in the garden and threw it in the bin. I just hope it was the right one.

Horncastle Pianolas

It works!

Today finds us at the Rural Lincolnshire Enterprise Hub where Ross of Hardware Meetup fame is showing of his digital piano. This is no ordinary instrument, although it did start as an ordinary piano. Then Ross fitted a whole bunch of solenoids and electronics to control them. He now has a piano that accepts MIDI music and plays it.

How it works

But Ross didn’t stop there. He’s also built an Alexa interface so that you can request music by name and have it played for you. And there is also an AI element which can tell you more about your musical choices and we even heard some attempts, not always successfully, to use AI to make new music. Great fun and a very impressive project. You can see it working here.

Hardware Group Hot Plate

Magnifying glasses are a great idea

We had a great time at the Hardware Meetup this evening. Brian has designed a printed circuit board that lets us use a Raspberry Pi PICO to control a Hull Pixelbot. The board uses surface mount components and tonight we used a little hotplate to solder them all in place. Stage one is to put some solder paste on each of the connections. Then put the components in position and finally heat the board up so that the solder melts and forms the connections. You also get some really interesting movement of the components themselves as they float in the molten solder and surface tension pulls them into exactly the right position.

Great fun.

Deferred Gratification with Film Photography

Went to York today and took a bunch of pictures. But I won’t be able to show them to you until I’ve finished the roll…..

Exchange Ship

Phone and exchange in perfect harmony

Finally shipped the Telephone Exchange article. I managed to get things to work mostly sensibly and learned the huge importance of prompt strings when using large language models.

Walking the Polaroid

I need to work out how to scan these pictures

We took one of our converted Polaroid cameras for a walk to the pub tonight. We took some pictures on the way and they came out quite well.

Don't let me go to West Yorkshire Cameras in Leeds...

Hmm. What to do…

…because if I do, I’ll buy something. Today it was a lens. But it did allow me to capture the above tense moment in a hard fought game of Pokémon.

Polaroid Conversion out and about

At least the camera photographs really well

Today we took our converted Polaroid camera to one of my favourite places in all the world, the gardens at Harlow Carr. We did get some pictures, but we need to work on exposures and framing a bit.

Reverting to Type

I know that there is no such word as andswer, but I didn’t want to type the thing out a fourth time…

I thought I’d give the redphone AI telephone exchange a hand-typed instruction card in keeping with the retro style of the whole thing. So I grabbed my old typewriter from the loft and hammered out the above. Turns out that manual typewriters are quite hard on the fingers.

Ready for shipping...

It has always struck me as strange how a piece of software can know when a deadline is fast approaching and then choose that moment to fail in new and completely unamusing ways… Oh well.

Bohanza Bean Elastic Fun

Bohanza is a bean trading game we played years ago. Tonight we had another go. It was kind of embarrassing. Last time I played it I carefully put all the cards in elastic bands. But a lot can happen to an elastic band over 10 years or so. Prior to dealing I had to scrape bits of elastic off the cards. Oh well. The game was great fun.

Converting Polaroid Land Cameras: Step 1

After the first part of the operation

We had a lot of fun today drilling and sawing. We’re following these instructions to convert some Polaroid Land cameras from very old Polaroid film which is no longer made to 5x4 and Fuji Instax. The procedure is simple enough, although you do need to be careful when using the drill (and it is best if you have sharp drills). You have to remove the back of the camera, along with a pressure plate assembly which used to squeeze the chemicals onto the photographs. You then add a 3D printed back plate along with a film holder.

We need to tidy up the tape we added to make the camera light tight against the 3D printed back.

We’ve got the back off the camera, adjusted the camera focus and fitted the new back. The next step is to change the “infinity stop” on the front of the camera so that it will focus at the correct place for the Instax Film holder we are using.

Rule 1: Point the camera in the right direction..

This is actually of a group of people

Photography is hard. First you have to set the lens aperture and shutter speed. Then finally, you have to point the camera in the right direction. Took some pictures today using a camera which uses a “sports viewfinder” which is just a wire frame you look through in the right direction. I looked in the wrong direction and we now have a bunch of tree pictures we weren’t expecting….

May the Fourth be with you

You can even see me in this picture if you look carefully enough….

Up town today to take some pictures at a local “May the Fourth” Star Wars event. It was great fun. Lots of bits and bobs for sale and loads of people in character. I was using Ilford HP5 film which is fast and gives a really nice grainy effect.

You talking to me?

Hull CS50 looking good

Warren asked me for some words about the upcoming Hull Computer Science 50th Anniversary.

The celebration runs over Friday 11th October and Saturday 12th and takes place on the Hull University campus. We start with a welcome event on Friday evening, but the main celebration event is on Saturday 12th. We'll have robot rugby for the kids, research talks, campus tours, Hull Stories, Retro video games, embed you in carbonite with our 3D printers, slot car racing, and a 'Computer Science Welcome Party Redux' in the evening where you can relive your first departmental social engagement at Hull, complete with a dodgy quiz.

If you fancy a doing a bit of coding while you’re here, we'll also be running a Three Thing Game hackathon. Get your three 'game things' at our online event on the evening of Wednesday 9th of October and then spend as much time as you like building something impressive in our lab. We’ll be judging the games on Saturday afternoon and then presenting the winners that during the welcome party.

Ticket holders will get lunch and dinner on the Saturday, and those awfully nice folks at Visr (visr-vr.com) have put some money behind the bar for the evening celebrations. Why not come for the weekend and spend Sunday exploring the city or revisiting old haunts.

The event will formally start on Friday 11th of October at 6:00pm with a meetup on campus. A good place to meet up and unwind after your journey up to Hull. We'll be around to chat about the old times.

On Saturday morning our day of celebration starts at 11:00am with tours around the campus, or a coffee in the Bronte Brasserie. We'll have a memory board for pictures from the past (send us some if you want to be famous-ish) plus retro consoles to play on. After lunch we'll have a sequence of micro-talks, starting with an overview of current research activities and then moving onto stories from Hull past and present. If you've got something to tell we'd love to hear from you.

At 4:30 we'll award the prizes for the Three Thing Game competition and serve out the food. Then, at 7:00pm we start the evening's entertainments with a 'Welcome Party Redux'. If you've got fond memories of your first social gathering here this is your chance to relive them.

We're going to have a Welcome Quiz with fiendish questions, retro games, slot car racing we'll even 3D scan you and create an image of you in carbonite.

(this programme is slightly provisional and may be subject to change - especially if we can't find any carbonite)

You can find out more (and maybe even register) here.

Making a box for my Telephone Exchange

This was much easeir than I expected

I’m making a telephone exchange for my Red Telephone. I’ve found a nice looking box design that has space for the ssd underneath the Pi. But I wanted to add some text to make it more interesting. The slicer made this really rather easy, which was nice. Next thing I have to do is print it.

Big Car Rob

I took my little car into the dealers for its MOT test yesterday. This is an annual British ritual where you find out just how dangerous that thing is you’ve been driving around in all year. My car passed (which is nice) although it did need two new tyres. They gave me a loaner car to play with which was huge (and according to the form I signed worth about 60,000 pounds). This was deeply scary but also great fun. I’m almost looking forward to the test next year…

Chatting with Bob

Which one is me?

Today I did some more work on the Large Language Model I’m connecting to my Red Telephone. Turns out to be quite fun.

Yet more Canon Dial mending

New dial and its inspiration

Over the weekend I bought yet another Canon Dial from those lovely folks at West Yorkshire Cameras. It was sold as “broken” from their outlet store. They handed it to me and then gave me a plastic bag holding the side rubbers which had been removed as part of an attempted repair.

I’ve been playing with it and It now works fine. All I had to do was remove the winder and free off the gears inside and add the tiniest amount of oil. Then I stuck the rubbers back on. Joy of joys, the meter works! I’m not sure what it is about these cameras that I like so much, but I’ve now got a couple that I can use which is nice.

Typewriters for kids

Now, where is P?

Bought a typewriter yesterday for number one granddaughter. It was in a charity shop calling for me. After I’d walked past it twice I decided that it was actually for me. Kind of nostalgic. Just like the one I used when I was a student nearly fifty years ago. And of course it still works. Number one granddaughter was fascinated. The idea that you can directly make marks on paper with something mechanical was quite new to her. Within a few minutes she was happily bashing out letters and learning that there is no delete key……..

Great fun.