Heading for EMF

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This is the view from our front door. Note the friendly fluffy clouds. At least, i hope they are.

Heading to Electromagnetic Fields 2024. I’ve been looking forward to it for ages. I managed to get packed and on the road by 9:30am. Go me. Nothing quite like blasting through the countryside with Supertramp on full volume. I’ve taken a bunch of cameras, including my current snapshot favourite, the Canon Dial 35. When I arrived I found that number one son had already put the tent up. Which is either good luck or good planning. You choose.

Grabbed a pizza for tea and then watched the David Lynch version of Dune – which was as good as I remember. Nothing like watching a movie with a bunch of like minded folks. The next few days are going to be awesome.

RFID Tags at the Hardware Meetup

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Testing the latest robot colour scheme

We had a nice little Hardware Meetup this evening. There were robots wandering around and also a bit of surface mounted soldering action. We’ve decided to take a look at RFID tags as means by which robots can find their way around the arena. So for the next meeting I’ll bring some along and we’ll see if we can get them to work.

Fun with Captain Flip

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That’s a human canonball I’ve not seen before…

Captain Flip is a fun little board game where you add crew members to a board that represents your ship and try and maximise the number of points. Each crew member confers a specific advantage and the trick is to get the most profitable mix. You crew turn up on random tiles that you pick out of a bag. If you don’t like the one you got, you can “flip” it to the one on the other side. This is a bit chancy, but adds a lot to the fun. And gives the game its name.

You’re not going to play this all evening (although the game comes with a bunch of different board designs so you probably could). However, we certainly had fun with it.

Lomomatic 110 Camera with Purple Film

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I’m not sure ifyou should buy a camera just becuase of its looks. But then again…

The Lomomatic 110 camera is the first completely new 110 film camera to be made for a while. Lomography (who specialise in interesting cameras) released it a little while back. It’s a rather expensive alternative to a cheap second hand 110 camera, but it does have a ton of style. It also has a proper electronic shutter and a glass lens with adjustable focus - which are not things you usually find on a 110 camera. Of course, I got my hands on one and loaded it up with Lomo Purple film. It’s a fun camera to use. You wind it on by opening and closing the body and you can also attach the cutest little flash gun to the side. It is very plasticy though and I found the shutter button a bit fiddly to press (best to use a fingernail and press it with that). The 110 film has tiny negatives, but I wasn’t too unhappy with the level of detail.

This is not how I remember Dalby forsest looking…

Should have held the camera horizontal

I think the camera shake adds a lot to this one…

The camera didn’t get the colours wrong, that’s down to the awesome film. But it did get the exposure and the focus mostly right. The only times things went wrong were when I forgot to adjust a setting. I took some pictures of people and they came out sharp and snappy, but with weird colours which added a lot to the atmosphere.

It’s a nice enough camera, very stylish and beautifully presented. I’m not sure I’d advise anyone other than a camera nerd to get one though. Probably better to pick up a cheap second-hand 110 camera if you want to try the format, or perhaps a Pentax Auto 110 (which is an awesome tiny SLR camera of which more later).

What I would advise you to do though is pick up some of the funky Lomographic 110 films. They are available at quite appealing prices in 110 format and you can get them developed at around the same cost as a 35mm film. I’m presently trying the “turquoise” film (which seems to turn people cyan). I’m looking forward to seeing the results.

I am an idiot

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This one is almost artistic

A while back I made the mistake of sending the same film through the camera twice. At the time I vowed never to do that again. Well, that worked. Above you can see the results of doing it again...

The first pass was with a Canon Dial 35 and the second with a Canon AE-1. While it saves me a bit in film it has the disadvantage of leaving me with lots of unusable pictures.

Radioactive Lenses

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Some of the lenses in my cameras are radioactive. Not in a particularly dangerous way, although if you managed to swallow one or left it in your underpants for several weeks it might not do you much good. As the radioactive elements decay they turn yellow, which means that some of my pictures have a yellow/gold tinge that I don’t really mind that much. It gives pictures taken in Hull a nice “French Riviera” look. The solution, when I get around to it, is to shine a bright UV light on the lens and speed up the decay process and turn the yellow white again.

Horncastle Pianolas

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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

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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.