Success from Failure at the Hardware Meetup

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WE got this mostly working

First nothing would work. Then everything worked. The Hardware Meetup last night turned out to be all about RFID tags. I’d brought along some tags I was thinking of putting onto the Hull Pixelbot robots. And Ross had brought a reader and some very fancy tags that were sticky labels that can be used to measure the temperature of whatever they’re stuck on.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags are great for identifying things - the clues in the name. They contain a chip and a tiny antenna which gets power from the the tag reader. The chip can send and store data so that you can literally keep tags on things. I’ve used them a lot in the past. And the new tags are much more powerful - but only if you can get them to work.

At the start of the evening I couldn’t get read any of my tags. And nothing Ross had brought was working. But then things started to change. A network cable was obtained to connect the sensor reader to a network gateway that Brian had brought. Then software was loaded and fired up and, despite not really knowing what we were doing, we managed to connect to the tags. And I even got my tags working too. The next step is to build a tag reader holder into the front of the robot and scatter some tags around the robot arena.

The next meetup is in two weeks. I wonder what we will get working then?

Playing "Heat" and "Hidden Leaders"

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Had a great game night yesterday. Played Heat and Hidden Leaders.

Heat is a racing game with a very nice card based moving system which forces you to take more risks as the game progresses. We only did a two lap race as we were learning how the game works. I’m sure I would have won if we had a longer race.

In Hidden Leaders you have hide whose side you are on while trying to tilt the game outcome in your favour. I very nearly won this one, but I was thwarted by some of Simon’s hidden players. A good game is one you want to play again so that you can try something different. This is a good game.

Back to blogging

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I’ve no idea if it works or not. But with these looks it doesn’t nave to…..

They say that the perfect is the enemy of the good. This causes me no end of problems. As an example, consider this blog. A perfect blog would have an entry every day with interweaving narratives which are sprinkled with humorous bon-mots and apposite pictures. But over the last few weeks I’ve not had the time to make a perfect blog. And every time I’ve considered writing a post I’ve thought about the effort needed to make my blog perfect, groaned inwardly (and sometimes outwardly) and gone off and done something else instead.

So I’m going to settle for good enough. When I get a bit of spare time I’ll go back and fill in the gaps and make everything my idea of perfect, but I’ll also stop stressing about having everything present and correct before adding the next post. Over the next week or so I’ll be filling in gaps and making things as perfect as I think I need. And I’ll be blogging when I get time.

As for today: I spent a bit of the morning helping to get rid of some iron railings and to celebrate the success I bought a movie camera for less than the price of a video game….

Humber Marathon in sunshine shock

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We went along to the Humber Marathon today. The middle of Hull was awesome busy and the weather was properly splendid. I think it was perfect running weather, bright and crisp. But then again, I’m not a runner so what do I know.

Anyhoo, we watched them all start off, had a coffee and a wander round and then watched everyone finished. I did take a bunch of pictures, but I wasn’t using my own camera, so I don’t have any to post I’m afraid.

Ligretto

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Ligretto is a fast moving card game. It is a bit like multi-player simultaneous patience. The aim is to get rid of your cards by placing them in matching stacks of the same colour. Thing is, everyone else is doing exactly the same thing at the same time. Quite often you are waiting for another player to put a number down so that you can unload a bunch of your cards. As is eeryone else. It can get rather frantic. But it is great fun.

EMF2024 Day 3 - Camera Fun

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What a lovely day

It’s the final day of the festival today. And the weather is perfect. Started the day with one of the best talks so far, all about the fun and games that were had when open-sourcing the Covid app. The good news is that Open Source is now firmly part of government policy when embarking on large projects. But it took a fair bit of pushing to get there. Then onto a talk about train timetabling. Then Jenny List did a great talk on her fun and games converting a Super 8 movie camera into a digital one.

Old cameras by an old camera

After the session, in the speaker questions tent, there was a lot of discussion about analogue photography and how much fun it is. I left with two thoughts in mind. Firstly that the next EMF will have more analogue film content. And secondly that I’m going to try to track down a Super 8 camera to play with.

Badge hacking

After a bit to eat it was a talk from the EMF badge team. The badge is a really nice piece of engineering, a lot of which is going to get carried forward into the next EMF event. This is a great idea. It means that we can work on apps knowing that they can be used at the next event. One problem with the badge is that there is so much going on at EMF - and you don’t want to miss any of it by spending too much time coding. Next time we should be able to turn up with a bunch of things that we will have tested on the real hardware before the event, which is lovely.

After the badge talk we went to one about 3D printing rocket engines and finally one about sending anything to anywhere. Then it was time for the closing ceremony (very sad) and another trip to the bar and Null Sector (slightly less sad).

EMF in good weather shock

Hacky Racers

Old telephones!

The food was all great

EMF2024 Day 2 - Blast from the past

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Just when you thought it was safe….

One of the highlights of EMF is their “bring and buy” tent. You get all kinds of “tech junk” coming up and there are always folks at the tent picking things up and putting them down again. As we were walking towards it I joked that it would be rather amusing to discover one of my books on sale there.

Turns out that fate has a sense of humour too. There on the table was a copy of the first book I ever had published. Way back in 2007 myself and Donald Thompson from Microsoft wrote a little book about C# development with the .NET Micro Framework. It wasn’t a best seller, but they did ask me back to write some other books, which was nice. I decided to get it because I didn’t like the thought of it languishing there for the entire festival, waiting for a buyer….

After that it was time for some sessions. Started with a very good talk about why gas boilers suck. I’ve resolved to do something involving measuring the flow temperatures of the boiler. And possibly something involving peltier devices and radiators. Then on to a talk about how awesome the BBC Micro Elite game code is. Then a scary session about the way influencer-based techniques are being used by being used by governments. Then a session about fiddling with tech and finally something about making my projects more professional. All very good stuff.

Then, after tea, we took a wander around Null-Sector trying to take pictures with an old Polaroid camera. Such fun. Today I switched to a digital camera and grabbed a few shots..

I did a lot of coding on one of these.

Bubbles

Clocks at the bar

Apparently these are the most eco friendly propane gas jets youi can buy

EMF 2024 Day 1 - Shower memories

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Quite an impressive lighting rig for a tent

I’ve written before about EMF shower etiquette. And this morning, as I stood in the shower soaking wet, with the my towel at the bottom of my bag and my jeans in a puddle on the floor, I wished I’d read my notes before I set out. But once I was clean and presentable (ish) it was time to head out for breakfast (crepes) and the opening ceremony.

You can tell it’s Jonty if you know what he looks like..

Then on to some great sessions. Saw a childhood hero (Tim Hunkin) do a talk, along with sessions about coffee machine hacking, living off the grid and small production run artworks. Then tea (a burger) followed by a screening of the Hackers movie. This film is an EMF tradition, I remember seeing it at EMF 2018. This time they actually had the director present for a discussion afterwards, which made it even more special. I’m looking forward to watching it again in 2026.

The sign for this year is also a water feature

Some of the letters on the sign are made of circuit boards. I think I recognised my current PC there…

Fantastic

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.