How not to organize an event...

/

Hull CS50 was great, but I always write down a list of things that I might want to think about next time I help to run something like this:

  • The Fisher Price Code a pillar is a great toy for kids and grownups to play with. You can track them down on eBay if you really want one. If you want to hack one, take a look here.

  • When you are printing the signs for an event it is a good idea not to print them double sided.

  • Talking of signs, don’t laminate them if they are going into Perspex holders. They won’t fit.

  • If you decide to use RFID cards to manage the free drink allocation, take a log of all the unique card numbers before you start and build them into your application. Otherwise you’ll find smart students using their university cards, bank cards and maybe even playing cards to get drinks. Fortunately the folks doing this were showing off - nobody got extra drinks like this. But next time it will be properly secure….

  • Don’t work on the basis that all your RFID cards will work. Turns out that if you buy 50 cards for an attractive price quite a few of them will not work.

  • The bits that you think will be most busy won’t be. I thought that the busiest time would be the quiz at the end, but in the end we had peek attendance at the talks.

  • People love having lots of things to do around them, even though they might not actually go and do them all.

  • Don’t deploy a new version of your robot manager software at 6:00am on the morning of the event. It will break and you will have a very nervous few minutes waiting for someone good with GitHub (in this case number one son) to pull back the previous version and deploy that.

  • Always take a picture of your audience. I completely forgot to do this during the talks (if you’ve got any pictures I’d love to have copies).

  • If you’ve not seen a little lady totally over the moon because her delegate badge is a match for the one on the dalek, you’ve really not lived.

  • Get T-shirts made. They add a lot. We got ours printed here. And modern banking systems make it really easy for people to pay for them. I used a Monzo link and it worked a treat.

  • Remember that having fun beats everything else. If folks are enjoying themselves doing what they are doing, you really don’t need to go and tell them what they should be doing to have fun.

Hull CS50 Was Awesome

/

UnFair Quiz Survivors

Well, HullCS50 was the most fun. I took a bunch of cameras with plans to take a bunch of pictures. Didn’t take one. I was too busy chatting to folks and showing off the robots and bits and bobs. We had 40 or so people embedded in carbonite, lots of “Badge Answer Buddies” and even some slow-motion Scalextric crashes - including one which took out the phone filming it. The quiz was universally acknowledged as extremely unfair, so mission accomplished there too.

Many thanks to the “elves” who kept the show on the road. Thanks also to the Computer Science Systems team who went above and beyond to get everything working and the folks in the Canham Turner building who provided great support and lovely food. Thanks also to the sponsors: Black Marble, RJJ Software, and Visr-vr. Without your contributions we wouldn’t have had an event.

Everyone seemed to be having a good time. One question that kept coming up was “When is the next one?”. We’ll have to work on that.

Ready - ish

/

Well, we’ve got signs for all the activities, printed the answer sheets for the unfair quiz, tested the WiFi coverage at the venue, tested the carbonizer, got most of the slot cars running and written most of the unfair quiz questions.

At this point the only thing you can do is hope that you’ve not forgotten anything important, and that the stuff you’ve remembered will get you through. And then head to Wetherspoons on the campus to meet up with folks who will be coming along tomorrow….

Exciting times..

Using Brother P-Touch software with Windows 11

/

Some old software never dies. Take the Brother P-Touch software that I got with the thermal label printer I bought around 15 years ago. It still works on Windows 11. I’m using it to make the labels to go on the cards for delegates to the Hull CS50 event on Saturday. The labels will wrap around the cards. On the front will be the event logo and the name of the delegate. On the back will be the sponsors logo (thanks so much RJJ Software) and an answer from the scavenger hunt quiz.

I’m using mail merge to get the values from a CSV (comma separated values) list I’m exporting from the list of ticket sales. It’s not optimal, in that I don’t have a name for every attendee. If someone has bought four tickets I only have the name of the buyer, not the folks using those tickets. Anyhoo, I’ve found a way around that and I’m doing the merge. And it works fine until I save the label design, at which point the the first name field for the merge becomes corrupted. Wah.

Took a while to figure out what is happening. Its all about character encoding. The P-Touch program seems to get confused by the text in the file unless you save it as ANSI format text. Then it works a treat. A lovely example of a great piece of software, written years ago and still good today.

I’ve now got all the labels printed and number one wife and number one son spent this evening putting them on the cards and getting them into order for distribution on Saturday. Getting quite excited now…

Minox Colour Photography

/

I got the scans back from those splendid folks at MSHobbies. To say that the negatives are smaller than the nail on your little finger and colour film to boot, I reckon they look pretty splendid. I’m definitely going to be doing more of this. Taking pictures with the camera is great fun and the exposure meter seems very accurate. I just need to practice pointing the camera in the right direction.

I really like the results. My phone could produce pictures much cleaner and clearer, but I’d have to work very hard to get the same kind of atmosphere in the images.

RFID tags working

/

I’ve got the RFID tags working for the free drinks at Hull CS50. The first time you touch your card on the reader you get a green light. The second and subsequent times you do this you get a red light. There’s also a magic “reset” card (which I really mustn’t lose) which you can use to reset the card storage and let everyone order drinks again.

It was suggested that we just use drinks tickets. But where’s the technical fun in that?

Hull CS50 is Go!

/

Actually Hull CS50 has been go for a while. Ever since the first ticket was sold. We seem to have gone from “What if nobody comes?” to “What are we going to do with all the people that are coming?” in a few short days. I blame the student tendency to leave booking things until the very last minute….

Anyhoo, we’re in the final planning phase and today we took a walk around the venue. It’s a lovely place. We’ve got the whole of the ground floor of the Canham Turner building to play with. Plenty of room for slot cars, carbonization, robots, retro games, troublesome tanks. And Daleks.

Bought yet another camera

/

I seem to be collecting half frame cameras. Rather than spend loads of money on a brand new one, I’m instead spending loads of money on lots of old ones. My latest purchase is a Fujica Half. I thought it also had the model designation “EXC” but this turned out to be how those folks at West Yorkshire Cameras describe camera condition.

They are right though. It really is in nice nick. I’ve popped a film in it and, what with this being a half-frame, I’ll discover how well it works after 72 or so shots.

Paparazzi Base board Build

/

These are all the components mounted on the base board. There are four servos, one for each direction. We could probably get away with two, but I thought I could get a bit more power with four. On the bottom we have the Pico which controls everything. On the right we have a servo controller board and on the top we have a Useful Sensors person detector which tells the PICO where the subject is.

3D printed Snap Together Fittings

/

This is how I’m supporting my camera. The shaft on the right has a ball on the top which snaps into a hole in the fitting which will be stuck into the camera. I’ve not made much “push fit” stuff like this with the 3D printer and it works very well, which is nice. There’s a very satisfying “click” when the two parts go together. The shaft will be bolted to the back plate, and I’m going to put wires into the fitting in the camera which will be connected to servos to move the camera around.

Hull CS50 T Shirts - and don't forget to register

/

Our 50th Anniversary celebration is in two weeks. Time to think about some T shirts… I’ve created a poll in the Announcements thread on the Discord channel for the event. If you fancy a shirt to celebrate the occasion, put a vote in and I’ll set up a way you can get one.

If you are coming next week it will be lovely to see you. We are working on content for the event at the moment. If you’ve not registered you really should do soon, we will be closing registrations soon so that we can finalise the numbers. You can find out more about the event here.

Paparazzi Pan and Tilt Fail

/

I’m trying to make an old point and shoot camera follow you around the room. I need something to move the camera around. My super-powerful servos arrived today. I thought they might do the moving for me. I designed the little pan and tilt mechanism that you can see above. The tray on the left is where you put the camera. There is a servo behind the tray which does the panning, and the servo on the right does the tilting.

Above you can see how it works. You fit the mechanism on a tripod and put the camera on the tray. And it sort of does the job. The servos are powerful enough to support the camera weight and do the panning and tilting thing. But I don’t like the effect. I had this idea of a camera suspended in the air on a picture and moving from there. And the tilt and pan axes are in different planes, so that the camera moves in a curved path when I don’t want it to. Oh well. Back to the drawing board (or in this case OpenSCAD).