Using PlatformIO on a Copilot device

/

Guess where I took this

I’m liking my Copilot laptop. Today I loaded it with Visual Studio Code and then tried to do some embedded stuff with PlatformIO. And I hit a snag. The problem is that PlatformIO notices that the computer is powered by an ARM processor and then tries to use ARM versions of all the software it brings in. This does not end well. The compilers I want to use for the ESP processors are only available for Intel X86 processors. The solution to this is to tell PlatformIO to use Intel/AMD for everything by creating the following environment variable.

PLATFORMIO_SYSTEM_TYPE=windows_amd64

Search for “Edit Environment variables” and then open the Systems Properties dialogue to do this. Then add the environment variable above, reboot your machine just to be sure everything can see it and then everything works. This means that PlatformIO will run slightly more slowly because it is now running on an emulated processor, but it still seems pretty sprightly to me.

Enter the Omnibook...

/

I’ve not bought a proper laptop for myself for ages. A few years ago I bought an M1 powered MacBook Air to see what the fuss was all about. It’s a lovely machine and it works a treat, but I’ve never really got on with it for doing proper work, what with it not running Windows and all. So last week, having got some unexpected royalties (which are always nice) I got myself a Windows Copilot notebook in the form of the HP Omnibook X 14. There are some very good deals on this at the moment.

I like it a lot. It’s around half the price of the equivalent Microsoft Surface. The hard drive is slightly small, but I can take the back off the laptop and replace the drive with a larger one if I need to. The battery life is supposed to be awesome and so far I’m agreeing with that.

The Omnibook is based on the Snapdragon ARM chip, which means that it needs to use an emulation layer to run “standard” Windows applications. I had a very similar experience with the MacBook, where a process called Rosetta ran Intel based Mac applications. The Windows version of this is called “Prism” and it works pretty well. The applications that I need seem to run pretty well. Applications like Word and the Edge browser have already been converted to Snapdragon hardware and they run very well indeed. I’m looking forward to finding out how good it is for getting things done.

Hull CS50 movie is back from the film lab

/

A few weeks ago we had our event celebrating 50 years of Computer Science at Hull. During the event we took some 16mm movie film on a 70 year old camera. We weren’t sure whether it would come out or not, but we sent the film off for processing anyway.

It came back today and it seems to have worked. The old clockwork Bolex camera that we used has done us proud. Above you can see particularly terrifying still from the film. We are going to improve the contrast and generally spruce things up.

Halloween

/

If you want an insight into how nice people are, just go “Trick or Treating” near way we live (it probably helps to go on the 31st October). We had a fantastic walk around the neighbourhood. The weather was lovely, lots of folks had really gone to town on their houses and there were families wandering around dressed as skeletons and all sorts. And we got home with a bucket full of goodies. Great fun. And just a bit scary. Especially one particular doorbell……

Splendid Meetup

/

Yes. The Mac is running Linux

We have a super-splendid Hardware Meetup in MakerSpace in Hull Central Library this evening. Loads of folks turned up to show things off and see what others were up to. Ross brought along his prototype piano keyboard reader which uses distance sensors to read key movements. It’s analogue and it works. Two things you can’t say about the things I make…

Betrayal at House on the Hill

/

There have been several editions. I think we played the first one.

Of all the stupid things people can say, I reckon one of the most stupid is “Let’s split up and search the place”. Especially if you are in a decidedly dodgy location where even the rooms themselves have it in for you. But that’s exactly how “Betrayal at House on the Hill” starts off. You all get your personas and then head off into the hallways, rooms and basements, uncovering all kinds of stuff - must of it unpleasant. Then, suddenly one of your party is at the centre of an evil plot and all the other players must team up and do some thwarting. We just had to beat the devil at chess, but other tasks involve monster slaying and whatnot. There are around fifty of them to work through.

We had a go at the game tonight and much fun was had. We managed to win thanks to some inspired dice wielding right at the very last minute. It’s a great game and we are definitely going to play it again.

Discarded wit

/

I’m writing some stuff about creating your own programming language at the moment. As I write I find things that I quite like, but aren’t really suitable for publication. Good thing I’ve got the blog then….

  • Bottom-up design: Start with the low level functions and build on them.

  • Bottoms-up design: Start by getting very drunk and writing some random code

  • Bottom-down design: Just get more and more depressed about what you are trying to do

  • Bottom-out design: Hope that things won’t get any worse.

  • Top-down design: start with the big picture and then break it down into chunks to build a map of your solution. Then create each chunk.

  • Top-up design: find a coffee place that does free refills and then keep drinking caffeine until inspiration strikes or you have a seizure.

  • Top-trumps design: forget about writing software and spend your time playing card games from your childhood.

Camera Reviews Coming

/

A good piece of advice to writers is “Write what you know”. This poses a problem for me because I ran out of things that I know to put in the blog around 10 years ago. So another piece of advice could be “Write what you like”. I like cameras, and I probably like writing about them. I plan to find out just how much by posting a regular camera review every Monday, starting next week. I’m going to work my way through my collection of classic old cameras with comments and sample photos. Should be fun. If it isn’t, I’ll stop doing it.

Blog up to date

/

Writing a blog post about having got my blog up to date does sound a bit meta. And is probably only of interest to me and ChatGPT, but here we are.

I’m now properly determined to keep the blog up to date and am trying to make adding content part of my daily routine.

We’ll see how that works out.

Incidentally, I used ChatGPT to make the picture at the top of this post. It is interesting how the image creation process now uses ChatGPT to generate a text description of the required image and then makes a picture from that. I asked for something depcting an artist putting the finishing touches to a great work of art, and ChatGPT lobbed in a lot of extra words before going off and making the picture.

DJI Neo is a super little drone

/

As part of my demob happy persona (back to work tomorrow) I also got hold of a DJI Neo quadcopter. It’s tiny and it works. Very well. A lot better than the Parrot drone I was playing with back in 2011. That was properly scary. This one just gets on with its job of flying round and taking good looking movies. It even has built in behaviours you can access from the button on the top. You can use a phone, and a proper joystick thingy,

it was great fun to fly, the pictures look good and it will land in your hand. Should be a lot of fun.