Free Cameras

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The chap in the Camera Shop in Beverley knows me quite well. I think I might be his pension plan. Anyhoo, he has now taken to keeping old cameras behind the counter that he thinks I might find interesting. And, even nicer, he hands them over for free. Today I was the happy recipient of three such cameras. Two of them were Kodak Brownies which are nice enough, but use 127 sized film which is no longer made. So they are useless for taking pictures.

The third camera was a different proposition though. It is a “Kodak Folding Hawkeye”. It has bellows in good condition, a clean lens, a shutter that clicks with encouraging noises and, best of all, it takes 120 roll film which is still sold today. At some point I’ll pop a film in it and see what it can do.

Rob's Ten Minute Rule

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I’ve invented “Rob’s Ten Minute Rule”. It goes like this: “It is often worth spending ten minutes on something that you are not sure about”. In ten minutes of searching and chatting with ChatGPT you can usually find out if something is a good idea or not. If it looks promising you can spend another ten minutes (or maybe even more) pursuing it. If it doesn’t work you walk away from the idea only having lost ten minutes of your life.

LittleFS filename conventions

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LittleFS is a great way to store files on your PICO or ESP powered embedded system. But it does have its foibles. Particularly when you switch from one platform to another. One thing that can trip you up is that on the ESP8266 and the PICO LittleFS the name method provided by a file object delivers the name of the file in the folder(test) but on the ESP32 LittleFS it delivers the file path to the file (\start\test).

I just discovered this while migrating the Connected Little Box code to the PICO. I’m putting this here so that I can find it again when I hit the same problem in a couple of years time.

PICO Probe in PlatformIO

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I probably shouldn’t be quite so surprised when something just works, but I must admit to being slightly shocked when I managed to deploy a C++ application into a PICO using the Raspberry Pi debug probe the first time I tried.

Debugging just works too. I’ve now got a new PC (replacing my 8 year old one with something a bit more sprightly) and the build and deploy cycle is now pleasingly short. This really is a great way to work. I’ve now got the Connected Little Boxes core running on a PICO as well as ESP32 and ESP8266 and I’ve re-factored the code so that it is now easy to manage the feature set assembled into the code. This makes it much easier to remove features that won’t fit on the ESP8266. Great fun.

Farewell Mike

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A sad day today. I went to the funeral of Mike Brayshaw. I worked with Mike for quite a few years. He was a wonderful fellow who wore his deep knowledge very lightly and worked tirelessly to educate and support students and the university. I’ve got great memories of loading Raspberry Pi devices into his car and driving off to a conference. There is a lovely in-memorium here.

Farewell Mike, a great person taken far too soon.

The Boiler Detective

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This is almost exactly how it looked

On Monday mornings our boiler stops working. How does it know? Has it been programmed to make the worst day of the week a little bit worse by making the house cold? I’ve tried asking for help with it, but once reset it seems to come back to life. The fault code is as enigmatic as the sphinx. And it is hard to mend something that isn’t broken. The worst kind of bug.

Anyhoo, I’ve figured it out. It turns out that Sunday night in our house is also “have a soak in the bath” night. The rest of the week we have speedy showers, but on Sunday a hot tub is in order. And the bathtub and the boiler share the same downpipe. When the bath is emptied the huge surge of water overwhelms the pipe and causes the to back up into the condensation drain for the boiler. The boiler doesn’t like this, and shuts down. And we wake up cold on Monday morning.

I’m going to get the plumbing looked at when the boiler is serviced. We are still going to have baths, but I’m tempted to 3D print a flow limiter to put in the plug hole so that the bath drains more slowly.

Python-Ish in The Magpi magazine

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The latest Magpi + HackSpace magazine is out. It’s lovely to see that the HackSpace ethos is coming through loud and clear, with lots of making articles in there with the Raspberry Pi goodness.

One of the articles is the first in a two part series about Python-Ish, a programming language I created by accident to control Hull Pixelbot robots. I want to take some of the mystery out of how programs get to run. In this article I’m all about the low-level run time part. I think it is worth a read, but then again I am a bit biased..

You can get the magazine in shops or buy a digital copy here.

Snowed In

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It even has the helecopter

They say that one of the best ways to give the gods a good laugh is to make long term plans. Well, we had made long term plans for today. These involved a trip to Harrogate, a nice meal out and a visit to, wait for it, a camera shop (and the Knitting and Stitching Show for others in the party). But then the snow came, followed by the weather warnings, followed by the traffic alerts. So we stayed home. Wah.

But we didn’t let that beat us. Turns out that you can buy Lego at Barkers, which is just a quick walk from our house. And it is right next to a lovely coffee shop. So it was out for a coffee, pick up the Lego Mars Rover that I’ve been coveting for months, and then back home to build it. It’s a lovely model with a really clever steering action. Then we went out for tea. It wasn’t the nice day we we’d planned, but it was very nice nonetheless.

Even Brokener

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the black thing at the bottom is a big capacitor for the flash.

We thought we’d have a look at one of my broken Nikon cameras today. The good news is that the back came off without too much hassle (once we found the screws behind the viewfinder surround). The bad news is that the picture above shows what you see next. The service manual now says you have to unsolder some of the ribbon cables and remove the rear circuit board. We are presently summoning up the courage to do this…

Learning the Data Protection Act - and Fixing the World

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I’m in the process of re-becoming a member of staff at Hull University. Things have changed a bit since I started. For one of the jobs I started back in the day the induction consisted of “Welcome to the department Rob. You’re giving the second year networking course. It starts next term”. Actually, I may be being a little unfair here. I think I did get sent on a DEC VMS system management course too.

Anyhoo, nowadays employers are much keener to make sure you know stuff. I’ve had to do seven training courses about things I thought I knew everything about but it turned out I didn’t. Today I did my Data Protection training. I knew a bit already, but what impressed me about this stuff was that people have sat down and thought about the implications of data breaches and what constitutes good behaviour by those holding data. Then they’ve made some sensible, enforceable, rules.

Now, if we can only make it illegal for companies to collect data about us when we publish things, and illegal use collected data to recommend other things, we might be on our way out of our current mess…..

I buy broken cameras so you don't have to

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What do you get if you buy a camera marked as broken? You get a broken camera. What do you get if you buy a camera marked as “tested and working - just needs new batteries”? You get a broken camera. My Nikon Pronea 6s has arrived and, although it looks lovely and makes all the right noises it also fails after I’ve taken a few shots. Oh well. I really like the look of the camera, and I like the idea of using old film. And the cameras are very cheap.

But my quest for a working one is going to have to continue…

Film Developing Frenzy

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Spent a very happy time developing some films today. I learned some stuff:

  • Using a tank which can develop three reels at a time is kind of a great idea, but you need to mix up a lot of chemicals.

  • It’s much easier to have multiple developing tanks so that you can develop lots of films in sequence without having to wait for the tanks and the spirals to dry out.

I took the pictures at Bridlington and Comicon.

West Yorkshire Cameras Closing

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One of my highlights of a trip to Leeds was a visit to West Yorkshire Cameras. They started off in the Corn Market and then moved to a spiffy shop in the Grand Arcade. I’ve bought quite a few bits and bobs from them over the years and always been impressed by their knowledge and enthusiasm for analogue photography.

And now they are closing. You can read a detailed explanation on their website. Essentially they took a look into their crystal ball and decided that the long term omens were not great. The only tiny piece of good news is that their closing down sale looks like it will be awesome. They are applying progressively larger discounts over time, so you can buy something at a reduced price or wait for the next price drop and gamble that nobody else will make a move on it.

Tests shot with the new old camera…

I thank them for their service over the years, and I wish them all the best for the future. And yes, I did buy a camera from them - for old time’s sake….

Great Hardware Meetup : Everything working by 6:30 pm

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Eveyrthing Working

We had a great Hardware Meetup last night. Not a huge number of people, but an awful lot of expertise. I took along a new ESP32 device I’d just received from China. I was planning to use it in place of the Wemos D1 Mini device that I’ve been using for ages. I was making the switch because I couldn’t find any drivers to connect a D1 Mini to my shiny new Snapdragon powered laptop. Imagine my amusement to discover that the new device I’d bought used the same CH340 usb interfaces as the D1 Mini and wouldn’t work either. Wah.

But then Ben didn’t believe me when I said that there are no CH340 USB-to-serial drivers available for my Snapdragon powered Windows 11 notebook. He did some digging and found me the manufacturer’s proper download site: https://wch-ic.com/downloads/CH341SER_EXE.html I installed the ones from this site and they worked a treat. This is a big win for me. It makes the new notebook even more perfect.

So then it was on to the project for the evening. I’ve been meaning to add a Connected Little Box which can display text messages. I bought a little LCD panel for the princely sum of 2.64 It comes with an adapter that lets you use it from I2C, which makes the wiring much simpler. I’ll do a detailed post about it later. We found the drivers, added them to my PlatformIO project and had the LCD panel working in about ten minutes. Pro tip: if you can’t see anything on the screen you should adjust the contrast.

So, half an hour before the end of the meetup I had got everything working that I’d brought with me. The next meetup is in two weeks on the 27th of November. I’ll have to bring along something more difficult next time.

In the meantime Brian and David were playing with a rotating Lidar sensor and Richard was showing off new kit and working on an old-school embedded device.

And we rounded if off with a nice meal at the Omlette. Good times.