PICO MIDI CheeseBox Version 3

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I’ve spent the last day or so writing code. Which has been great fun. The focus of all the effort has been my PICO MIDI Cheesebox which has had something of a makeover. I’ve now got a PCB based version which has an OLED screen in the middle. I’ve added messaging so that you see what you are doing when you press a button. I’ve also added full setting save and restore so that you can create a pattern and store it in the device. And this afternoon I spent some time making an arpeggiator. Such fun. I’ll put it on on GitHub once it works.

Dominion Drops Dead

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On Tuesday nights we play Dominion online. It’s a great game which manages to be different every time you play it, what with the huge range of cards and combinations. Tonight I was just about to put together an awesome power play (as was everyone else in the game apparently) and at exactly 9:00 pm the game died. Most annoying. We went from a closely contested competition to the login screen in the time it took the clock to strike 9. Wah.

We did have problems with games crashing a while back, but that happened at the end of the game. I even made a thing which would read the game log and try to compute the actual scores. This time it happens at a specific hour, which makes me think of timeouts or expirations. Oh well, it was great fun right up to the point that it wasn’t happening any more. And there’s every chance we’ll be back next week. We just might press the screenshot button a bit more frequently.

Antique Audio at the next Hardware Meetup 19th March

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I’ll bring along my tapedeck, we can see if it still works….

The next Hardware Meetup is on Wednesday the 18th of March starting at 5:00pm in Hull Makerspace. I’ve decided that this one will have an antique audio theme. If you have any old portable audio hardware bring it along to show it off. Or just come along and marvel at what we used to have to do to play music back in the day.

I might even dust it a bit before bringing it along

I’ll also be bringing a record deck and a few choice cuts…

Schrodinger's Pico Bluetooth Keyboard

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I’m trying to get Bluetooth working on a Raspberry Pi PICO using MicroPython. I want to make a keyboard that you can pair with a computer and then use without further connection hassles. ChatGPT is being very encouraging and upbeat about the task, but I’m not sure whether it is possible or not. I think I’ll only know that it can be done once I’ve got it working….

Update: I’m pretty sure this is impossible. The aioble library for MicroPython doesn’t support bonding and, although ChatGPT came up with all kinds of fictional ways of making this work, none of them are any good in the real world. Oh well. You learn as much from your failures as you do your successes……

Photography and Video Show 2025

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I went to the Photography and Video show last year and bought a camera. This year I didn’t buy a camera, but I did buy a lens or two (or three) along with some film. It was a great trip, although getting up at 5:00 am to catch the 6:02 am train wasn’t really one of the highlights. Kudos to Hull Trains though. I got from the local station to London and back without changing trains. The trains were comfortable and speedy and I got there in enough time to join the queue waiting for the show to open at 10:00 am.

No second hand camera purchases this time. Perhaps I’m growing up a bit. Perhaps I’ve bought them all already. Anyhoo, there were lots of interesting stands and a whole bunch of tempting offers.

They have these little tableau set up for you to photograph. I think the lady is saying “You’ve forgotten you guitar again haven’t you”. They even had a Lego camera.

The next show is in Birmingham in 2026. I’m already counting down to it.

iFixit Precision Electric Screwdriver

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I’ve been after a small handheld electric screwdriver for a while. I ended up getting this one from iFixit. It works very well. It has three leds that illuminate what you are working on. It is powered by a couple of AAA batteries and has enough torque for most tightening duties.

It’s one of those things that, once you’ve got one, you wonder how you managed without it. One thing you do need to remember is that it doesn’t come with any screwdriver bits. If you have already got some 4mm bits you’ll be fine though.

Organ Pipes and more at the Hardware Meetup

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If you’ve ever wondered what make those thundering notes you can get from an organ, you’re looking at the answer above. Simon brought it in to the hardware meetup this evening. Apparently he has a bunch of these, as you do. One for every key on the keyboard apparently.

This one is A sharp, as you can see. Ross had a go at blowing into the end of the pipe and it produced a note that might well have been A sharp. The next step is to obtain an air pump and see what kind of notes it can make…

Update: Ross is already there. Take a look at this. If you don’t hear anything it’s because you need pretty good speakers to hear the low note. On headphones it sounds amazing.

If you can make sense of the above we’d love to hear from you. One of our members has a Mitsubishi MC-8000 HiFi dating from 1980. It looks awesome, but it doesn’t work awesome. One of the issues is with the cassette deck. It looks simple enough…. Not. Investigations are continuing.

Ross had brought the next generation of his piano which is coming along nicely. Especially impressive is the way the volume of the notes is controlled by how hard you hit the keys.

Me, I was there with my latest chord keyboard. It’s nearly working….

Next meetup is on Wednesday the 19th of March. Let’s see if we get anything bigger or more complicated turning up then.

The hardest way to take photographs

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It was a lovely morning

We think we might have found the hardest way to take pictures. You start with a twenty year old “digital back” which you fit on the back of a sixty year old camera in place of the film magazine. Then you plug the back into a fifteen year old Apple laptop and take the whole lot down to Hessle foreshore near the Humber Bridge. Then you take some snaps.

Each photograph is sent over the wire into the laptop. You’re not really supposed to do it like this unless you are in a studio. One of us was carrying the camera. The other the laptop. From a distance it must have looked like I was being taken for a walk with my camera.

Then we came home, took the pictures off the laptop and did some tidying up. I really like the results. They are very sharp and detailed and the light first thing in the morning was lovely.

I’m not sure this will become my preferred way to take pictures, but I’m very pleased that we managed to make it work. I took some shots on film too, but I’ll have to send those off for processing.

Poetry for Neanderthals

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Spent some time today playing “Poetry for Neanderthals”. It’s a great little game which comes with an inflatable stick you can use to hit players with. The idea is simple enough. There are two teams. Team members take it in turns to describe the concept on a card using works of only one syllable. If anyone uses a multiple syllable word or otherwise messes up they get tapped on the head with the inflatable stick. Get as many words right as you can before the egg timer runs out. Then the next player from the opposing team gets to have a next, and probably wacked.

Once everyone has had a go cards are counted and the winners identified. Cards contain a simple word (for example milk) and also a two word phrase (for example chocolate milk). You get one point for the simple answer, three for the more complicated one and lose a point for every mistake and skipped card.

We won. Although the fact that we had one extra team member might have had something to do with it. As an icebreaker it is great fun. Strongly recommended.

Splendid Tech Session Tonight

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Hot on the heels of DDD North last weekend we now have more high quality technical content which has free food (thanks to Hull University for the spread). Tonight at the Tech Sessions we had two excellent talks.

First up was Martyn Coupland who has the kind of life that I want when I grow up. By day he pilots planes around the world. And at night he develops software using .NET (actually this might not be precisely how he divides his time, but he definitely does both). His talk was titled “Cleared for Takeoff: Navigating the Intersection of Aviation and Technology” and gave some great insights into the hugely complicated business of getting people from A to B safely through the air.

It was nice to see the views from his “office” at 30,000 feet but it was even more interesting to see the server room underneath the cockpit containing all the computers that keep the plane in the air. There are four copies of one crucial component, along with a box that contains the height above sea level of just about every point on the surface of the earth. Aviation tech has to be done right and this point was made time and again as systems were described. Everything was pilot-centric since they are the people who have to make decisions that are literally life and death. Very impressive.

Next up was Elliot Fearn talking about “Building a RAG-Based LLM with Vector Databases”. Elliot explained that RAG stands for “Retrieval Augmented Generation”. This is a technique for boosting the usefulness of a Large Language Model (LLM). An LLM takes in questions and gives you answers to them. Elliot gave a great explanation of how this process works, with individual tokens in a question being converted into vectors which are then mapped into the knowledge space of the LLM to produce a useful answer, one token at a time.

The RAG bit serves as a kind of “booster” pack of local knowledge which is combined with the content of the prompt string which is given to the LLM to get the answer. For example, you might ask an LLM about “sales”. This could mean that you want to know where things are being sold cheaply, or how well a marketing plan is working. If you have a system that puts the word “sales” in a marketing context by adding sales information to the prompt string you have better chance of getting a useful answer.

Elliot described systems that could help to automate this process, so corporate information could be packaged and formatted to be used in this way. Very interesting stuff with some nice demonstrations of the tech.

I really looking forward to the next session. If you want to join in go here on Eventbrite and follow The Tech Sessions.

Baker Street or Bust

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Great fun to photograph

Last year I acquired a pair of green cord trousers, a cardigan and a saxophone. I’m on my way to becoming a fully fledged beatnik. All I need is the hat and some skills. With that in mind I’m telling both my readers that from now on I will be reporting on saxophone practice at regular intervals.

It turns out that the saxophone is both tricky to play and very loud. But I have persevered. And I can now play any song which is comprised of the notes B, A and G. More notes later.

Tech Session at Hull University Thursday 27th Feb

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Yesterday I did a post about things you can do that will help you get a job in the future. One great thing to do is attend events, meet folks and learn new stuff. There’s an event this week which is just the kind of thing you should be going to. And you might learn something too. A group called “The Tech Sessions” has organised an event on Thursday evening this week at the University of Hull. They’ve got two speakers, Martin Coupland is talking about “Aviation’s Tech Lessons “ and Elliot Fearn is talking about building large language models. It starts at 6:60 pm and you can sign up here.

I know very little about either of these topics, but I’m looking forward to finding out more.

How to get job

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One of the wonderful things about DDD North yesterday was that a bunch of developers (and me) spent a big chunk of their lunch hour in a meeting with students telling them how get a job in this business. There was a lot of good discussion which I’ve boiled down into 10 points. I apologise if I’ve misquoted or misconstrued folks who were there - feel free to hit me in the comments…

  • Employers hire people who “get stuff done”. So, get some stuff done and tell the world about it.

  • Employers also hire people who they know about. So, get out there and meet them. Join user groups, go to conferences, contribute to open source. If you get it right, they call you before you call them.

  • Keep your bio brief and to the point but put in things that differentiate you from the rest. Recruiters are busy people. Put your technical skills and project experience right at the front of your details to encourage them to read more.

  • Don’t say “I can’t do that”. “I’ll find out more and get back to you tomorrow.” is a much better response. Then find out more and get back to them tomorrow.

  • The recruitment process can be a snake pit. Be prepared for industrial scale rejection and duplicity.

  • Get yourself into a situation where you can get lucky. And if you aren’t lucky try to take something from the experience and go on to the next one.

  • Work with people who aren’t software developers and learn to see the world through their eyes. Solutions aren’t just built by coders, there are lots of other folks involved and you need to be able to work with them.

  • Consider everything you do in terms of “how can I use this to promote my brand”. Even “train wreck” projects can be useful if you describe what you learned from them.

  • Keep learning. Your knowledge has a half-life of a few years. It will start to decay in usefulness as soon as you’ve learned it. (Although you should also remember that there are universal constants in terms of how you work with people)

  • Stay nice. I’ve found that nice people end up the happiest.

Making Stuff at DDD North

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What a great ajudience looks likE…

Well, that’s the presentation over. It’s been a while since I took an audience picture. I took this at the end of the presentation too. And they were still smiling. Thanks for that.

I’ve put the slide deck for the presentation here. If you actually decide to make something it would be lovely to hear from you about it. And if you are in Hull you are welcome to come along to our Hardware Meetups. They take place every couple of weeks in Hull MakerSpace at the top of the Central Library. The next one is on Wednesday 5th of March starting at around 5:00pm.

You don’t have to bring any hardware to the meetup, although I like to take things along to talk about. If you are thinking of building something (or if you aren’t sure what to build) then it woudl be lovely to see you for a chat about it.

Thanks to Derek for the picture