Isle of Man Pictures

Not much to say today, but we did get some nice pictures

Exploring the Isle of Man

Got some holiday coming up? Fancy somewhere really nice? Go to the Isle of Man.

Never been there before, but I’ve been missing out. It has scenery that will give Yorkshire a good run for its money (which is saying something) and a fantastic coastline. It gives you the feel of being abroad (different money) without the hassle of being abroad (english money works fine too). We got to spend some time today exploring the island. The Isle of Man is a bit too near UK to be guaranteed good weather, but we found a good bit and headed for it. As you can see above, I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This gives the pictures a bit more impact. Sometimes this means they look a bit more like they did when you took them. Other times it means that you can go for artistic effects like these.

I’m using Photomatix Pro to combine three images taken at different exposures. The program has a bunch of pre-set configurations which can be tweaked to get some very nice effects. And the good news is that the forecast is even better for tomorrow.

C# Yellow Book 2012 Now Available

The latest version of the C# Yellow Book is now available for free download. You can get it here, or you can press the spiffy new short cut on this page.

There are a few changes. I’ve fixed all the mistakes that have been sent in (and probably added a few more). The section on Graphical User Interfaces now covers XAML rather than Windows Forms. And the text now mentions “The Wizard of Oz”

Gadgeteer LED Matrix

Earlier this week I was lucky enough to get hold of some LED Matrix modules for Gadgeteer. These give a decent sized array of 64 leds. They are really easy to program, and they use the GHI DaisyLink protocol, which means that they can all be controlled from a single Gadgeteer port. Each device links to the next to make a kind of daisy chain, which is where the name came from I guess. Each of the display modules contains an ARM processor which you can load with your own software (although you’ll have to be a pretty good developer to do that).

One other neat thing is that I managed to power four of them (as you can see above) using a single USB output from my PC. I was worried that having 256 leds powered from a single port might cause problems with the current available but they work fine.

At the moment my program just displays random patterns (like those computers they had in 70’s movies) but I’m going to have a go at displaying scrolling messages and even lo-res pictures. I reckon you could even get a very simple pong game working on a 16x16 display.

Staying with Gadgeteer, if you want to find out all about how my Tweet Printer works, there is a full writeup on the Gadgeteer website (http://www.netmf.com/gadgeteer/) where it is a featured project at the moment. I actually gave the first printer to the Gadgeteer team, I’m presently building a replacement.

USB3 Need for Speed

This car is presently in the entrance to our department. I’ve no idea why it is here, but it looks great and fits the subject. And I want to have a go at driving it….

Along with my Windows 8 installation I’ve also been working on beefing up my main machine a bit. I take a lot of photos. And I mean a lot. And some of them come out. The rest stay on my hard disk as I never throw anything away. And now the disk is full. Maplin (of all places) were selling a Seagate 3Gbyte USB3 disk for a very good price (less than 130 quids) and so I bought one and then hopped onto ebay (only the best will do) and spent another ten quid on a USB3 card, because my PC motherboard is one year old wildly out of date and doesn’t have the new high speed interface.

I popped the card in this evening. Then I took it out again, because I’d forgotten to remove the blanking plate from the PC case. Then I put it back and off we went. Seems to work OK. One tip, if you install a card like this in your PC and it has PC power supply connector on it you really should connect this up. Otherwise devices might try to draw more current than a PCI Express slot can deliver, which will end badly in any one of a number of ways.

Anyhoo, tests indicate that I’m getting around double the speed of my older USB 2 drive on the connection, up to around 58 MB/sec on the larger files. Not quite the 10X increase that USB3 is supposed to offer, but at around half the speed of my internal SATA drive I can live with that. These numbers come from the spiffy performance display that Windows 8 gives you for file copies:

Seeing as they are not raw speed readings, but rather more “real world” in their usefulness, I’m a happy bunny at the moment. The number above is a bit low because I’m moving lots of small files around, which always restricts the throughput.