Eurovision and Gadgeteer

Well, Sweden won, but I spend the evening in front of the telly getting a Sytech camera talking to a GHI Gadgeteer Spider board.

I’ve got the camera capture working and even managed a tiny bit of image processing before the final performance. Great fun.

How to sell on eBay

Ebay is probably seen as old hat these days, but if, like me, you have a gadget habit to pay for and limited funds, then one way to get some cash is to sell some of the gadgets that you have around the place. I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. Here are my tips for successful sales:

• Give the auction plenty of time to run, and let it end at a time when folks are sure to be around and take part in a “bidding frenzy”. I quite like Sunday evening for this.
• Use Buy It Now. I had a lot problems with people making “kamikaze bids” at the last moment to try and snipe the auction. The problem is that if two people are using this “cunning” trick the result is an enormous bid that they is promptly rescinded, leaving you stuck with no sale. The good news is that you do get to hear some great excuses from people about why they did the bid, and how the cat must have pressed the keys, etc, etc, but the bad news is that you have to run the auction over again. For some reason, Buy It Now sales, where you set a price you will instantly sell it for, stop these folk. If you set a price around 10 pounds or so less than the last one sold for then you will at least get the market rate or near enough. You can use Completed Listings on a search to find out how much this was. This can be depressing, but remember the thing you are selling is only worth what people are willing to pay. If charge what you think it is worth you will just lose your listing fees. And sometimes people get so carried away bidding that you actually get paid more than the Buy It Now price, which is rather nice.
• Have it packed and ready to post before you put it up for sale. As far as I’m concerned, the gadget is gone as soon as the listing goes live. Purchasers expect to get their item as soon as they have paid for it, and so you must have it down at the Post Office the following day and away on Next Day delivery.
• Do some research on postage prices. I’ve got stung once or twice where the thing I was selling turned out to be a lot more expensive to post than I expected. As a guide, a small mobile phone will cost around 7 pounds for next day, insured, delivery. A laptop will cost around 25 pounds to send. Of course you should always use tracked, signed for, delivery.
• Use PayPal. And nothing else. Nuff said.
• Be nice. When you’ve posted the item, send the tracking number in an email so that they can watch the progress of their parcel. And you can use the tracking number to make sure that it has been collected at the far end.
• If you are buying a gadget that you might fall out of love with one day (it does happen) then keep the box and all the bits so that you can send out a complete package if you do sell it. This helps with both the price and the speed of the sale. And don’t lose the driver disks.

Imagine Cup World Finalists Announced

The World Finalists for the Imagine Cup Software Development Challenge have just been announced. All 72 of them. You can find the list here. I’m really looking forward to seeing them at the Finals in Australia.

One thing I forgot to do a while back was to give a shout out to Team WykeWare who won the Hull University heat of the Imagine Cup and got to compete in the UK Finals. Kudos to Katherine Fielding, Samuel Armstrong, William R Dann and David Hart. Good work people, and I know you are enjoying the prizes that you got.

Getting Started with Gadgeteer

WE had the folks from Microsoft Gadgeteer here to see us yesterday. They brought with them all kinds of cool interfaces that I’m looking forward to playing with, after I’ve finished marking. If you’ve not come across Gadgeteer before it is a .NET Micro Framework based platform for creating, well, er, gadgets.

If you’ve ever wanted to create a data logging, remote controlled, catflap. Or a GPS-enabled TV remote, or a motion detecting chicken counting camera, etc etc, then Gadgeteer gives you the modules to plug together to make the hardware and Visual Studio and C# to write the software, including in device debugging of your code.

There are a huge number of modules available now including camera, LCD panel, gyro, compass, lights, switches, multi-io boards, barometer, soil moisture sensors, heart rate sensors,  Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS, GPRS, infra-red, ethernet, USB Host and USB client. Plus you can bring out the individual signals from the processor and use them directly.

You can get started with the Fez Hydra Basic Kit, which you can see above. This costs around the same as a video game and a half. The sensors range from a fiver to quite expensive (for things like the VGA adapter, if you need it). If you want to get started in embedded development, or have an idea for a device and want to make it come to life, the Gadgeteer is a great place to start, particularly if you already have C# skills.

We have been using the Gadgeteer’s older brother, the .NET Micro Framework, for the last couple of years and it has been a very successful means of introducing students to the joys of making hardware do stuff. If you want to have a go with this kind of thing you should take a look.

If you are a student at Hull and you have have a really good idea for a device, and you want some hardware to play with over summer, then come and see me and I’ll see if I can find a kit to loan you.

Name the console

Well? Can you?