Using the Texas eZ430 Watch with the .NET Micro Framework

Some time back I got a Texas Instruments EZ430-Chronos watch. One of my better investments. For only fifty dollars you get an LCD watch which you can program. What’s more, it contains a whole bunch of sensors and can communicate with a host device over a wireless link. Around the same time I got a ChipworkX board from GHI Electronics.

So, one lunch hour I decided to try and make them work together. It turns out to be very easy. The watch has a wireless connector (you can just see the PCB at the top of the picture) that appears as a USB serial port to whatever you plug it into. Since the ChipworkX board has USB hosting and serial port support it was an easy matter to get the two talking. A bit of searching and I found the accelerometer protocol for the watch, and away we went.

If you are interested, I’ve created a Watch class that abstracts the watch behind an object that will fire off events when the watch delivers new accelerometer readings. You can find a sample .NET Micro Framework project here.

08249 Robot Fun and Games

These are the first ever cohort on our 08249 Electronics and Interfacing module. On the left we have the controller team, on the right we have the robot team. Today they got together to link their two .NET Micro Framework programs together so that the controller could send the robot off to traverse a room and measure the size of it. The packet of cigarettes that you see near the robot is actually a really important part of the setup. This is what they stood the robot on to make sure that it didn’t jump off the desk and run away when they were testing the motor code…

It was very interesting to watch the two teams work together as they developed a communications protocol and then implemented it at each end. By the time they had finished they the two devices passing messages backwards and forwards and actually understanding what was going on.

Great fun. Next we are are going to have around 27 or so students on this module. Time to buy a few more robots methinks.

Making Great Games

I’ve spent pretty much the entire day marking. I’m now giving grades to everything I see. I’ve been impressed with what our students have been getting up to this year, it always surprises me how many different takes you can get on the same problem. This year we were making Breakout. Many of the games that they made were good enough to go to market. Some have had really poor presentation but fantastic gameplay. Others went the other way, with lovely graphics but nothing worth playing. Some thoughts for game writers:

Get someone else to play. You might spend so much time admiring your scrolly graphics and particle effects that you forget that it has to be fun. Get other folks to play. You know you are on a winner when you find people playing who become better at your game than you are. And won’t let you back onto the machine to work on it.

Embrace serendipity. Some of the games had really strange collision behaviour that I’m sure wasn’t intentional. Their ball careered through bricks in really odd ways. However, this made the gameplay much more interesting than some of the better behaved ones. If this sounds like some folks got more marks for writing imperfect code I must add at this point we weren’t marking gameplay as such, this was strictly a programming exercise. But it did bring home to me that if something strange happens you should investigate what is going on and not always fix it. Sometimes these things make good features.

Give the player control. Some games had fantastic graphics, sound, etc etc but the ball always bounced the same way off the paddle. Boring. Other games had very poor graphics but amazing ball and paddle interaction that really let you aim at things on the screen. Much more fun. Consider what happens at your average game of table tennis in real life. Not much happening graphically, but a fantastic range of shots available from a simple ball and bat combination.

Put the graphics on after the gameplay is sorted. In real life game developers often use empty “placeholder” graphics when building the game. This forces them to think about gameplay first. No amount of graphics will compensate for poor gameplay. So get the gameplay right before anything else, and then use the graphics to add value afterwards.

Enjoy your games. I got the feeling from many of the games that the students had really enjoyed writing them. There were little touches and flourishes that you would only add if you were really having fun writing the code. This is great, and just how it should be.

Another Hull Winner

Earlier this month Josh won a flashy tablet on the back of his Windows Phone development, and now Stephen has got himself a prize as well. If you don’t win the HTC Steven you might still stand a chance with the Optimus Quest II which will be launching here soon.

The Thank You Economy

I’m trying a new thing where I read more books. I’ve worked out that a book on Kindle is less than the price of a couple of packets of cigarettes. If I read a book in two days (unlikely) this will still cost me less than a tobacco habit. And it is much less likely to kill me.

So, today on a whim I downloaded a copy of “The Thank You Economy” after I saw it in Joey deVilla’s blog. I’ve started reading it and it is rather interesting. It makes the point that in a world of connected and savvy consumers, who are going to Tweet, Blog and Facebook any bad customer experiences, a business can’t afford to upset folks in the way that it used to. Furthermore, if you give really good customer experiences you are creating a sales force out of the users of your products.

Apple are brilliant at this. I remember being told an awestruck tale of a dropped (and shattered) iPhone which was ‘Just replaced’ in an Apple Store. This is actually very good business sense. The hardware costs Apple very little, they can write the expense off against tax, and if their delighted customer tells ten people the story and a couple of them go Apple rather than Android then it will have paid for itself.

A couple of thoughts though. Some people seem just born to complain. I’ve stood behind examples of this genre in queue the Post Office, and I’m sure you have too. These folks have presumably got Twitter and Facebook accounts, so I wonder how this policy works with them. With a bit of luck the book will cover this a bit later on.

The other thing I was thinking was how we could apply this to my business, that of education. We work hard at Hull to can give students a great experience, but at the end of the day we also have to give some marks out which will not always be well received. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made was to hand out my teacher assessments after I’d given out the results on a course. Some of the students (who had not actually applied themselves very well and done badly as a consequence) took it upon themselves to deliver payback and the comments were so good they got stuck on the staff room wall for all to enjoy.

I’ve not finished the book, but I’m enjoying reading it. Like most good business books it is full of things that make you say “Well Duh!”, but you might not have actually thought of. It is worth a read, and will certainly do you more good than 40 cigarettes.