Raspberry Pi Hardware Notes

I’ve done some small tidying up of the notes that we used for our Raspberry Pi Hardware sessions a couple of weeks back. You can download them from here. If you do use them in any way, I’d love to know how you get on.

Open Day and Saying Cheese

To be honest the day didn’t get off to the best of starts. I was crammed into a photo booth in Cottingham Post Office taking a picture of myself for a Russian Visa. Turns out that photo booths, like lots of other things in my life, weren’t really designed for someone of my stature. So I was trying desperately to get all of my head into the right part of the picture, repeatedly re-taking the picture and failing to get all of my apparently enormous face into the frame.

After numerous retries the system gave up on me and printed the tenth or so attempt. Fortunately it looks OK, and so my passport, along with lots of accompanying documentation, is now on the way to London and visafication.

The reason I’m after a visa is that I’m helping with the judging of the Imagine Cup World Finals the week after next. They’ve got some amazing judges, including the chap who invented Tetris,  and they’ve got Matt Smith, of Dr. Who fame, hosting the awards presentation.

I’m really looking forward to going along and taking part. Visa permitting. With a bit of luck the visa should be sorted on Monday and I can start choosing which gadgets to take…

Once I’d posted my visa application I shot straight into the university for an Open Day.

I did two talks, this is the first audience.

This is outside the library, we had our American Football Team, along with the rowers to show the kinds of things we get up to. 

This is the second sitting for my Open Day talk. Another great audience.

During the talks I mentioned the “Yellow Book” that we use to teach C#. You can download a PDF of the book from here. There are also some other free documents there too. All in all a great day, hope that everyone who made the trip found it worth their while.

3D Printing in Windows 8.1

Now, I’m not particularly old. But I can remember when the very idea of having your own printer was the stuff of dreams. Printers were places you went to when you wanted to have something printed. And as for printing in colour, that was beyond dreaming.And then the first dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers appeared, closely followed by laser printers and finally inkjets. And now everyone has a printer.

In the early days of printing, it was a bit of a nightmare. You had to have the right kind of printer, the right kind of software and the right kind of drivers to get anything sensible. And often the thing printed didn’t match the image on the screen, or was the wrong size or shape. Eventually things settled down. Standards were set and now you can buy a printer in the confidence that it will just plug in and work with your computer.

I reckon that 3D printing is following a similar trajectory. We are at the point where hardware is appearing and we need some standards so that it can be made available to the widest possible audience. My experience with the technology has left me thinking that a 3D printer is not yet an “appliance”, but that in the longer term the attractiveness of the technology means that pretty much everyone will want a device eventually.

That’s why I’m really pleased that Microsoft have announced support for 3D printing in Windows 8.1. This is really only a step on the road to widespread adoption, but it is a really good one.

The Case of the Broken Blog

I took this picture shortly after I arrived at the conference centre. Lovely sky.

Before I do a session I always test my demos. I’ve found that you really need to do this, as oddities in the network setup can sometimes catch you out. Anyhoo, I was happily (or rather non-happily) testing my file download demonstration and it got stuck. So I spent a painful while trying to get it to work, all to no avail. Then I found the problem.

My blog was broken. It was the source of the files that I was showing how to fetch, and it wasn’t there. Wah. So I re-wrote the demonstrations to use different servers (and local ones just in case everything broke again) and just as I’d finished this little exercise my blog came back again. Oh well.

The sessions themselves went nicely, and folks were polite enough to laugh at my jokes. You can find the Speech demos here and the Background Agents demos here.

 

These are some of the audience at my first session.

This is my demonstration setup. Note red rocket poised for lift off.

These are some of the audience for the second session. There are some more pictures on Flickr. Apologies if you arrived a bit later,, and aren’t on the pictures. Although then again you might not be that bothered…..

I love doing TechEd sessions, the audiences are always great, and today was no exception. Thanks folks.

Tomorrow I’m back on a play to head for home.

Update on Monday, July 1, 2013 at 09:55AM by Rob

The irony of this happening just after I'd done a post about the imporantance of paying for services that you can rely on has not been lost on me.

All I can say is that they responded to my cries for help really quickly, and they've just sent me another survey to find out how they did.

Hello Madrid

After a day of travel I’m now installed in the hotel in Madrid, nervously checking my demos and making sure that I don’t forget any plastic rockets for the sessions tomorrow.

The journey here was fairly uneventful, except for the “experimental road works” on the M62 as I was driving to Manchester Airport. The road works seem to exist for the sole purpose of finding out what happens if you reduce a busy three lane motorway to one lane. (The answer, by the way, is that you make everyone 25 minutes late).

If you are at TechED EU I’d love to see you at my talks tomorrow. Come and see me in room N12 at 12:00 to 12:15 talking about Speech on Windows Phone and at 3:15 pm lots of fun and games based around background agents. And you might win a rocket. Can’t say fairer than that.