Red Nose Day Door of Mystery

Sometimes a good idea can take away your entire Sunday.

“The Door of Mystery” is an unique fundraising idea that takes the old style, simple, raffle idea and turns it into a new, high-tech, complicated form. To take part all you have to do is buy one of our special “Red Nose Day” tags for two pounds and then take it to “The Door of Mystery” at my office in the Robert Blackburn building to find out your entry number. Then, at the presentation on Friday we will build a “Door of Mystery” machine of our own and then use it to pick the winner of the competition. The prize, courtesy of Microsoft Research Cambridge, is a Gadgeteer kit of your own.

The tags contain an RFID chip which is read by a Gadgeteer board inside the door unit. The unit contains an SD card with a list of RFID values which are mapped to entry numbers. Show your tag to the door and it will tell you your magic number.

This is the guts of the prototype device. I’ve cannibalised my Tweet Printer case to use for the project. I’m going to print a proper one later. If I get round to it.

I’ve got 100 RFID tags to sell for Comic Relief. Each one has been keyed to the system and you can buy them from the departmental office. Perhaps we’ll think of other uses for them over time..

You can sponsor the whole shebang over at: http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/robmiles

Profound Question

If you found something that you’d lost, but you had already mentally prepared yourself for buying a replacement, can you now spend that amount of money on some other gadget without any guilt problems?

Off to Greenwich

After a few days of early rises, what better way to spend a weekend than getting up at 5:45 to catch a train, a bus, a train, the tube and the Dockland Light Railway (DLR) to go to Greenwich.

Glad I went though. Lovely place. As well as the Cutty Sark they also have the Royal Observatory and of course the meridian. The weather was as kind to us as we could have hoped for, in other words it didn’t rain, and there was even a rather nice show in the planetarium.

Speechifying Windows Phone 8 at TechDays 2013

This is the final audience of my TechDays sessions as they arrived.

Today I did the last session for TechDays 2013 NL. We were making Windows Phone talk to us and make sense of what we were saying. Another splendid audience and another bunch of files that you can download with the presentation and all the source code. Heading home this evening, once I’ve spent the afternoon playing with my latest “Gadgeteer idea”. That rhymes, which is useful.

Gadgeteering at Tech Days

The audience for my “Gadgets Everywhere” session was even larger than the phone one. I think they came to watch the demos fail….

Did my final session of the day on the Gadgeteer at TechDays.  A great audience, a whole bunch of demos that worked, and a whole bunch of superb questions including one which, again, I didn’t have a proper answer to. I do now though. The question concerned the availability of “watchdog” support for the .NET Micro Framework. At the time I said that I didn’t think that it was available. Turns out I was wrong. Watchdog support was introduced into Version 4.0 and you can use it to make sure that a system will automatically reset if the controlling program gets stuck for some reason.

A happy owner of a bright orange, Ultimaker printed, Lumia 820 cover.

During the talk I mentioned Una, my 3D printer, and how easy it is to use such a device to print cases for Gadgeteer devices. You can even get the designs for the Gadgeteer boards on CodePlex. I had some printed gadget cases, but I’d also brought along a bright orange Lumia 820 case that I printed last week from this design. I figured it might go down well in the Netherlands. And so it turned out.

Examining Gadgets

Camera Art

Thanks to another amazing audience. You can find the slides and the demos here.