Thought for the Dazed

I've had to give up that Distance Learning course as I was having trouble seeing the teacher.

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Entries from October 7, 2012 - October 13, 2012

Saturday
Oct132012

Campus Open Day (again)

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We had our second autumn open day today. The weather started a bit grey, but it soon brightened up a bit and by the time I left the campus the place was looking very shiny. Two great audiences, thanks to everyone for coming to see us. I mentioned some links in my talk. Here they are if you didn’t get to note them down at the time.

Hull CompSci blog: http://hullcompsciblogs.com/

C# Yellow Book download: http://www.csharpcourse.com/

Departmental Website: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/computer_science.aspx

Where Would You Think: http://www.wherewouldyouthink.com/

My blog: http://www.robmiles.com/

Friday
Oct122012

New Embedded Stuff

There are quite a few new embedded toys that I’ve discovered just recently. Here are three.

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First up is the DAGU racer. This is a neat little Bluetooth controlled racing car. They’ve got it on discount at RoboSavvy at the moment. It comes with an Android app that you can use to control it, but they also expose the Bluetooth command set so that you can control it from anything, including Gadgeteer I reckon. It is powered by a tiny lithium ion battery and even comes with a set of stickers you can use to customise the racer. And for under twenty quid it was very tempting. So I got one.

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I got all excited when I first found out about the Electric Imp. This is a wireless embedded device that fits into an SD card socket. You can’t actually use it as a memory card but you can use it to control a connected net appliance. And you can get it for around twenty quid. My excitement dissipated quite a lot though when I discovered that every device is bound to the imp cloud service which is where it registers its data and where messages come from.

I’ve bought these kinds of devices before, my Chumby and Nabaztag rabbit worked in a similar way. The idea of the company behind them is usually that they don’t make much money on the devices themselves, but build a subscription model which lets them pay for the infrastructure by getting cash somehow from the users of each device. Snag is, if that doesn’t work and the company goes bust you are left with a paperweight.The folks behind the imp seem quite confident that they can make it work, and the service is free at the moment. But they are talking about $50 subscriptions for business users and stuff like that, so I think I’ll pass on this, amazing as it is.

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Now this I really do like. It brings you the best of the .NET Micro Framework, Arduino and Gadgeteer in a single board that costs less than thirty quid. You can feed it five volts and it just works. You’ve got an Arduino shield, three Gadgeteer ports, SD card, USB client and host and a space to put an Xbee or WiFi receiver. I’ve been looking at very simple devices that I’d like to make using the Gadgeteer and wanting a cheap, simple board that just gets things done. The FEZ Cerbuino Bee seems to fit that bill perfectly. For less than the price of a video game you get a device you can program with .NET, connect lots of Gadgeteer devices to and put onto WiFi at a bearable cost.

If you are learning C# and want to dip your toes into embedded development I can’t think of a better start. Lovely.

Thursday
Oct112012

No Gas

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At least we have electricity

Came home tonight to no gas. Which in my case (gas central heating) means cold house. A water leak had somehow got into the gas supply and as a result it had shut down.  They are having to dig up the road to find out where the problem is and we’ve turned on the PS3 and are watching Fringe to try and warm up.

Fringe is absolutely top notch telly. Where else do you get lines of dialogue like “So why do you think shape shifting soldiers from a parallel universe are stealing frozen heads?”. Why indeed?

Wednesday
Oct102012

Pi Arcade Joystick Interfacing

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I’m trying to get the entire department working on my Raspberry Pi powered gaming table. After sterling work by Peter on the cabinet, today it was the turn of James to lend a hand with the button and joystick interfacing. The kit that I’ve bought comes with a USB to button interface (you can see it at the bottom left of the above picture). all we had to do was wire the right buttons and switches to the pins on the interface, connect it to the Raspberry Pi and then remap the controls in the software to use the right switches. And the amazing thing is that we did just that.

By the end of the day we had an arcade game running and the only problem left to solve is getting the sound output to work. At the moment the Pi is putting the sound down the HDMI cable. We need to change this over to the 3.5mm jack socket and then I can get some amplified speakers connected.  At this rate it should be finished well before Christmas….

Tuesday
Oct092012

Hull College Come to See Us

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Please note that this is not all of Hull College, just the ones that came to see us.

I did one of my “well planned” sessions today. Well planned right up to the point that I found that it wasn’t where I thought it was (Two Lecture Theatre A’s on the same campus? Who’d have thought?) and that the place where it really was has a video project that doesn’t work with my lovely tablet.

Fortunately Martin was there to save my bacon and do his bit before I did my bit, so I had time to go get the less lovely, but actually working, laptop. And I got some laughs, which is always nice. Especially if they are in the places I’m expecting…..