Hull Pixelbots at BBC Radio Academy on Sunday

If you are heading to the BBC Radio 1 Academy next Sunday, look out for Hull Pixelbots. I'm taking a few robots (including Crystal Masie) for us to play with. 

I Hate the word Easy

If there's one word that the English language could really do without, I reckon it's the word easy. It's one of those words that you shouldn't ever use because it never helps the situation. 

If I'm trying to do something and you tell me that it's easy that doesn't help. It just makes me even more concerned because I can't do it. And if I finally manage to do that thing, the knowledge that it was considered easy completely devalues the achievement. 

Don't say "It's easy". Say "You can do this". 

Pint of Science

Thanks for being a great audience tonight folks. Such fun. 

Rob at "Pint of Science" on Monday Evening

I'm doing a bit of talking tomorrow night. It's as pat of the "journey inside the human body" part of the "Pint of Science" talks in Hull. I'm going to be talking about whether or not we can make "Artificial Brains".  It's a look at artificial intelligence, computer software, killer robots and what we should really be afraid of.

And there are giveaways. You can sign up here. (please note that the 37 on the screenshot above might be out of date soon - especially when people find out that I'm coming along....)

Judging Three Thing Game

I stole this picture from David Parker

One of my fondest memories of working at Hull University was the Three Thing Game hackathons. Teams spent a chunk of time developing a game based on three "things". What they came up with was always impressive.

David was kind enough to ask me to help with the judging on the latest competition, so I headed into the university this afternoon to see what was going on.

Answer, a lot. More than 80 students. Over thirty teams. APD providing pizza,  Lee Stott and Simon Jackson with game ideas and devices, Adam from BetaJester, the Visr crew .  Just like old times. Only better. 

I saw some awesome games and had some great conversations with students, some new, some I knew. Unfortunately I had to zoom off just before the prize giving, but Lee has got some great pictures on his Twitter feed. 

Congratulations to the Hull team for running such an awesome competition. 

Loading FreeCad designs into Paint 3D

I've got lots of things I've designed using the lovely FreeCAD program. I wanted to play with them in Paint 3D in Windows 10 Creators Edition. If you want to do this too, this is how:

FreeCad doesn't seem to support a format that Paint 3D understands. You'll need to use a converter program to do this. I've found a free program at NCH Software that seems to do the trick.  First thing you need to do is download and install the program. 

Then, in FreeCad, select all the elements of the model that you want to export in the editor. Then select File>Export from the FreeCad menu to display the Export Dialog:

Select the "Wavefront OBJ" file type as you can see above. Give the file a sensible name, and then click Save.

Now you need to convert the OBJ file into a 3MF file. Open up Spin 3D. Select Add File (the big plus) and add your file. You can add lots of files if you like. 

I've found that models need to be rotated for some reason (perhaps because the coordinate frames of reference are different). Click the Effects button in the bottom left to ask the Spin program to do this for you.

You want to rotate -90 degrees about the X axis. Click the "Apply Offsets to Objects" checkbox and then put -90 in the Rotation X box, as shown above. Then click OK to close the Effects dialog.

Make sure that you've got the output format set to 3md as you can see above, and then click the Convert button on the bottom right hand side of the Spin 3D window. Your design will now be converted into a 3mf file that you can import into Paint 3D. 

I even managed to put the design into the Remix 3D site for people to download and play with. You can find it here.

Hull Pixelbots on News at Ten Tonight

ITN are doing a feature about Hull and c4di are in it. Yay! John asked me if they could get some shots of Hull Pixelbots in action. 

Could they ever.

They were most helpful. After they'd finished I asked If I could take a shot "For the blog". Not only were they happy to help, but the cameraman set up his camera again so that I could get a good looking result. 

As far as I know, the item is going out on News at Ten on ITV (that's channel 3 in old money) tonight. 

Update:

Well, the items came and went. And there were Hull PIxelbots there. Kind of "blink and you miss it" stuff, but even so it's still News at Ten....

Guardians of the Galaxy 2

Guardians of the Galaxy films seem to use a different set of colours from other science fiction films. They seem to use all of them.

If you like your action bold, incredible and full of snappy comebacks then you'll like this latest instalment of the franchise. Just as you would have liked the first one.

I was talking to someone who had stayed out 'till after midnight to see the first showing of the new film and he was a bit "Meh" about it, but I reckon the film is lot better than "Meh".

The characters develop a bit. We get some new ones. An old one is killed off to make for a bit of pathos. And Sylvester Stallone makes an appearance. What's not to like?

SatNav and NavSat

We went from Hull to Harrogate on Sunday. And then, because we wanted to get home, we went from Harrogate to Hull. On the way back the sat. nav. tried to send us a different way from the one it used for the outbound journey.

I hate this. It happens most of the times that I go somewhere and then, surprise, surprise, come home again. It reminds me of one of my favourite railway station jokes:

Customer: "I'd like to buy a return ticket please."
Ticket seller: "Where to?"
Customer: "Back here of course...."

Anyhoo, for any navigation software writers out there, here are a couple of tips for your next version. 

1. If I try to plot a route that seems to be the direct reverse of the one I've just driven, just reverse the route and give it straight back to me. 
2. If you're planning a route from A to B, plan it from B to A as well and compare them. Then pick the best one. 

Rob on MasterChef

We're in the finals week of MasterChef, a BBC cooking competition that is taking up more telly time than I'm happy with to be honest.

I'm afraid I could never take cooking (or indeed anything in life) as seriously as these people do. There's undoubtedly a lot of passion, effort and skill being applied to make these amazing meals, but I can't help thinking that everyone is trying a bit too hard here. After all, it's just food. Right

I'd love to have a chance to take part. I can imagine the hushed and reverential commentary:

"...and Robert is preparing his signature dish, Sausage and Potato Surprise. He's thrown the potatoes in the oven and now he's playing Mario Kart on his Nintendo Switch......"

Eat Black Cheese

We went to the BBC Good Food show today. Great fun. Free samples. And, this year, Black Cheese. It's cheese, but with charcoal in it. And it tastes amazing.  The Nibble Nose Cheese Company do some very nice cheeses. I can also recommend their caramelised onion one. 

Buy this Arduino Book

If you're looking for a book about the Arduino that is stunning value for money, just head out to your local newsagents and track down a copy of the latest Teach In from Everyday and Practical Electronics (or EPE). It provides an excellent introduction to the Arduino device and then, as a bonus, adds a bunch of chapters about PIC development and some other good stuff.

Like all of the EPE publications, this is well written, technically accurate and laid out in an easy to read manner. And you even get a CD-ROM with lots of useful stuff on it too. 

Full Disclosure: Many years ago I helped Ian and Tony to write a Teach-In for the magazine. It's nice to see that Ian is still writing for them, there's a lovely piece from him about state machines in the back of this very publication. 

A must-buy in my opinion.

Cheer Yourself Up with Writing Therapy

Not had a great day to be honest. The exhaust fell off the Cube and a bunch of food in the freezer got spoilt when the door stuck open. 

One way to cheer yourself up is to get lost in a good book, so I'm doing just that; writing chapter 3 of Begin to Code with Python.

Great Hardware Meetup at c4di

Just had one of our best Hardware Meetups of the year. Not that the others haven't been great, but at this one we had loads of new members, lots of excited talk and some really interesting hardware that folks had brought along. We've still got room for more folks though. If you fancy coming along to the meetups you can find out more here.

If you're having bother finding us, we're in the bottom of the shiny gold c4di building. Doors open at 6:00pm or so. 

Al Stewart - Back to the Bedsit tour

If you're of a certain age, like me, then you'll remember Al Stewart. His Year of the Cat album is one of the best records ever made. With Time Passages running it a close second. Both albums had amazing cover art too. Number one wife spotted that he was playing live in Hull tonight as part of his "Back to the Bedsit" Tour. 

Of course I got tickets. 

There were just three musicians on the stage. Dave Nachmanoff, Tim Renwick and Al Stewart himself. And the sound was awesome. The show started with a solo spot from Dave Nachmanoff, which was excellent, and then Al Stewart hit the stage with him for some songs and stories. The stories were a nice element. Any anecdote which contains the phrase "..and then Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel turned up in a silver Rolls Royce...." is alright by me. 

Tim Renwick was introduced as "the man who did all the impressive guitar playing on my albums" and he's lost none of his style. The solos were note perfect and sounded really good. And three really well played guitars (and a bonus violin on one track) made for some splendid versions of some of the classics, including the "Year of the Cat" song of course. 

A great night out, if you've got fond memories of the old albums (and have kept your vinyl originals) then you won't be disappointed.

The Secret Science of Superheros is out in August

Last year I went to Salford and wrote a chapter of a book. In a weekend. It was fun. And on the 10th of August you'll be able to buy the book with my chapter, and quite a few other ones too. 

You can pre-order it now. I'm going to have to get a copy. I've completely forgotten what I wrote......

Developing for Unity and HoloLens at NASA Space Apps Challenge

I've always said that a hackathon is a great place to investigate new technology. It's an occasion where you can spend time concentrating solely on something, and that can be both instructive and useful. So, when I signed up for the Nasa Space App event I was keen to try something new.

I had a tiny go with Unity a while back, which was fun, but I've never written code for a Microsoft HoloLens. Number one son had an idea for an app that let you see where satellites are in the sky or in the ground. The idea was that it would use satellite data to predict positions and then render them in a way that was locked to your present position and orientation. Then you can look around and see what is up there, even through the surface of the earth you're standing on. 

It was quite an objective, particularly as neither of us had developed for the HoloLens before. But we thought we'd have a go. Number one son was in charge of getting the satellite data and doing things with it, while I looked at finding and displaying a globe. 

You can get the Unity framework here. It's free for personal use. If you want to make HoloLens applications you'll need some other things which you can find out about here.  You don't need a physical HoloLens to get started, there's an emulator you can use to find out what your apps will look like. I managed to run the emulator, Unity and Visual Studio on my Surface Pro 3 with 8 Gb of memory and it worked OK (although it got a little upset when I tried to load Adobe LightRoom as well....).

Number one son was using a MacBook Pro for his part of the development, so he installed the Mac version of Unity and the .NET framework and set to. I was amazed that you can do HoloLens development on a Mac, but when we took his code and moved it to the Surface Pro it worked fine, which I found astonishing. Even compiled dll files added as assets moved across.

A Unity solution is driven by the assets that it contains. These can be images, models, scripts, dll files, shaders, sounds and lots of other different things. You create scenes by bringing assets together and create behaviours by binding scripts to events. The scripts can be written in C#. I really like that. 

The items in a scene are fiercely hierarchical. Changes a container will affect the things in it. Scripts can be bound to objects and there are start and update behaviours that you fill in to get your scripts to act on your objects. Variables in your scripts can be mapped onto elements in game objects and used to affect their appearance and behaviour.

If you've played with game development in XNA you'll find the "set things up and then update them every frame" way of working very familiar. But it is both more powerful and more confusing, in that every item in your game can have its own start and update, rather than being driven from a single, central, game engine. You can run your game in the editing environment at any time, and you can turn elements on and off at will. 

Unity have created an asset store that plugs directly into game projects so that it is very easy to find paid (and free) items that you can include in your game. In no time at all we'd found a really nice globe and I'd kind of managed to get it into a Unity project.

There are some settings that need to be customised in Unity for HoloLens development. You can do this by hand (there are instructions here) or you can find a ToolKit that automates the process. 

You create your software in Unity and then use it to build a Visual Studio solution that is compiled and deployed to the target device. We had the HoloLens attached to the Surface Pro via a USB cable, and we ran the program that way. You can use WiFi deployment too, but one of the golden rules of hackathons is that once you've got something to work you stop working on it and move on to the next problem.

Number one son made awesome progress. He found some tools online for computing orbits and even tracked down some 3D models for the satellites themselves. I learned a lot (which is software engineer speak for went more slowly) but I did manage to get a globe displayed and spinning.

With half an hour to go before judging we brought the software over from the Mac, fixed a tiny issue with exceptions in the satellite code and then built and deployed the program to the HoloLens. And then the problems started.

Everything was upside down and wrong way round. The code worked fine in Unity on the PC, but on the device it was wrong. And, since we'd not done anything that could cause this behaviour, we didn't really know how to fix it. Not good. 

After a bit of frantic searching we managed to find this which fixed the problem. By turning off an apparently irrelevant option (MSAA) we got the code to work. This was very annoying. There is no mention of this issue in any of the release notes anywhere. It means that anyone who carefully follows the "getting started" sequence for the HoloLens would be rewarded with a solution that does not work properly and no information as to how to fix it. Not good. 

I was really impressed by the ease with which you can get started and the power of the HoloLens itself. I'm going to try and hang on to my loaned device for as long as I can.

Space Apps Challenge Judging

A tense moment in the judging.....

That was such fun. At the end we had four teams that produced projects that gave Derek, our judge, some meaty developments to get his teeth into. In the end the overall winner was the Fire Finder app, although everyone who took part produced some lovely results. 

I was part of Team "What'sUp", trying to build a HoloLens application that let you look into the "sky" (or the ground) and see what satellite are around relative to your position. It was my first foray into Unity and HoloLens development and it's worthy of a blog post all it's own. Which it will get....

You can find details of what the teams got up to here. Many thanks to c4di for the use of their lovely work area and to Dileepa for hosting the event. And getting us pizza.

Everyone who took part had a whale of a time. All of the starters finished with a working solution. Here's to next year.

NASA Space Apps Challenge

We started our NASA Space Apps Challenge at c4di first thing this morning. We've got teams looking at the NASA challenges and getting to grips with them. We've got satellite trackers, fire reporting systems, solar power simulations and orbiting robots. And another 24 hours or so to finish.....

..although of course it's really all about the stickers...and the pizza....

Mario Kart 8 on Switch

So today, in the middle of getting ready for the Space Apps Challenge, I nipped out to Toys'r'us to get a copy of Mario Kart 8 for my Switch. I've found that the toy retailer is a good place to buy games. The prices rival Amazon's, and this weekend they were giving 10 pounds off any sale of fifty pounds if you have a Toys'r'us membership card.

I do now.

I was intrigued to see how the Amibos work with Mario Kart and so I bought some (which actually came close to free once I've factored in the discount).  The Amibos I've got unlock extra outfits. Fun, but not a must-have I suppose. 

The game is Mario Kart. No surprises there. Although you get lots and lots of tracks, including ones that were previously extra purchases. You also get the ability to hold two weapons rather than one, and there are some new battle tracks. I loved playing previous versions and I love playing this one. Particularly as I'm getting a high quality game experience on a hand held device. 

The more time I spend with the Switch the more I like it. I've put in hours on games simply because I can. Rather than traipsing upstairs and firing up the console, I can put in a few laps in front of MasterChef. I've been told that half the population of Switch owners went out today and bought Mario Kart. I guess the other half will be buying their copytomorrow.