Just present

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Something to remember: Presenting in front of people is a skill. Give an engineer a new thing to work with and ask them to use it and they will just do that. So treat presenting as a tool you need to learn how to use. Apply yourself to it in the same way. Have a go, learn from your mistakes and then have another go. You don’t have to look very far to find someone to present in front of. You could take it in turns next time you get together with a bunch of like minded souls.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that presenting in front of people is a skill that you are born with. It is something that you can learn. And if you are born to be good at presenting (lucky you), applying yourself to your craft has got to be a good idea.

Long articles are easier to write

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I’ve got an 4,000 word article to finish by the end of the week. I’d much rather it was 20,000 words. It turns out that longer articles are much easier to write. You just have to churn out the words. For a shorter article, where you want to get the same points out there, you have to write the longer one first and then figure out which bits can be thrown away.

Chord Keyboard Trainer

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ChatGPT is officially amazing. I wanted to make a chord trainer for my PICO powered chord keyboard. So I pasted the Python source for the device into ChatGPT and asked it to make a JavaScript program that could train a user on the chords. And, after a fair bit of discussion we’ve managed to make the program I wanted.

We did have some fun. ChatGPT was determined to put linefeed characters into string literals rather than ‘\n’, which made the program break a few times. The worst bug we found was that when you are entering text into the game and press the space bar this can re-trigger the “Start New Game” button to very confusing effect.

However, it now works. If you want to test your Micro Writing skills you can have a go. If you type a letter quickly, before the help layout appears, you get 5 points. Otherwise you only get one. You can use the other buttons to get a complete list of the keys.

You can find it on GitHub here. You can have a go with it here.

PICO Musicbox

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Say hello to the PICO Musicbox. It contains a Raspberry Pi PICO and uses an M5 Stack Synth module to make the sounds. There’s also an OLED display in the mix along with a rotary encoder. And of course some neopixels. You can see inside the box here. I’ve spent the last couple of days dropping out Circuit Python to make it all work together. If you fancy building one I’ll have the circuit diagram and software available soon, along with the STL files for the case.

Vintage Audio at the Hardware Meetup

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We had some lovely vintage audio stuff at the Hardware Meetup. Including Tracey’s amazing vertical record playing HiFi.

This is my portable tape recorder. By portable I mean that it has a handle on the top. I can’t believe that we used to carry things like this around just to have music along.

This is kind of portable and it does play music. And it does look vintage.

We had a saxophone too, which was super cool. Not sure what the theme of the next Hardware Meetup is, but it will be on April the second.

Mad Software

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For the last six weeks the car has been asking me to accept a change in terms and conditions covering the software in it. A cheery reminder pops up after five minutes of driving. But it won’t let me see the conditions of course. Because I’m driving.

So today I waited for the reminder in the car outside the house before I set off. There were several pages to be gone through and I didn’t read any of it. Mainly because I wanted to drive somewhere. I just clicked on OK and NEXT to get me through to the end and out. I’m pretty sure that the changes are so that when I drive past a Starbucks the car can tell me that latte is on offer at the moment.

I’m not sure how we got to this place, but something tells me it is not a place I want to be in.

Airecon 2025

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Went to AireCon 2025 today. It was awesome. Good company, good food and a great atmosphere. I did my rounds of the second hand game shop and bought a bunch of super-cheap games.

Get Lucky is a kind of reverse Cluedo where you try to kill Dr Lucky and stop other players by making him lucky enough to survive their attempts. Good graphics and some lovely writing on the playing cards. Trophies is a nice little “ice-breaker” game, comes in a tin and has a real trophy in it. Moo’s Cafe is fun for youngsters (and young-old people) and comes with a wooden spoon. Bucket of Doom is not as good as I thought it would be. Never been a fan of “Cards Against Humanities” type games and this is a bit like one. And I bought “Dead and Breakfast” just for the name (although it looks fun too). Thanks to the organizers and the staff who made everything work so well. Great fun. Now counting down to AireCon 2026….

Daleks can't see red

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The invisible dalek?

Back in the sixties I was reading a Dr. Who annual, as you do, and I happened upon the “Dalek Defence Guide” which gave helpful tips for surviving a Dalek invasion. Daleks were the number one science fiction baddy of the time, so I reckoned these tips were worth taking seriously. One of them was that, since Daleks can’t see the colour red, you should wear red clothes and hide behind a red post box if you see a Dalek going past.

This caused me all kinds of problems. If they can’t see red, how does this work? Does red appear black (in which Daleks would see you as black) or transparent (in which case the Dalek would see what was behind you). If they see red as transparent, how does the view of what is behind get through you for the Dalek to see. And how does the universe know to show the world behind you to the dalek, and not you behind the red thing?

Yep, I started over thinking things pretty early in life….

Update:

Thanks to the wonders of the internet I’ve found the original reference. You can read the entire Dalek World from 1965 here. I actually think the description makes a kind of sense. It’s not that red stuff is hidden, just that the dalek brain does not notice it as such. But I might be overthinking again….

PICO MIDI CheeseBox Version 3

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I’ve spent the last day or so writing code. Which has been great fun. The focus of all the effort has been my PICO MIDI Cheesebox which has had something of a makeover. I’ve now got a PCB based version which has an OLED screen in the middle. I’ve added messaging so that you see what you are doing when you press a button. I’ve also added full setting save and restore so that you can create a pattern and store it in the device. And this afternoon I spent some time making an arpeggiator. Such fun. I’ll put it on on GitHub once it works.

Dominion Drops Dead

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On Tuesday nights we play Dominion online. It’s a great game which manages to be different every time you play it, what with the huge range of cards and combinations. Tonight I was just about to put together an awesome power play (as was everyone else in the game apparently) and at exactly 9:00 pm the game died. Most annoying. We went from a closely contested competition to the login screen in the time it took the clock to strike 9. Wah.

We did have problems with games crashing a while back, but that happened at the end of the game. I even made a thing which would read the game log and try to compute the actual scores. This time it happens at a specific hour, which makes me think of timeouts or expirations. Oh well, it was great fun right up to the point that it wasn’t happening any more. And there’s every chance we’ll be back next week. We just might press the screenshot button a bit more frequently.

Antique Audio at the next Hardware Meetup 19th March

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I’ll bring along my tapedeck, we can see if it still works….

The next Hardware Meetup is on Wednesday the 18th of March starting at 5:00pm in Hull Makerspace. I’ve decided that this one will have an antique audio theme. If you have any old portable audio hardware bring it along to show it off. Or just come along and marvel at what we used to have to do to play music back in the day.

I might even dust it a bit before bringing it along

I’ll also be bringing a record deck and a few choice cuts…

Schrodinger's Pico Bluetooth Keyboard

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I’m trying to get Bluetooth working on a Raspberry Pi PICO using MicroPython. I want to make a keyboard that you can pair with a computer and then use without further connection hassles. ChatGPT is being very encouraging and upbeat about the task, but I’m not sure whether it is possible or not. I think I’ll only know that it can be done once I’ve got it working….

Update: I’m pretty sure this is impossible. The aioble library for MicroPython doesn’t support bonding and, although ChatGPT came up with all kinds of fictional ways of making this work, none of them are any good in the real world. Oh well. You learn as much from your failures as you do your successes……

Photography and Video Show 2025

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I went to the Photography and Video show last year and bought a camera. This year I didn’t buy a camera, but I did buy a lens or two (or three) along with some film. It was a great trip, although getting up at 5:00 am to catch the 6:02 am train wasn’t really one of the highlights. Kudos to Hull Trains though. I got from the local station to London and back without changing trains. The trains were comfortable and speedy and I got there in enough time to join the queue waiting for the show to open at 10:00 am.

No second hand camera purchases this time. Perhaps I’m growing up a bit. Perhaps I’ve bought them all already. Anyhoo, there were lots of interesting stands and a whole bunch of tempting offers.

They have these little tableau set up for you to photograph. I think the lady is saying “You’ve forgotten you guitar again haven’t you”. They even had a Lego camera.

The next show is in Birmingham in 2026. I’m already counting down to it.