May Meetup Fun and Games

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Apologies to Ross who arrived to late to be in the picture.

We had our May meetup last night. We had some great chats about this and that. I was showing off the latest release of the Connected Little Boxes system and it actually worked.

Brian has been experimenting with a cheap lidar system. The spinning bit has a distance sensor and should be able to “see” objects around it. I want to try putting one on a pixelbot. Brian is getting data out of it, but it is not terribly sensible just yet. However, that’s not stopped me buying one to play with. If you fancy getting one too you can find them here.

Bluetooth Location Tracking at the Hardware Meetup

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We’re still having regular Hardware Meetups at the MakerSpace in Hull Central Library. First Wednesday of the month. Start around 6:00pm. Bring hardware to show off or problems you want to talk about.

Today Martin brought along some nifty Bluetooth location tracking hardware to show us. The device on the end of the stick (in the picture) is being tracked by four carefully positioned devices on the table. We could wave it around and the laptop showed the realtime position. It was awesome. To think this is being done using radio is amazing. One day we might use it to find our way around airports and public buildings.

I took along my big camera (took 1 picture) and a robot dog. Great fun was had.

Hardware Meetup

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A good hardware meetup is one where you don’t have time to take pictures because you are too busy talking. By that standard the meetup this evening was a great success. But unfortunately there are no pictures. There was a great range of discussion covering all kinds of stuff, from Pure Data to new Bluetooth standards for device location.

The next Hardware Meetup will be on the 1st of March, starting at 6:00 pm at Hull MakerSpace in the Central Library. Come along. We’d love to see you.

Christmas Meetup Fun at Hull Makerspace

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We had our Hardware Group Christmas Meetup at Hull Makerspace this evening. We had sweets, mince pies, instant pictures, a robot dog and a digital trombone. As you do. Much fun was had. I’d taken along “Bluey” my Sony Aibo (he’s called Bluey because he’s, well, bluey) and he was on fine form. He could easily see his pink ball against the Makerspace floor and it was great to watch him chasing it around the place. We’ll be having more events next year. I’ll keep you posted.

Puncture and Meetup

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I think I’ve found the problem…

I was all set for the Connected Humber Meetup this evening. However, as I was headed down the road I got a warning about low pressure in one of the tyres. It wasn’t hard to see why. Fortunately, I was very close to Endyke Tyres so I popped in to be told that it was time for a new tyre. The good news is that they can get one in tomorrow. So I put some more air in the tyre, drove home very carefully, swapped cars and managed to make it to the Meetup just about on time.

The meetup was excellent. I showed off my oven and bits and bogs. Brian had brought along a really pretty display, powered by a really beefy power supply. He also had his PICO audio device playing Gerry Rafferty.

Ion had brought along a very accurate sine waves for amplifier testing. Ben turned up and finally got his lights with names in. John came along and we talked about bits and bobs. My laptop decided to update everything during a demonstration audio which didn’t go too well but there was lots of other good discussion too.

Great fun. The next meetup is on the 5th of October. If the parts arrive from China I want to do some live surface mount soldering.

Chocolate Synthbox at the next Hardware Meetup

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The next Connected Humber Hardware Meetup is on Wednesday 3rd of August at Hull MakerSpace, starting at around 5:30. I’m taking my Chocolate Synthbox, which I’m hoping will be a bit more reliable than last time I showed it off. If you want to have a play with it, or bring something musical along of your own, we’d love to see you Find out more here.

Wrapping temperature sensors

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One of the things we discussed last night at our Meetup was the our air quality sensors. We started out with four sensor three years ago, in locations around Hull. All the ones still in place are still working, but they have fallen foul of the recent heatwave.

The temperature sensors are wrapping round when the temperature gets above 40 degrees. To save space in each LoRa message the temperature data is restricted to a range of -24 to +40. This gives a range of 64 which can be expressed in six bits. As you can see above, this doesn’t work too well when things get really toasty.

I think we could use some cunning code to figure out what that temperature should be, even though it has wrapped around. However, the next version of the code is will need to be changed to handle these high temperatures that we are now seeing.

Meetup Fun

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We had a very good meetup tonight. Lots of technical talk and even some problem solving.

  • Richard showed off the box he had designed and laser cut at Hull MakerSpace.  You never know, you might see it on a train one day.

  • Brian had brought along a new M5Stack device that looks awesome. It has a lovely touch display and was running a little program that showed off all the internal sensors really well.

  • Karen had questions about Circuit Python vs Micro Python. General consensus was that they are both jolly good. Circuit Python is easier to get started with and has lots of lovely Adafruit libraries. But it doesn’t support interrupts so programs have to poll whenever they want input. Micro Python has a few more advanced features, but is a little harder to get to grips with. You can get started with Thonny really easily for both these platforms.

  • I was showing off PCBs just received from a company in China. Five large boards for less than twenty pounds. Yes please. Brian used Kicad to make a really nice layout for a PCB for the Pico MIDI Cheesebox and I was in charge of sending of the files to get them made up. All we need to do now is get the surface mount parts and solder them into place. We fired up Kicad, got the part descriptions and ordered all the bits. On my super-cheap laptop.

  • We all took a look at the PICO W. Very nice now running on a Pico Display. A very powerful combination.

  • We solved a problem with aerial connectors. Female to female doesn’t work…..

  • We discussed the creation of 3D printed jigs for holding surface mounted devices in place for hand soldering.

  • I showed off my Pure Data sound generator on my super cheap laptop. But I really need to bring a proper speaker so that everyone can hear it over the noise of the laser cutter.

  • And there was lots of non-technical chat too

The next in-person meetup is on the 3rd of August at the Makerspace. If you’ve got tech you want to talk about, come and find us.

Hardware Meetup on Wednesday

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Our next hardware meetup is in person, at Hull MakerSpace in Hull Library. It’s on Wednesday 6th, starting at around 5:30 pm and then going on until around 7:30 pm. We’ll be showing off what we have built and talking tech. If you want to see the new Raspberry Pi PICO W (which brings WiFi to the very popular controller) we’ll have some around too. Just turn up, we’d love to see you.

Connected Humber Meetup Dates

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We’ve set the dates for the next Connected Humber Hardware Meetups. We meet at Hull Makerspace in person on the first Wednesday of the month. Then, 15 days later on Thursday evening we meet online - link here. I look forward to seeing you if you fancy dropping in.

July Meetups:

Wednesday 6th July from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 21st July from 6:00 pm online

August Meetups:

Wednesday 3rd August from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 18th August from 6:00 pm online

September Meetups:

Wednesday 7th September from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 22nd August from 6:00 pm online

October Meetups:

Wednesday 5th October from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 20th of October from 6:00 pm online

November Meetups:

Wednesday 2nd November from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 17th of November from 6:00 pm online

December Meetups:

Wednesday 7th December from 5:30 pm in Hull Makerspace

Thursday 22nd of December from 6:00 pm online

April Hardware Meetup was awesome

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We had an awesome hardware meetup last night. I don’t measure the success of a meetup by the number of folk who turn up (although we were nicely quorate). I measure success by how much stuff gets passed around from person to person. Here are the things that we talked about. There were probably a few others that I missed.

  • There is an awesome “Minecraft alike” program called Minetest that you can download and play with for free. It’s written in C# and Lydia of Starbeam Rainbow Labs fame has added some excellent extensions for it that you can find here.

  • Karen has discovered origami on YouTube. It’s a great way to relax by making stuff. If you’ve ever fancied folding your own toilet, you can find the instructions here.

  • You can use the Kidzoom printing camera to make wonderful little sketches of people by converting their portraits to “colouring in” pictures and printing them out on the built-in printer.

  • The Furby Connect has a reset button hidden next to the battery compartment that can be used to bring the toy back from the grave. That, or we joggled the batteries when we were pressing the button. Either way, the Furby lived.

  • You can make a flat piece of wood into a very flexible thing by cutting loads of slots in it with a laser cutter.

  • 100% of the people who started writing a diary after I told them to say it is a very good idea. So starting a diary is either a very good idea or they are very polite people.

  • There is a video arcade with lots of retro games machines in the basement of the Princess Quay shopping centre in the middle of Hull.

  • The Badger 2040 e-ink display is as cute as a very cute thing.

  • There is now a successor to the .NET Micro Framework. It’s called the .NET nanoframework. It lets you run and debug C# code from Visual Studio 2022 on devices like the ESP32. And it rocks.

  • If you happen to need a mobile device to take round and check for LoRa gateways and map them for you, Brian has built one.

Thanks so much to Hull Makerspace for hosting the event. It was terrific fun. You only get these kind of things by actually meeting up in person. Here’s to the next one.

Red faces at the hardware meetup

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We had our first in-person hardware meetup of the year tonight and it was a roaring success. The theme for the evening was “Thermal cameras” and Brian had brought along his thermal camera equipped Pi which has a really nifty screen. You can see it action above. Faces show up as bright red, with windows and other cold things dark blue.

Pretty much everyone had brought along some stuff to talk about. Ion had brought along some amazing creations, including a super accurate crystal controlled clock which he had built from scratch, including a custom designed four-layer printed circuit board.

Richard had brought his beautifully built “Completely Useless Machine”. To find out what it does you have to flick the switch.

I was going around making tiny printed portraits of people using the Kidizoom camera. You can just see one of Richard underneath his device above. It turns out that if you take a photo with the camera and then convert it in to a “colouring in” picture you get some nice looking line art printed out.

We’re going to try and meet up in person once a month from now on. If you’re in Hull and you fancy coming along it would be lovely to see you. I’ll be posting the details of the next meetup soon.

Thermal Camera Meetup next week

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We’re holding our first in-person meetup event of 2022 next week at the Makerspace in Hull. At this event we are going to take a look at what a thermal camera can do for you. Brian has got one running into a Raspberry Pi and has been doing some tests.

Of course we’ll be bringing along other bits of hardware to talk about and you are welcome to bring yours too.

Police Squad and Rust at the Hardware Meetup

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Another fun hardware group meetup last night. In between chats about Python, Rust and thermal cameras I mentioned the TV series Police Squad. You can find it on YouTube here. It is one of the funniest TV shows ever made. They only made 6 or so episodes for some reason - but in a way I’m pleased about this as it never got time to go off the boil or become stale. It is just continuous, brilliant, genius. Take a look and thank me later.

Oh, and the next hardware meetup is on the 3rd of Feb. Find out more here.