Future Meetups

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The MakerSpace is a good looking place..

I’ve put together a schedule for hardware meetups for the first part of this year:

Wednesday 17th of January Colour 3D printing

I'll bring in some examples of colour printing and show how to use Bambu Studio to colourise prints and create lithopanes. I'll also show off some work made with HueForge (https://thehueforge.com/)

Wednesday 7th of February Robot Rugby

We'll set up a Hull Pixelbot rugby match and get a game going.

Wednesday 21st February Music and MIDI

I'll bring in a bunch of MIDI music devices (some Pico and Pi powered) and we'll have a go at making some tunes

Wednesday 6th March Analogue photography

I'll show you how to get started taking analogue photographs on instant and black and white home-processed film. If we can have access to running water in the Hackspace we can take a bunch of pictures and process them on the night.

All the meetups are in the Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull. Doors open at 5:30 pm and we start the presentations and whatnot at 6:00pm after some chat. We finish around 7:15pm or so. Anyone can turn up and you don’t need to book. If you have a topic that you’d like us to cover (or better yet you fancy running a session yourself) get in touch. If you want find out more you can find it all on our Mattermost page here.

Next Hardware Meetup is all about 3D printing

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YOu could have one of your very own….

We’re having our next Hardware Meetup in Hull library in the Makerspace on Wednesday 1st November starting at 5:30pm. It’s all about 3D printing. There’s an exhibition of 3D printing on at the Makerspace at the moment and lots of stuff worth looking at, whether you own a printer or are thinking of getting one.

It would be lovely to see you there. If you have something you’ve printed that you want to show off, bring it along. There will be a small (3D printed) prize for the object that everyone likes the most. I’ll be talking about the fun you can have making 3D printable objects from Python code - which is something of a thing for me.

We’ll also have free tags of fun to give away, and we might have a Tag Joust championship. It would be lovely to see you there.

If you are around earlier on Wednesday I’m going to be in the Makerspace fiddling with stuff for the entire afternoon if you want to drop round for a chat about hardware.

Connected Little Boxes at the Hardware Meetup

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We had little Meetup tonight. Alifeee was there and we had a good chat about Connected Little Boxes (and Brian got his loaded with the new firmware and working). Alifeee has written a great article about the Hull Bus Sign project, which you can find here.

The next meetup will be on Wednesday 1st of November. I’ll be taking along my super-big camera to record the event - so be there if you want to be immortalised on proper film.

Connected Little Boxes at the Hardware Meetup

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I’ll bring along a text display too.

I’m bringing a bunch of Connected Little Boxes to the Hardware Meetup next Wednesday. I want to show off the web configuration and deployment and what you can do with QR codes.

If you fancy coming along you can just turn up at Hull MakerSpace on Wednesday 11th of October from around 5:00 pm onwards. I’ll be around with some devices to show off, and even ones that you can take home with you (numbers permitting). It would be lovely to see you.

Playing Pong on a Bus Sign

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I was very bad at this game

We had our first Hardware Meetup at Hull Makerspace today. There was a good turnout and lots of stories were exchanged. Alifee was there making a Hull City Council Bus Sign play pong. The signs used to be in the bus station, but now the Makerspace has a bunch and lets anyone with an interest in electronics and interfacing have a go with them. Alifee has connected an Arduino and to a sign and got a game running. You can find out more on GitHub.

It was great to see people old and new turning up. Our next Meetup will be on Wednesday 4th of October. If you fancy coming along it would be lovely to see you. We start at around 5:30pm or so at the Makerspace on the top floor of Hull City Main Library.

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.