Robot Rugby - now with added ball

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We need to slow the ball down, it kept rolling into the same corner.

Just a quiet Hardware Meetup this evening. Probably because I forgot to send out the email telling people about it….

Oh well, sorry folks. The next one will be in two weeks on the 23rd July. I’ll make sure to give you plenty of notice. Simon came along with kit of parts to make a remote controlled ice-cream jingle machine, along with a beautifully made clock driver box. I’d brought 4 robots and a couple of golden balls that we are going to use for robot rugby. I got all the robots working and programmable from the internet. It turns out that my phone makes a very workable WiFi connection.

Next time we’ll hopefully have some tracking action too.

Of Muck Spreaders and Music Boxes

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One of the best parts of the Hardware Meetup is the conversations we have at dinner afterwards. Take last night for example. For some reason the conversation turned to muck spreaders, tractor powered devices which spread, er, fertilizer over fields that it may enrich the land and lead to larger crops. I wondered whether, after you’d finished muck spreading, you actually cleaned your muck spreader, and if so what with?

Anyhoo, an owner of a muck spreader is keen to have a musical chime attached to his tractor that could play a jaunty, ice cream van themed, tune while going about his business spreading other peoples, er, business. He felt that this would add a lot to the occasion and we were inclined to agree. While not actually being that keen to go along and audition the device when in use.

It turns out that musical chime systems that were used on ice cream vans in the last century are quite collectable and fetch good prices on eBay. We took a look at one lot which was selling for a tidy sum for what was just a music box mechanism attached to an amplifier. So we are going to look out for a music box mechanism and some suitable hardware.

So, if you are ever passing by a field and hear distant musical chimes that make you fancy buying a “ninety nine”, accompanied by a truly horrendous whiff, you’ll know that we got it to work…

Nearly Robot Tracking at the Hardware Meetup

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Turns out we don’t need a gantry. Which is nice. Brian brought his tripod, mounted a Pi camera on it and within minutes he was tracking robots in the entire arena. Well, not actually robots. More like bits of paper with Aruco codes on them. At the next meetup we’ll have the codes attached to robots moving around, and hopefully receiving position information.

We had other stuff too including DSP (Digital Signal Processing - I knew that one) hardware, a very impressive retro touch sensitive keyboard from Ross and lots of excellent chat.

The next meetup is in two weeks on the 9th of July. I’m rather looking forward to it.

Best laid plans go awry

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Music and Robots

I had all kinds of plans for the Hardware Meetup tonight. They definitely didn’t include forgetting to take the gantry and the camera to the Makerspace for robot testing. Oh dear. But I did get to see some of Brian’s Aruco marker detecting code in action and have a whole bunch of interesting chats about tech and other matters.

I took the Deluge along for folks to play with.

The next meetup is in two weeks on the 25th June. I’ll definitely have the gantry this time. And maybe some robots running around underneath it.

Arena Bricks

Hull Pixelbot gets connected at the Hardware Meetup

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I’ve spent a big chunk of today combining the Hull Pixelbot and Connected Little Boxes to make a single device. This will make it possible to use a robot as a connected device. It’s big news for me, but perhaps not for anyone else.

Anyhoo, I’ll be taking the newly upgraded robot along to the Hardware Meetup tomorrow (Wednesday 11th June) at 5:00 pm in Hull Makerspace. We’re going to try and connect it to a tracking camera so that it can tell where it is. It’s going to be great fun.

Recognising "Two" at the Hardware Meetup

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The evidence is on the screen if you look closely

More fun at the Hardware Meetup last night. Brian had brought along an M5 Stack device that recognizes words that you say. Mostly. The idea is that you can use it to make your devices voice controlled. It’s very cheap, has a vocabulary of 42 words and nearly all of them work. Except “Two”. This stubbornly refused to be picked up until Ross turned up and managed to make it work. We think it might be his accent. Or lack of it.

If you don’t want to input numbers you might find a use for it. You connect via a serial port and it sends messages when it receives the wake word and words that it recognizes. The marketing blurb says that you can add extra words from a total vocabulary of 300 words, but at the moment it is not clear how to do this.

At the price I think it represents good value. It was certainly fun to play with.

Old tapes and scopes at the Hardware Meetup

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Well, that was fun. Another retro-themed Hardware Meetup. Ross turned up with an oscilloscope and a tape recorder. After a bit of fiddling we got the tape recorder playing music from the 1970’s. Then we took the top off.

Old devices had a huge number of moving parts in them. Most of which still moved.

The oscilloscope worked too. So we are calling the evening a success. I’ll post details for the next meetup when we’ve recovered from the excitement of this one….

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.

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…

Organ Pipes and more at the Hardware Meetup

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If you’ve ever wondered what make those thundering notes you can get from an organ, you’re looking at the answer above. Simon brought it in to the hardware meetup this evening. Apparently he has a bunch of these, as you do. One for every key on the keyboard apparently.

This one is A sharp, as you can see. Ross had a go at blowing into the end of the pipe and it produced a note that might well have been A sharp. The next step is to obtain an air pump and see what kind of notes it can make…

Update: Ross is already there. Take a look at this. If you don’t hear anything it’s because you need pretty good speakers to hear the low note. On headphones it sounds amazing.

If you can make sense of the above we’d love to hear from you. One of our members has a Mitsubishi MC-8000 HiFi dating from 1980. It looks awesome, but it doesn’t work awesome. One of the issues is with the cassette deck. It looks simple enough…. Not. Investigations are continuing.

Ross had brought the next generation of his piano which is coming along nicely. Especially impressive is the way the volume of the notes is controlled by how hard you hit the keys.

Me, I was there with my latest chord keyboard. It’s nearly working….

Next meetup is on Wednesday the 19th of March. Let’s see if we get anything bigger or more complicated turning up then.

Making Stuff at DDD North

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What a great ajudience looks likE…

Well, that’s the presentation over. It’s been a while since I took an audience picture. I took this at the end of the presentation too. And they were still smiling. Thanks for that.

I’ve put the slide deck for the presentation here. If you actually decide to make something it would be lovely to hear from you about it. And if you are in Hull you are welcome to come along to our Hardware Meetups. They take place every couple of weeks in Hull MakerSpace at the top of the Central Library. The next one is on Wednesday 5th of March starting at around 5:00pm.

You don’t have to bring any hardware to the meetup, although I like to take things along to talk about. If you are thinking of building something (or if you aren’t sure what to build) then it woudl be lovely to see you for a chat about it.

Thanks to Derek for the picture

Mostly Musical Hardware Meetup

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Ross with his “fillet of piano”

Another musical hardware meetup tonight. Ross brought along a demo of his amazing “piano round trip machine”. Not content with making an electronic pianola he has now added infra-red distances sensors to the piano keyboard. These generate midi notes which means you can make an old out of tune piano sound like anything. Including a new in tune piano.

Keyboards old and new

It was very impressive and opens the door on all kind of interesting stuff. You could make a piano which joins in with your playing, or plays the left hand for you.

Brian had brought along his theramin-ish machine which uses distance sensors to control sound playback.

Something else I now want to buy….

Richard brought an amazing led panel. Next time I’d like to see if we can use it in some long-exposure photographs.

This is Brian’s Pi Powered AI tracking skeletons. It was amazingly quick and didn’t slow down when more people entered the frame.

I brought along my latest non-working project and used the MakerSpace oscilloscope to prove that I really don’t know how to create a software uart using Raspberry Pi PICO state machines. But I might get it working for next time….

The next meetup is in two weeks, on the 19th of February. This one will have a photographic bent. I plan on bringing along my servo-powered cable release, among other things.

If you fancy coming along it would be lovely to see you.

Musical Meetup

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I like a messy desk

We had a splendid meetup tonight. Sally from Drake Music came along to see what we get up to and we had Midi Cheeseboxes, a digital trombone, and a magical theramin. Brian had also brought along his lidar that can tell when you hold your hands above your head and the discussions were wide ranging, from “How do you hear a square wave?” to “What happens if you dream that you are lying awake at night?” and lots of places in-between

I’m not sure we found all (or indeed any) of the answers, but we are looking forward to having another go at the next meetup on February 5th at Hull Library Makerspace. You are welcome to come along. Ping me an email (meetups@robmiles.com) if you want me to add you to our mailing list.

Hardware Meetup Time

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I took this picture yesterday

I never seem to have any pictures of the really good meetups. We are all too busy talking about this and that and solving the problems of the world. Today was no exception, greatly enlivened by the arrival of Simon, a splendid fellow with an appreciation of time technology. He and number one son (a budding clock builder) had a great conversation about topics such as escapements and whatnot.

Ross brought along his piano keyboard reading technology which is now in full-blown PCB form and looks really lovely and works well. And we rounded off the evening with some great Italian food from a restaurant I didn’t know existed.

The next Hardware Meetup will be on the 22nd of January 2025. It's going to be a big one, with a musical twist. If you want to know more, ping an email to hardware@robmiles.com and I’ll add you to the mailing list.