Full fat cheesebox and red phone
We had a most excellent hardware meetup tonight. Thanks to everyone who came along. Here are a few pictures. Next meetup is in two weeks on the 5th March.
ready for your closeup….
Light music
Finger music
People tracking with AI
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.
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.
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.
We had a great meetup last night. Much fun was had. I made a video. I need to find some music for the next one…
Eveyrthing Working
We had a great Hardware Meetup last night. Not a huge number of people, but an awful lot of expertise. I took along a new ESP32 device I’d just received from China. I was planning to use it in place of the Wemos D1 Mini device that I’ve been using for ages. I was making the switch because I couldn’t find any drivers to connect a D1 Mini to my shiny new Snapdragon powered laptop. Imagine my amusement to discover that the new device I’d bought used the same CH340 usb interfaces as the D1 Mini and wouldn’t work either. Wah.
But then Ben didn’t believe me when I said that there are no CH340 USB-to-serial drivers available for my Snapdragon powered Windows 11 notebook. He did some digging and found me the manufacturer’s proper download site: https://wch-ic.com/downloads/CH341SER_EXE.html I installed the ones from this site and they worked a treat. This is a big win for me. It makes the new notebook even more perfect.
So then it was on to the project for the evening. I’ve been meaning to add a Connected Little Box which can display text messages. I bought a little LCD panel for the princely sum of 2.64 It comes with an adapter that lets you use it from I2C, which makes the wiring much simpler. I’ll do a detailed post about it later. We found the drivers, added them to my PlatformIO project and had the LCD panel working in about ten minutes. Pro tip: if you can’t see anything on the screen you should adjust the contrast.
So, half an hour before the end of the meetup I had got everything working that I’d brought with me. The next meetup is in two weeks on the 27th of November. I’ll have to bring along something more difficult next time.
In the meantime Brian and David were playing with a rotating Lidar sensor and Richard was showing off new kit and working on an old-school embedded device.
And we rounded if off with a nice meal at the Omlette. Good times.
We’re trying something new with the Hardware Meetup next week. Afterwards you are welcome to join us at “The Omelette”, a Hull institution which just happens to be opposite the central library in Hull, where we have our meetups. If you want to join us for a nice meal and talk some tech (or whatever) it would be lovely to see you.
We’ll be meeting in Hull MakerSpace in the library from around 5:30 pm and then heading over to The Omlette at around 7:00 pm
Yes. The Mac is running Linux
We have a super-splendid Hardware Meetup in MakerSpace in Hull Central Library this evening. Loads of folks turned up to show things off and see what others were up to. Ross brought along his prototype piano keyboard reader which uses distance sensors to read key movements. It’s analogue and it works. Two things you can’t say about the things I make…
We had a fairly quiet hardware meetup last night. But I was able to give out some sage life advice for someone who asked what their kids should be learning about. Two things:
Take a look at 3D design. Have a play with one of the many tools out there that you can use to learn about this, for example TinkerCad or BlocksCad. If you are feeling super brave you could even take a look at Blender. These are free to use and you can output things that you can 3D print. A knowledge of the language of 3D design is always going to be useful, whatever you end up doing in real life.
And, talking of language, the next thing you should get kids doing is blogging/journaling. Writing about what you’ve been up to is a very good habit to get into, whether you want the world to see it or not. It gets you used to putting your thoughts into words and gives you a sense of where you are going and what you have done. It is also a great way of dealing with things that have gone wrong. You can write them down, along with a list of the things that you will do different next time and kind of “put the issue to bed”. I write a journal and then take bits out of it for the blog (this thing). I don’t do this for anyone in particular. I do it because I enjoy it and find it useful for me. Your journal can be as simple as a Notepad document that you add to, or you can use one of the online tools (Apple even have a journal app built into their phones now)
More advice in the next Hardware Meetup, which will be in 3 weeks on the 25th of September.
We had an awesome meetup tonight. Loads of people, loads of stuff and so much technical chat that I forgot to take any pictures. Update: I managed to find the picture I took…
Thanks to everyone who turned out in spite of recent events.
This is a bonus pic that I took first thing this morning, when I noticed the way light was hitting a mobile.
I was hoping that the Rabbit could tell me exactly what kind of pattern this is.
We had a nice Hardware Meetup tonight. We’ve made some patterns that could be used by a robot to determine where it is. It seems to nearly work, which is nice.
WE got this mostly working
First nothing would work. Then everything worked. The Hardware Meetup last night turned out to be all about RFID tags. I’d brought along some tags I was thinking of putting onto the Hull Pixelbot robots. And Ross had brought a reader and some very fancy tags that were sticky labels that can be used to measure the temperature of whatever they’re stuck on.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags are great for identifying things - the clues in the name. They contain a chip and a tiny antenna which gets power from the the tag reader. The chip can send and store data so that you can literally keep tags on things. I’ve used them a lot in the past. And the new tags are much more powerful - but only if you can get them to work.
At the start of the evening I couldn’t get read any of my tags. And nothing Ross had brought was working. But then things started to change. A network cable was obtained to connect the sensor reader to a network gateway that Brian had brought. Then software was loaded and fired up and, despite not really knowing what we were doing, we managed to connect to the tags. And I even got my tags working too. The next step is to build a tag reader holder into the front of the robot and scatter some tags around the robot arena.
The next meetup is in two weeks. I wonder what we will get working then?
Testing the latest robot colour scheme
We had a nice little Hardware Meetup this evening. There were robots wandering around and also a bit of surface mounted soldering action. We’ve decided to take a look at RFID tags as means by which robots can find their way around the arena. So for the next meeting I’ll bring some along and we’ll see if we can get them to work.
Magnifying glasses are a great idea
We had a great time at the Hardware Meetup this evening. Brian has designed a printed circuit board that lets us use a Raspberry Pi PICO to control a Hull Pixelbot. The board uses surface mount components and tonight we used a little hotplate to solder them all in place. Stage one is to put some solder paste on each of the connections. Then put the components in position and finally heat the board up so that the solder melts and forms the connections. You also get some really interesting movement of the components themselves as they float in the molten solder and surface tension pulls them into exactly the right position.
Great fun.
Sorry about the blur. It’s what I get when I try to be artistic
We had our hardware meetup tonight at Hull MakerSpace. Plenty of folks turning up and building/programming robots. We are still working on the rules for Robot Rugby, but in the meantime folks spent today attaching battery packs so their robots could wander around with no wires. I’ve started writing a book which describes the process we are going through. You can find the first part here. I’m going to be adding sections as we build each part of the robot.
If too many folks turn up will run a draw for these
Thanks to the generosity of “Player Piano Ross” we have some Hull Pixelbots to give away at the next Hardware Meetup at the Hull Makerspace at Central Library Hull. The meetup is on Wednesday 20th March and will start at 5:30 pm and continue until around 7:00pm. We are going to spend some time doing “Robot Training” with a little obstacle course we’ll try to program our way around.
The long term aim is to swap out the existing Arduino Uno controllers on the robots and replace them with Raspberry Pi Picos. This will let us run Python on the devices and program them over Wi-Fi. For the session on the 20th we’ll be using Python-ish and connecting our robots over RS232. I’m going to bring a few original pixelbots including Crystal Masie and Captain Black. It would be lovely to see you there. Bring your laptop, some AA batteries and a winning smile.
And you might get a free robot of your own.
We had a fair amount of hardware to play with
We had a lovely meetup this evening, greatly enlivened by some newcomers keen to learn stuff. The theme was musical and so we had a few devices to play with including my Chocolate Synthbox, a Synthstrom Deluge, an Organelle, a Norns Shield and Tenori-On. Much fun was had, with plenty of clicks, beeps and musical-ish sounds beating out.
We had some wonderful chats about ChatGPT, air quality, how a piano works (and how to mechanise it), lithophanes, HueForge and of course robots.
There was so much interest in Hull Pixelbots that we’ve decided to get together and build a bunch. We’ll be meeting up in two weeks (20th March) at 5:30pm in Hull MakerSpace and having a go. I’ll be publishing a shopping of list of parts soon. If you want to go on the mailing list for the Meetup send an email to addmetothelist@hullpixelbot.com
I’ll be keeping the lid on though
Our monthly hardware meetup for March will be on Wednesday 6th March in the MakerSpace at the top of Hull Central Library. We start around 5:30 pm and then go on until 7:00 pm or so. We theme the meetups, the March one is all about music. I’ll bring along the MIDI CheeseBox, Crackers Controller and Chocolate Synth along with a few more conventional devices. If you’ve got something you want to show off or talk about, feel free to bring it along.
No need to sign in or anything, just turn up and take part. It would be lovely to see you.
It was a quiet meetup on Wednesday this week. Just three of us chatting about 3D printers, life and the universe. It’s always fun to go down to Hull Makerspace and see what people are doing. If you fancy joining us the next one is on Wednesday 7th of February when we will be doing some Robot Rugby. Come along and pick a side. We’ll be starting at around 5:30 pm and going on until around 7:00 pm in Hull Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull.
Printer Poop produced when switching colours
We’re having a hardware meetup next Wednesday evening at Hull Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull. We’ll be opening 5:30 pm with a presentation of 3D printing lithophanes and the HueForge program starting around 6:00 pm. We’ll finish around 7:00pm
There’s no need to book, just turn up and look interested. If you’ve got anything to show off we’d love to see it.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
A proper developer conference in Hull. Find out more here.
