Score another one for the web!

Hardware, ,

Last week I made a quick trip to Spain. It was a pretty early flight and I was quite sleepy and so… I totally forgot my laptop! I indeed thought that my bag felt “a bit weird”, as the laptop makes the back flat (when it’s in the bag), but I was quite zombified, and so I just kept heading to the station.

I realised my laptop wasn’t there by the time I had to take my wallet out to buy a train ticket. You see, TFL have been making a really big noise about the fact that you can now use your Oyster to travel to Gatwick. But they have been very quiet about requiring people to have enough credit in their cards to pay the full amount of the ticket. And since I use “auto top up”, sometimes my card might have £18. Sometimes it won’t, as in this case.

Anyway, I didn’t want to go back for the laptop, as I was going on a short holidays trip, and a break from computers would be good. Except… I did have stuff to do, namely researching for my next trip!

I could use my phone, but I quite dislike using phones for researching trips: the screen is just too small, the keyboard is insufferable, and I want to open many tabs, look at maps, go back and forth, which isn’t easy on a phone, etc. I could also borrow some relative’s laptop… or I could try to resuscitate and old tablet that I hadn’t used since 2013!

It had become faulty at the beginning of 2013, but I thought I had fixed it. But months after, it decided to enter its mad loop of “restart, restart, restart and repeat” during a transatlantic flight. I had to hide it in my bag and let it expire its battery. And then I was very bored during both the rest of the flight, and the flight back, as all my carefully compiled entertainment was on it. Bah! And so I stopped using it and at some point I brought it to Spain, “just in case”.

Who would have guessed I’d end up using it again!?

I first spent about 30 minutes looking for a suitable plug for the charger. This tablet requires 2A and all the USB chargers I could find were 0.35A or 0.5A. The charger only had USA style pins, but that part could be removed, and revealed a “Mickey mouse” connector, or C7/C8 coupler if you want to be absolutely specific. A few years ago you could find plenty of appliances using this connector, but nowadays? I eventually found the charger for an old camera, with one of these cables! So I made a Frankenchargenstein out of old parts. Perfect.

The tablet took a long time to even show the charging screen. After a while I could finally turn it on, and oh wow, Android has changed a lot for the better since 3.1. But even if this tablet could be updated easily, I had no laptop and no will to install developer tools on somebody else’s laptop. So I was stuck in 3.1.

The Play Store behaved weirdly, with random glitches here and there. Many apps would not show any update, as developers have moved on to use newer versions of the SDK in order to use new hardware features and what not, and I don’t blame them, because programming apps that can work with different SDKs and operating system versions in Android is a terribly painful experience. So the easiest way to deal with old hardware or software versions is just not supporting them at all. But this leaves out people using outdated devices.

One of these “discriminatory apps” I wanted to install for my research was a travel app which lets you save stuff you would like to visit, and displays it on a map, which is very convenient for playing it by ear when you’re out and about. Sadly, it did not offer a version compatible with my device.

But I thought: Firefox still works in Android 3.1!

I got it updated to the latest version and opened the website for this app/service, and guess what? I could access the same functionalities I was looking for, via the web.

And being really honest, it was even better than using the app. I could have a tab with the search results, and open the interesting ones in a different tab, then close them when I was done perusing, without losing the scrolling point in the list. You know… like we do with normal websites. And in fact we’re not even doing anything superspecial with the app either. It’s not like it’s a high end game or like it works offline (which it doesn’t). Heck, it doesn’t even work properly when the network is a bit flaky… like most of the apps out there 😛

So sending a huge thanks to all the Firefox for Android team for extending the life of my ancient device, and a sincere message to app makers: make websites, not apps 😉

And the NodeBots from London assembled

Events, Hardware, , , ,

I attended today’s NodeBots London event. The theme (?) was “NodeBots of London… Assemble!” and so we did. Compared to the last event I went to in July, which was way more informal, this was considerably bigger (within the venue allowances, of course) with more people and more things to look at and talk about!

First Oli made an introduction to NodeBots (essentially a place where people program hardware using JavaScript, but everything is allowed if you want to), what Johnny Five is and its relationship to node-serial, same for Firmata, and then some interesting tips for software people turned amateur hardware people I hadn’t heard of before, such as:

– the case of the generous motor, in which you can fry Arduinos connected to motors without diodes, when the motor keeps spinning even after you stop applying input voltage, and so it becomes a dynamo which feeds current back into the circuit and so… bye bye Arduino which didn’t have any protection
– the flappy servo, when you sequence value changes too fast and that results in just some feeble erratic movements instead of the dramatic ones you expected

Then Alex made an introduction to electricity, in general, which was a good refresher for people like me who studied some electrical engineering at uni/school but haven’t used it for reals since then. He explained the basics (V = IxR) and also insisted again on the importance of putting the right resistors in the right place to prevent things getting fried. He used this online circuit.js utility to depict circuits and the flow of current, the voltages at each point of the circuit (in the subcircuits perhaps?)–super useful and I so wish I had had this when I was taking these subjects. Makes things way more intuitive!

And with that—we hacked a bit! Jerome Loï (who had travelled all the way from Paris!) tried to resuscitate my pseudo fried Duemilanove with a shield and a thingy to mount the ATMega168 only, but turns out that it’s such an old board/chip combination that the bootloader firmware is not distributed anymore! So I left it aside and focused on my next task for the day: find out what the components in the kits I have are! With Jerome’s and Alex’s help, and some image searching, all the components were identified in a matter of minutes. Yay!

Then I was not sure of what I wanted to do—I didn’t really want to start a new project although I have a practical idea, and I was also hungry and Oli’s marvelous cooking skills didn’t help to stop making my stomach rumble. Whenever I tried to focus on hardware or research for my idea, a new wave of delicious slow-cooked stew would reach my nose. Ahhh!

Fortunately Charles made a lightning talk describing how he goes from thought to execution using a sketchbook and Autocad instead of thinking by executing as it’s advised in many environments (something like “you don’t want to waste time and effort on build something expensive that might not work, it’s better to think on a sketchbook first”).

Also someone (whose name totally escaped me, ahh, sorry) gave a little intro about a somewhat related event about which I heard about aeons ago but which seemed to have faded out, Dorkbot. It’s been revived, but I’m sad it is held in a) a quite remote location b) at a time I can’t go, because it sounds like the kind of thing I’d like to attend. SAD FACE.

And then it was finally time for lunch. As expected by the opening flavour, it was so yummy! It gave the day a sort of lovely family reunion for Sunday lunch, except we didn’t argue about silly things, but just used the time to catch up on what we had been up to since the last time I visited their maker space, or talk about what we were building today.

After lunch, I spoke to various people such as Andrew Nesbitt of many–things-fame, and learnt new cool things. Such as:

  • Platform.io which is an IDE for “things”, built on Electron… which can work with Arduino and also has code completion! so if you don’t like the Arduino IDE you can use this instead
  • The Arduino board clones such as the Funduino are interesting not only because they might be cheaper than the originals, but also because sometimes they offer cool features such as additional pins for +5 or +GND, which sometimes can make it easier to build something by connecting the wires directly to the board instead of using a breadboard to ‘multiply’ the pins. Or has a toggle to switch between 3.3 and 5V, etc. This very interesting tip came from Jerome, who also told me about this French shop called HackSpark which not only have a lot of those Arduino compatible boards on stock, but also might seem convenient for folks in the UK. And also have a physical shop in Paris! Wow!
  • The Espruino is small. Like… really small! It also transpiles JavaScript to Lua (if I understood this correctly). You write JavaScript instead of Arduino C flavour, and you can get really quick feedback. Sounds like a cool idea for prototyping without having to tether as with Johnny Five—most useful for wearables!

But my super favourite thing I learnt about today is that pencil lead is a conductor! Jerome built a quick and fun pencil based resistor which controlled the speed of a 555 timer connected to a speaker. So effectively he was changing the frequency of an oscillator, and changed the pitch of the sound as he moved the pencil tip closer or further away from the banana connector clipped to the paper. The other end of the pencil had a drawing pin inserted on it and a wire too, effectively closing the circuit! You can see all this in action in this little vine:

We also talked about how I should use an accelerometer and not tilt sensors for my idea (to avoid false positives), and ways to use Web Audio with hardware stuff, and ways to make things that made noise, even how to make a leslie / hammond! So many things that we can make! So exciting!

And there were many other things I learnt but I can’t recall now (hopefully my brain will retain them). Do join one of these NodeBots groups if you can—great things to learn and a very welcoming environment!

It was also cool to devirtualize people I apparently had met already but totally didn’t remember (hi Jerome… sorry), and meet new people! Hopefully next time I will remember 😀

Oh and Jerome, who was one of the main instigators of the NodeBots cat mesmerizer workshop at LXJS 2014, happened to still have a workshop kit in his travelling suitcase and gave it to me… which means I have a laser in my possession!

PEW PEW PEW LASERSSSSS!!!!!!

An e-mail from “Larry Page” (or my favourite spam in a while)

Silly stuff,

I got this spam e-mail, with sender “Google Inc ®”

Dear Google User,

You have been selected as a winner for using Google services. Find attached email with more details.

Congratulations,

Larry Page
CEO of Google

©2016 Google Incorporation ®

How exciting! I win for using Google services! Larry told me so!

Note also the “Incorporation” bit—totally cracked me up!

And there’s an attachment titled “Official Payment Letter by Google.pdf”.

Evidently it all feels very official 😏

A peek at Peer to Peer

Events, ,

It’s incredible how time flies and how changing the weather can be! Today’s a sweet bright slightly chill Monday in London, whereas last week it was VERY COLD and horrible.

I also happened to spend most of Monday in a studio in Islington recording my Peer to Peer session on… guess what… Web Audio!

The host was Drew Neil, from Vimcasts fame. He set a challenge for me that consisted in writing a system that could perform an interpretation of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music“.

It’s a simple concept, but it also involves a lot of different techniques and APIs so it was quite a lot of fun!

Sadly you’ll have to wait at least a couple of months until the editing and subtitling is done. Until then… maybe you want to check out the existing videos!

UPDATE, about 15 minutes later: it’s grey and raining now. 👌🏼😂

From very annoying thing to slightly less annoying thing (and serial, and temperature sensors, and…)

Hardware, , , , , , ,

You might recall the annoying thing I built with the Duemilanove before I left it in an unusable state. It was essentially the usual blinking example but with a buzzer connected instead of an LED.

But that wasn’t very musical. So I investigated a bit further. First I connected this huge chunky potentiometer to the board and learnt how to read its values. My idea was to change the voltage of what we wrote to the pin, depending on what the potentiometer said. A cheap way to experiment with how would different values sound in the buzzer, without having to recompile each time—interactive inputs are always so much better!

Analog reads give values in a 0..1023 range, and analog writes can only be in the 0..255 range. So to scale it I divided it by 4.


Continue reading From very annoying thing to slightly less annoying thing (and serial, and temperature sensors, and…) →