I got in real trouble a couple of days ago when it was discovered that there still some days from last year’s chocolate advent calendar that I’d not got around eating. What can I say? I forget stuff.But this is something quite different and definitely not edible. It’s an advent calendar that starts with a simple circuit that lights a LED and ends up on Christmas Eve with a fully working version of… Read more →

I’ve got very fond memories of Hull’s City of Culture year. We had streets full of people on chilly nights looking at amazing artwork and feeling a real pride in the place. Tonight we had all that again with the “Urban Legends:Northern Lights” event. In fact I reckon the quality of the artwork an story telling exceeded that of last year. Perhaps they’ve learned a few tricks since last time. We hea… Read more →

I spent a big chunk of yesterday trying to create a Heltec Lora 32 part for the Fritzing design program. In the process I learned quite a bit about SVG files, Inkscape and pcb design. So I don’t think it was a complete waste of time….Tomorrow I’m going to try and figure out how to add my newly created part to the Fritzing parts library. Then I’m going to make Fritzing parts for the sensors that I’… Read more →

One of the really nice things about living where we do is that after about five minutes of walking I can be somewhere like this. Read more →

Yesterday, Terry Haynes from Studio Gobo and Electric Square came to Computer Science to talk about why our students might like to work there. Read more →

Since I had the slide deck lying around I thought I’d record a screencast of the content for anyone who missed the seminar yesterday. I’ve not made any screencasts for a while. I learned a few things doing this one:All the foam has dropped off the earpieces on my microphone headset and turned into a rather horrible powder….The microphone on the headset seems to be past it’s prime too.It’s very ann… Read more →

Recently I've looked at using AI to extract key information from natural language, and creating a system service with systemd. The final piece of the puzzle is to write the bot itself - and that's what I'm posting about today. Since not only do I use XMPP for instant messaging already, but it's an open federated standard, I'll be building my bot on top of it for maximum flexibility. To talk over X… Read more →

As you can see, there was a lot of publicity for the seminar…. Today I did my LoRa talk at the university. It was great fun, and the audience were lovely. I was in a lecture theatre I know very well from many hours of teaching there in the past. Good to see a few familiar faces and a few new ones. I hope you found the material useful/interesting. Read more →

One of the problems with any WiFi enabled device is the initial configuration. How do you tell your device the settings for your WiFi when you can’t talk to it via WiFi? It’s a “chicken and egg” situation, even though it doesn’t involve any chickens or eggs.One answer is to make your device set up as a WiFi access point of its own, and then connect to this from a WiFi enabled phone or computer to… Read more →

When I’m making embedded devices, I find that ground pins are a bit like liquorice allsorts. I just can’t get enough of them. The ground pin is the one that provides an electrical ground connection. You need a ground connection for the power for every device you want to add to your circuit, and also for every data signal. If you want to provide a push button for your user to press, yes, that needs… Read more →