Messing Up - Part of the Design Process

This weeks blog was to be a £10 digital camera tear down and rebuild into a Kite Aerial Photography (KAP) rig. I'd found this super cheap digital camera at Sainsbury in Derby called the Vivitar Vivi Cam 7020 that was less than a tenner. I took to it with gusto at the Thursday night hack at the Bristol Hackspace.

ViviCam 7020

After removing the 5 case screws including the one hidden under the QC sticker then dropping one on the floor never to be found again, I managed to pop the casing off this incredibly cheap (in build and cost) digital camera.

Further dismantling showed that weights had actually been added to the camera to make it feel... well more like a camera?!

I located the shutter button and proceeded to try and workout how to activate it using an external switch on the little controller circuit I'd made from a plan by Limor Fried  that makes any cheapo camera into a time-lapse device.

Unfortunately to test the camera in it's unmade state I needed power and the batteries weren't going to stay in place without the casing so I reach for the Bristol Hackspace power supply. Things unravelled fast from this point. I must admit I failed to note which knob was current and which was voltage before whacking the wrong ones up to full power and probably frying this tiny flimsy camera.

A rapid reassembly and a borrowed SD card (for this little camera needs one to work possibly) would only produce little beeping sounds. I'd done something terrible and irreparable.

I disassembled and reassembled a few times. At first I thought it might be because I'd left a few screws out and these screws had part of the copper substrate from the circuit board connected to them.  Adding these in made no difference. The camera was just dead. Toast.

Though I must admit I felt a tiny bit frustrated I did feel I was adding to the long tradition of "DOING THINGS WRONG" that is at the heart of all tinkering and boffinry. I feel society (and perhaps it always has) dusts over the stories of failure and likes to laugh at them if they are told at all. But in my experience All truly good making has it measure of failure, mishap and just down-right buggering things up. I'm not suggesting this should happen, but we mustn't be afraid of it. I can think of so many exciting and promising projects that myself and others have started and never finished because they didn't go right the first time. In UK Government project we use something called Optimism Bias. It's where we add a % to the time and cost of any project because it is (and this came as a surprise to me) human nature to be overly optimistic. We too should be taught this from an early age in school or wherever. Maybe that's the true role of a Hackspace. Come here to Make... MAKE MISTAKES!

A wise man once said to me "If you're not making mistakes... You're not making ANYTHING!" Just to emphasis this here are two pre-Secret Life Of Machines (SLOM) films of Tim Hunkin where I think it's quite clear that the UK's premier Hacker makes a few errors as he goes along.

and this one from slightly later...

I managed to take the camera back to Sainsbury for a full refund (thank you Sainsbury) unfortunately the branch of Sainsbury I took it took don't sell this camera so I had to have a cash refund rather than an exchange which will hold up my adventures in KAP for a little longer, though I admit my appetite for it has increased since the recent trip to Southwold. In the meantime look at this phenomenal picture taken by David Steward of Bristol Hackspace. It's called a light painting using LEDs on a long stick that flash in sequence as you walk slowly along infront of a very long exposure camera.

Logo photo by David Stewart Bristol Hackspace using light painting stick with Arduino

David Stewart actually refocused the camera closer to the action after this first picture. It wasn't clear in the small view finder on the camera what a great effect the light reflecting off the cobble sets was. These sort of pictures are sort of spooky, in an arty way they make me think of how something last through time, like the very old wall in the background whilst other things (the people in the pictures) are fleeting. Yeah... I know right?!

13 Go to Southwold!

Mike Pountney's GoPro HD Hero 2 camera mounted on my Cody Box Kite at about 150ft (ish) looking over the camp site with the sea and Southwold on the horizon. This is a fish eye lens that is not the curvature of the earth. 

Had an excellent weekend in Southwold, good weather making our Geek weekender rather good. In addition to the camping and beer drinking we enjoyed a pleasant afternoon kite flying on Saturday hence all the pictures.

We very much enjoyed an early morning (10am) visit to the Adnam's brewery with a tour and tasting that I think got us all a little merry. The afternoon was spent at The Under The Pier Show, which was further improved by a behind the scene's tour from it's proprietor Mr Tim Hunkin. In addition to the camping and beer drinking a pleasant evening of BBQing and kite flying back at camp and at one point flying about 8 kites including my Cody Box kite (see picture) a brave little blue sled kite also in the picture and Martin's mental wing like kite surfing monstrosity.

Photo by Spencer Owen

A slow start packing away gear and then the highlight of the weekend a visit to Tim Hunkin's workshop just outside of Southwold. I was very delighted to be shown how to use the MIG welder by Tim and had a go at joining a couple of bits of metal together. It really was a lot of fun and I'm pleased to have grasped the welding nettle. Tim took time to show us his latest under the pier attraction in progress the super "Somali Pirates" arcade machine.

I was really delighted to see everyone have such a good time. It was one of the best weekends I can remember. I hope we can do it all again next year.

Tim Hunkin crouched down on the floor causing one hacker to exclaim "You look more like Tim Munchkin now!" a good time was had by all. Photo by Gillian Zirmer 

Poster for Mini Maker Faire Derby

I'm pretty excited about the up coming Mini Maker Faire in Derby on the weekend of 2nd & 3rd June. I'm one of the co-organisers and it's been quite a bit of work already especially for Hannah Fox at the Silk Mill and her team.

On the left is a very tiny and low resolution version of the promotional poster for the Faire. I really like the robot and silk mill graphics. I'm really pleased that the Nottingham Hackspace has such a prominent logo which is also a QR code so should drive some traffic back to the Nottinghack.org.uk website!

It's going to be a pretty busy week and weekend for me but it'll be worth it. Hope to see you there! You can get tickets on Eventbrite

http://makerfairederby.eventbrite.co.uk/

Fishing for keys!

It's been a tough couple of weeks for me and I've not been able to bang a blog post out. That probably means I owe the Hackspace £50 as I did promise I'll penalty myself £50 if I don't write a post a week. Well we'll see I don't like reneging on a promise but I also don't like giving away money.

The saddest Captain's hat in the world yesterday

The week started fairly badly when I left my netbook power adaptor in Nottingham (I now live in Bristol). I'd lent my wife (who was working on a murder trial in Birmingham) my MiFi which is the only way I can get online on the boat. Having no power adaptor for the netbook meant that McDonald's and other flavours of FREE (and no doubt evil) WiFi were not an option. Dragging my ancient power adaptor only Ubuntu laptop to Bristol Hackspace was the only way I was going to get any work done for the Derby Mini Maker Faire (which is on the 3rd June btw). I packed my huge Ubuntu laptop into my bag grabbed my bike, bike lock and Hackspace keys with the bike lock key on. At either end of the pontoon I live on is a big gate with a padlock on it. I'd manoeuvred my bike through the gate and was about to lock the padlock up behind me. I had one of those weird involuntary spasms we all have from time to time and somehow flicked the Hackspace (and bike lock keys amongst others) off the karabiner I keep them all on and into the harbour. As if in slow-mo I lunged out and watched them sink. I ran back to the boat and grabbed the 10ft boat pole that's lashed to the side. Pushing it down as straight as I could I discovered that the harbour in that spot is more than 10ft deep. Annoyingly I had to accept that these keys were gone... FOREVER!

Here is the thing about Hackspaces, a lot of people have a lot of ideas about how to do things, but often they don't DO those things. I think I've developed a "RULE 3" filter in my head somehow. They don't have Rule 3 at Bristol Hackspace so the bike shedding was rife. The one repeated theme I heard was "GET A MAGNET ON SOME STRING!" I heard it so many times I thought I had to do it just so I could say, "Yeah I've done that." David W (the Bristol Hackspace treasurer) very kindly provided me with a stack of HDD magnets (very powerful had my fingers bitten by them a couple of times) and I borrowed a long reel of string from the Hackspace stationary pot.

It was past 23:00 before I got back to the harbour. I put a head torch on and went out to fish. I determined that this bit of the harbour was 12ft deep. That's pretty deep really, the draught of the SS Great Britain is 16ft and I'm talking about a bit of the harbour near the edge. Anyway I tentatively started plopping the magnet in and dragging it about. Almost straight away I got some feedback. There must have been some girders or re-bar down there as the magnet was attracted to something immoveable (by me I mean). Dipping that thing in and dragging it about on such a calm evening was very soothing. Before long it was no longer about fishing for keys and was about finding anything metallic for the magnet to stick too. I'd have been pleased to pull a nail up really. I did get a number of rusty tiny chunks of iron. I'm not sure what they could be from. Maybe the remains of some industrial process or bits that have rusted to almost nothing. THEN SUDDENLY ... I'd got a bite. I could feel I was lifting something. I was more than 2m from where I thought the keys had gone in. I pulled the string a little too eagerly and I felt the line lighten. More carefully this time I lowered the magnet again. A slight change in weight... did I have it? Surely whatever I'd caught wasn't still attached?

Cautiously I wound the string in. My muscles playing tricks on me that the weight was actually the same as it ever was BUT NO! I'd somehow found my keys! They smelt a bit like fish and they were a little tarnished and already rusty in places. But I'd saved myself at least £25 in deposit costs on the Bristol Hackspace keys as we'll as ensuring I had spares for my different bike locks.

So there must be a lesson here right? Well I'm not sure there is. I could say something about optimism or having a try. I could say something about simplest solutions being the best or dogged determination. I could talk about chance and probability or get very nerdy about search patterns, the depth and flow of current in the harbour or about the distance from where they went in to where they were resting. But I'm not going to. Still I have to admit I've been in a much better mood since I found my keys.