The ramblings of Dr John Vidler on Code, Tech, Maker stuff, and Fatherhood
I’ve been ordering a large number of things from ThePiHut lately, and the university procurement system needs quite a few details of each order line so they can actually make the purchase. Unfortunately, ThePiHut’s website does not include an ‘export basket’ or other equivalent mechanism that I can use to send all these details to our procurement folks… so in the usual fasion of a developer faced…
The original symbol as defined in the official mikroBUS library The process begins with an original component that consists of two physically independent connectors housed in a single package. This is a common scenario with certain types of board-to-board connectors or specialized interface headers where manufacturing constraints require separate physical components, but the electrical design…
Two basic paddle switches fully assembled. My 3d printer needs some attention, so some of the detail is lost, but they function just fine. Based around a low-profile keyboard keyswitch this was pretty much the simplest, lowest-profile paddle I could construct in time for the conference, so they’re a bit rough around the edges (especially on the lettering, and stringing on the curved surfaces) as I…
For the past two years I have worked with the Micro:bit Educational Foundation and in that time I’ve developed several hardware prototypes to support our research at Lancaster University and towards the end of my tenure The Foundation comissioned a report on accessibility which included a speculative section on how to improve accessibility to the Micro:bit platform for folks with limited or…
Part of a (short) series on 'knowing enough to be dangerous' with Docker. Docker 102 - John Vidler John discusses various aspects of Docker in this video, including networking within containers, Docker Compose, troubleshooting Docker Compose, passing environment variables, running containers using Docker Compose, mounting volumes, and security issues. They provide explanations, examples, and…
Part of a (short) series on 'knowing enough to be dangerous' with Docker. Docker 101 - John Vidler In this YouTube video titled “Docker 101,” John provides an introduction to Docker and its importance in simplifying the deployment process. They explain the concept of Docker containers, which are loosely isolated environments that contain all the necessary requirements for an application to run.…
Historically I have struggled to maintain a decent list of bookmarks in any browser - for some reason putting them in the browser just means that I immediately forget that they exist at all, making the whole exercise rather pointless. So on the previous iteration of my website, I instead managed a list of links to resources that I commonly enough used, but did so infrequently enough that I would…
This post uses interactive code blocks! Feel free to edit and experiment with the code. All code listings here are MIT licensed with no warranty. In my previous post, I demonstrated Mastodon comments being used for in-page discussions on this website, but didn’t explain how it worked. (Honestly, the post was barely a post and just demonstrated the concept) So how does it work? The Mastodon API has…
I’ve been continuing to rework my site lately, and have just thrown together a basic integration with Mastodon for post comments. Hopefully if you reply to this status , it should be picked up on the website on the next check (usually every 24hrs) If it works, your comments should show up down below!
This is a slowly growing list of annotations for blocks in Makecode, mostly to document these for myself whenever I need to write another extensions. Working Annotations These are annotations that I have seen work in practice. Namespace Properties //% color="#BC986A" icon=" uf0ea" Change the colour and icon for the namespace - the icon appears to be most valid unicode characters… Basic Block…
I don’t have any decent cameras, just my mobile phone (Currently a Google Pixel 5), but sometimes I do manage to get a half-decent shot or two, and apparently the one thing that this phone is particularly good at is macro photos. A close up photograph of a bee! There are a rather large number of bees buzzing around the flowers outside my office right now, so I took the opportunity and managed a…
I don’t have any decent cameras, just my mobile phone (Currently a Google Pixel 5), but sometimes I do manage to get a half-decent shot or two. In this case, these are all from my trip to IDC’23 from wandering around the city after the presentations. Coming from Lancaster, where there aren't many tall buildings, what struck me in particular was the sheer number of floors on every building. One of…
It works (mostly) out of the box now! I unfortunately managed to update the pure Arch Linux kernel on the laptop right in the middle of an update that broke support for the chipset that it used; perfectly timed to mean it fails to boot, so was generally unrecoverable. Thankfully, I had only installed Linux on the uSD card at this point, so I could reboot into Windows if I had needed a working…
This is a follow up to a previous article So! It wasn’t me! I probably shouldn’t be happy about this, but knowing that by teaching my daughter sign language I haven’t actually set her back on normal speech development is a significant weight off my shoulders. Instead, through some more testing with the fantastic folks at the child hearing clinic near here, we’ve established that she’s hearing…
The original whiteboard design for the jac:stack. Ultimately I dropped the left-hand Jacdac connector due to space concerns, but the overall design made it all the way to production. This is the second iteration of an idea to present GPS support to the Micro:bit, but rather than the previous version which was more of a dedicated GPS logger board, this one presents the much more flexible Jacdac…
I’m still writing this article, expect missing content! -John This work was published at IDC’23! [1] See the paper and poster here: Supporting fieldwork for primary education with computing – micro:bit, clip:bit and game controllers. [2] Introducing Classroom Cloudlet: a mobile, tangible, and transparent approach to Internet of Things education. [3] Dear reader, please be kind to me on this one.…
This module is rather unimaginably named the ‘Micro:bit GPS Logger Prototype’ as it never really worked well enough to warrant a proper, snappy name. Unfortunately despite the module I selected communicating beautifully over i2c pretty much immediately, I failed to correctly account for the ground plane requirements for the GPS antenna to function, resulting in a great looking, but ultimately…
I recently found out from the preschool that my daughter isn’t keeping up with the other kids with her speech development. This came as quite a surprise, as although her speech is a bit garbled, due in part to being a kid, but also as she currently has a case of ‘glue ear’ so she’s not hearing things quite correctly; she is normally quite a chatterbox at home, and her talking away has been noted…
I have a Yoga Book - the only laptop that I’ve actively wanted at launch - and with its release now in the dim and distant past of 2016 its really showing the age of its hardware, so I’ve decided after some deliberation to attempt to get a working Linux stack running on it. There were two versions of the laptop at launch, one running Windows 10 and the other running Android, and while they may…
I’ve always struggled with sleep, even from a very early age; my mother will gladly regale anyone who asks that as a toddler, she would leave me to sleep whenever or wherever I fell asleep, as she could never get me down for a nap otherwise. Since I’ve discovered that I have some form of frontal lobe brain issue, I’ve put my sleep issues down as part of it and just deal with the battle each night.…
I’m terrible at writing at length. I have a PhD, and as part of this I, like many others before me, had to write up my work in a thesis, and it was absolute hell . The act of just sitting and writing is something that I’ve found extremely difficult for as long as I can remember. In school when essays were handed out as homework every time without fail I would think “Not this time. Not again. I’m…
I’ve thrown together a little demo to show off the micro:bit v2’s microphone functions, mostly to demonstrate the update rate (its very high!). Here’s a video of the board listening to my laptop play back some drum and bass (always good for tech demos!) and it updates its lighting to match the beat… mostly! My version of the classic Disco Lights demo, running in CODAL on a Micro:bit v2 Once I…
In a fit of buying interesting hardware a while ago, I picked up two of these joystick modules, each has a nice bezel, and two potentiometers on the back for sensing position; but mostly I picked them up becuase they have a really really nice feel to their movement, and the extended stick length is fantastic. The sticks are much more like the length of a professional radio control handset than…
… I think I need more smarts in my BMS. There are some fun cold-start edge cases for my EV motorbike whereby the system needs to turn on enough to handle charging the rest of the system, and the BMS just isn’t clever enough to deal with this, so it requires a bit of a bodge via the vehicle management unit (VMU) to kick it into gear. No problem, just use the CAN bus or RS485 to talk to the BMS and…