My 3D Printed My Lamp presented at Electric Biro

As part of the Brighton Digital festival and a wound down from the maker faire, as I helped run the Build Brighton stand. I decided to attend and support an event called Electric Biro, which was presented in Fabrica Art Gallery, Duke St, Brighton.

Wasn't too sure what to expect when I arrived at the event and had packed away some projects back at the hack-space after the maker faire at the weekend. I was a little last minute in thinking about attending the event so grabbed my recently 3D printed lamp to present at this event. Over the last year I have spent many hours by the Build Brighton 3D printers producing items from designs, fixing and using the Build Brighton 3D printer, so users can arrive, get a small induction to 3D printing and then print their own design. I came across a nice looking lamp design, which I found on this site makershop.co, it's also called My Lamp . The design is also available on Thingiverse  presented by user called Teece and released under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

This sparked an idea, rather than having 3D print items which are mundane and don't also have a purpose. I should be able to make something with this, so I started printing out the design; it's made up of about 7 pieces, the shade was too tall (143mm) for the printer. So used netfabb to perform a Z cut so that the part was under the printer's 100mm height limit. This also reduced the print time for the shade. The printer's settings was 190-200 degrees C (hot end) and 60 degrees (bed temp) with a 0.2mm layer height. As the shade was printed in 2 parts. I needed some way of joining them; first thought was 2 part epoxy which worked OK, there was a slight step as it was hard to line up but I was able to make it look presentable with a small file. There was also a suggestion it would have been better to use "ABS glue" (small bits of ABS filament dissolved in acetone) to make a smooth paste, which when applied and the acetone evaporates, the ABS holds the parts together.

I wasn't able to source the same lead/led set-up used in the post but was aware due to heat produced by a normal 240v 60W incandescent lamp that I would need to use LED's. I did think about using LED's bulbs and CFL's but didn't have the funds available to buy them or the time to wait for delivery.
So the thinking was this is going to be a bedside lamp with a switch and use cheap, easy to get LED's, get a high mA value should give good amount of light, also wanted the light produced to be a "warm white" as this will not attract the flying bugs or insects to the light, they hate it so fly away from the light.

During the research stage I found these 10mm 20mA 11000-15000 mcd LED's 30 degree viewing angle available from Phenoptix. Those should provide a good amount of light, also came across this Touch IC
available from hobbytronics; With this, together with two bolts I was able to make a circuit which used a 240v mains power adapter supplying 7v into a 7805 5v voltage regulator so I was able to switch on the LED's on and off. With the base I needed to make the hole for the wire more open and the inside area near the opening a bit more shallow so able to "hot glue" the power socket to the base and the lamp will stand level and straight, rather than produce a PCB or use the surface mount version of the IC, which would have made the electronics smaller and thinner. I soldered the parts directly under the base, which needed me to produce another 3D printed part to extend the height of the base, this can been seen in the photos as the green part.

Testing and Use

As I wanted the best amount of light, I placed 2 of the LED's in parallel with one series resistor on the output pins, so had a total of 4 LED's which gave a current draw of 27mA and voltage of 3.2v across the LED. I found though testing the touch points that this current load was too much for the IC as it's max current output was 25mA. It didn't switch the LED's off; So I decided to just have one LED attached to output pin, which improved the switching.The lamp gives off a fair amount of light but I have found that if left on for a while it can take a test lead from a continuity tester to switch off the light, maybe there is not enough capacitive energy to make the IC switch.

Further Development 

This could developed further to use a micro-controller and have a USB connection to enable it's user to charge a phone/tablet while it sits on the bedside table. Also placing the bolts on copper and glass pads could increase the capacitive energy so that the IC is able to switch more reliability, currently one output works better than the other. Might have been damaged with the overload of 2 LED's asking for 40mA.
Also using a PCB would improve the switching action of the IC rather than bare soldering. As it has been noticed during use that the LED's flicker which could indicate a loose connection or stray static/noise which causes the IC output pin to float.

Thingiverse Profile OricTosh contains links and information about the design files used.

Please comment below or contact me if you spot any errors or required further information    

Raspberry Pi, Raspbian, OpenCV @ BMMF - Getting It There

Just thought I would post the journey it took to get the Raspberry Pi Computer Vision project to the Brighton Mini Maker Farie 2012.

It started about 5/4 weeks before the Maker Faire, in a pub. Where the small group of members of the Brighton Pi sat round a table and thought what can we do for the Maker Faire. I had spoken about using some sort of computer vision on my autonomous RC car project sometime ago but didn't do anything more with it. So the others decided that I would use my Raspberry Pi to demo some computer vision, face detection, object and edge detection. "Ok" I said, "I should be able to put something together"

My Pi was still in the anti-static bag, with no other items to enable it's use in this project. So quickly ordered a box from pibow and quick look on Amazon and the Elinux.org SD card section. Picked the Integral 16GB SDHC Class 10 Ultima pro 20 Mb/s. Also ordered a Flexible keyboard from HK only a £5 and powered USB Hub (which I needed to modify). I had a Logitech C250 webcam, also an USB mouse.

While I was waiting for the delivery of the other items, also have some items coming from Hong Kong (fingers crossed they arrive in time). I used my Ubuntu (Linux) computer to enable me to start working on the code and see if this at all is possible to do this. Plugged the webcam into the computer, showed it was connected, loaded a program called Cheese (a webcam photo booth) to test the webcam. All working fine.
Cheese is available as a Debian package using the apt-get command in a terminal. As it was also going to run on a Raspberry and I knew a little Python, so that would be the language used to talk to Open CV. Open CV is written in C++ and available from http://opencv.org/

OpenCV is released under a BSD license and hence it’s free for both academic and commercial use.
It has C++, C, Python and Java interfaces and supports Windows, Linux, Android and Mac OS.

The image used for this project was the Raspbian available from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads which was a gamble as there was no support for the webcam I was using by default. The Arch Linux image did have the support required but due to my 250mA flexible keyboard I was unable to boot into that OS. It's too late to get another keyboard. Anyway I liked the keyboard as it was easy to transport so I stuck with the Raspbian image, just need to recompile the Linux Kernel with the required UVC driver. Found some details here (Linux UVC driver & tools)  http://www.ideasonboard.org/uvc/#download  I had started tweeting about my project and the kernel gods answered by adding USB webcam support to the Raspbian kernel, which I somehow picked up by doing a lot of reboots and apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, Ri-update commands. Also following a USB cable mod (cut the red wire) to stop the powered hub powering the Raspi the webcam was detected by my raspberry. Whoo hoo major hurdle overcome. The code was being worked on my Ubuntu box, which showed Grey-scale, Face Detection, Edge Detection, Gaussian Blur. These were running in loop which ran about 4.5 FPS. Now the Ubuntu box is 2GHZ CPU with 512Mb Ram so it going to be a lot slower on the Pi which runs at 700Mhz with 256Mb ram.

Moved the code over to the raspberry and also installed Genny (lightweight text editor) able to help with python indentation. First I installed OpenCV from the site above but found  that the python bindings didn't work so I use the package python-opencv available by using the command sudo apt-get install python-opencv  This enabled my python scripts to import cv gaining access to the Image processing commands within OpenCV.

Another major problem I overcame was that raspberry pi couldn't cope with taking the feed directly from the cam though the USB at 640x480 so I used a program called fswebcam which enable me to take frames from the cam, perform some basic image manipulation, save to a Jpeg file and reduce in size. This file was then placed upon a USB stick to save wear and tear on a SD card, because I was polling the cam every 10 secs with a 1sec delay upon capture saving the image. The python script was then loading/reading the image from the USB and processing the same image with a loop, which ran at about 0.5 fps. The webcam program was running at 7 fps. This caused a small delay in the update of the 4 images shown but did a good job  with edge and face detection. As you can see in the pic below, Pi's Cpu was running at 90-100% and using about 25% of the ram available.

Maybe with a directly connected camera . So by passing the USB bottleneck and access to the GPU chip it could have been quicker. Also it wouldn't be common practice to run each image function Face and edge detection using Haar Cascade and Canny within a loop but it did show that the Raspberry Pi could be used in image processing applications.   

Some late night debugging was done the Thursday night before the Maker Faire at the Build Brighton Hack-Space Set-up was done Friday night with a bit more debugging.     

Thanks to the members of Build Brighton, Brighton Pi, Brighton Mini Maker Faire also a blog post by Fajita and various other blog posts which enabled this project to presented at Brighton Mini Maker Faire 2012
Result below:

Please comment below or contact me if you spot any errors

Brighton's First Raspberry Pi Jam

On Tuesday 26th June I attended the first Brighton Pi Jam at Build Brighton.

The Brighton Pi Google Group and this meet up was planned by Peter Hobson after a meeting was held in a small pub in Brighton in which Peter put across the idea of Brighton having a user's group of Raspberry Pi user's and non users to help promote it's use, share ideas, equipment, etc. Also try to answer that  frequently asked question "What is this?" and "What can I do with it?".

A good turn out of people arrived at the Hack Space, after passing the test of finding the entrance to the space, (not set by us) just something which was caused by things beyond our control.

There was 3 people on the speaker's list to introduce us to the wonders of the Raspberry Pi.
First up was

Neil C Ford - Show Notes http://www.neilcford.co.uk/2012/06/brightonpi-raspberry-jam-the-show-notes/

He came up to the front and gave a very passion filled talk about his work with the Rewired State, his Raspberry Pi, a Raspberry Jam, Young Rewired State. Explained about Hack Days, as he had been involved in The Field Studies Council hack day in Devon, enjoying every minute of his 2 day trip on the Devon coast in beautiful sunshine using the Pi as a portable web server. You can get further details by clicking the link above. You can also follow him on Twitter @neilcford . This talk helped get the group together and discuss what to do with the Pi during the short break for refueling with tea, coffee, etc

Next Up was
Chris Evans - Manager and Owner of CJE Micro’s and Fourth Dimension. 
CJE Micro's http://www.cjemicros.co.uk/index.shtml

First off he stated that he also bought a model B back in the days of the BBC Micro . A computer which was placed in my primary school the year I left for secondary school which had Commodore Pet computers. Ahh the joys of typing in 3+ pages of code from a text book with no errors.


Chris also showed off a pre-alpha version of  RISC OS running on the Raspberry Pi. I was not aware of this being developed for the Pi, which sparked more discussion during the breaks as the OS has a low footprint so could  be run/installed on smaller SD cards rather than larger ones required by the official Pi build of Debian. 

He also came to show off and promote some of the hardware that the store had developed for the Raspberry Pi device. One major device which was showed and a world first was the development of a Real Time Clock module which plugs into the Pi and stays within the contours of the Raspberry Pi. Linux and RISC OS is partly implemented with full implementation due soon. A fully made up PCB of this is available from the store above, also you have the option of a temperature sensor which will give you piece of mind when you Pi is running, though is not going to run that hot anyway to worry about it being melted.

Showed the various cases that are available from the shop and for the Raspberry Pi, even showing that you could place a Pi within a ATX or Mini ITX case to make smooth looking device. Also supplies cable to make a Raspberry Pi look neater and control the cables coming from the device. Further work that the company is carrying out is how to power a cluster (known as a Bramble) of Pi from one power source.

Next Up was
Peter Hobson - Founder of the Brighton Pi Group on Twitter @BrightonPi



Peter was going to show some examples of using the Scratch programing language, this is also the foundation's main choice which will be placed on the education release of the Pi. Aimed at getting young people involved and interested in coding, learning what is possible when using a computer but it was deiced to let the attendees have a chance to talk about their projects and plans for their Pi, also to test or tryout any of the hardware which Chris had brought along.

A good evening was had by all and the Raspberry Pi is going to be huge and has great potential, lets carry this into the next month's meeting. 

If you are interested in joining the Brighton Pi Group please visit the group's google group all updates and information about the group will be posted to this group. You need to be approved before your able to post. (don't worry about this, it keeps out the Spam Bots (machines) from posting to group.)

Brighton Hack Space are up for letting us use the space on an monthly basis. So we need ideas for speakers, discussion about what to do at each of those monthly meetings.
Any further ideas, errors, updates just drop a comment below or post in the google group and I will update this blog.

Remove Internet Social Media Content

Got this tweet from @aleksk "Can any comm mgrs explain? RT @sanjukta: On Facebook u only have Like button, no unlike. On Twitter u have a Retweet, but no discard tweet."

Am I reading this right I cant unlike or delete comments or content on Twitter and Facebook

I believe that I can and should be able to remove content from my social media as shown below

Discard tweet or delete it


Click the area marked when viewing your tweets when using the Twitter Website Your twitter app should have a delete option, you just need to find it.

Unlike a Facebook page


As you see this Facebook page shown about Tim Robbins which is waiting to be liked. Once you clicked the Like button it will vanish but you can unlike it as shown in the larger picture below. 

Please feel free to leave a comment below or contact me about this post. 

You just need to click the link shown in the marked red area and you will unlike the page and it will go back to it's original state.

I do agree that there is no Unlike button on Facebook; this functionally has been well spammed on Facebook but there is a Unlike link as shown above.

In some cases it seems hard to find the method needed to remove or unlike content from our social media but as in life we should explore our space and the space of others and always provide the functionally to say "I don't like this!"

Please feel free to leave a comment below or contact me about this post