Ben North's blog

One of the sports in the Wii Sports Resort game is Island Flyover, where you get to pilot an aeroplane round the island and its surrounding waters. There is a lighthouse, and when you fly near it, you hear a sound very like Morse code. My younger two children and I decided to see if this really was Morse code, or just something made to sound a bit like it. Our first job was to capture the audio while a player flew the plane near the lighthouse. This is what we got: This was going to be tricky for us to analyse, so, in Audacity, we applied a high-pass filter to try to cut out some of the engine noise,

A previous post described a Lego implementation of an escapement mechanism similar to one I’d seen in the British Museum. Recently, Zach and I built something a bit closer to the actual Tompion escapement. The pins are all in a line round the wheel, and the pallets are also in a line, offset around the circumference. It still has the difference that the interaction between the pins and the pallets takes place on the side of the wheel, rather than the top. Pleasing that this one worked too!

[This is a guest post written by Zach.] I’ve been using a Raspberry Pi as a desktop for a while now and it has been working great, but one annoying thing was that I had to turn on both my monitors (in case the mouse is in the wrong one) when I wanted to check my email, so I thought to make a light box to tell me if I had an email. Also, flashing lights are always cool. I, with my dad, built a display box with three LEDs so it can show up to seven emails in binary. Hardware The hardware side of this project was pleasingly simple because the Raspberry Pi has built in GPIO pins. What

An idea I first started thinking about and working on over four years ago — a stepping stone in the journey from Scratch to Python — finally has a public prototype. https://www.pytch.org/ Scratch is a wonderful system for beginning programmers. It has a visually attractive environment, a way of creating code with a drag and drop system which avoids the possibility of syntax errors, and a natural concurrency model, where multiple ‘sprites’ all obey their own ‘scripts’ at the same time. At some point, learners want to explore text-based languages. Python is very popular in schools, and of course it is heavily used in the real world too. When trying to learn Python, a learner coming from a Scratch background

On a ferry journey, Jude wanted a pen and paper game that we didn’t already know how to play, so she invented a variant on naughts and crosses (‘tic-tac-toe’). You play it on this board: You still have to get three of your marks in a row, but there are more ways for this to happen than in normal Os and Xs: Three rings: Three radial lines: Three clockwise spirals: Three anti-clockwise spirals: We wanted to know whether there was a winning strategy, so we drew a whole pile of diagrams to work out how the play would develop: and concluded that the first player always wins. Winning strategy for first player One winning starting move is for X to

A friend kindly gave us some flashing-light stickers for Hallowe’en, and the natural thing to do with them once the festivities were over was to dissect them. So we did this, and found that each contained a square circuit board about 25mm on a side. When you press a little button in the middle, three coloured LEDs — red, green, blue — flash rapidly for about twenty seconds. It looked like they were flashing round in a circle, but too quickly for me to be sure of the sequence. To investigate, I set up the flasher approximately vertically, held in a lump of Blu-tack: Then I turned off the lights, pressed the flasher’s button, and took some pictures with a