I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Category: Tech

Technology. We all use it, we all love it. We all hate it.

And my Pebble Time is on its way

Posted by on in Tech, Wearable ComputingLeave a comment

Hopefully I won’t have too long to wait until it arrives, although it does have a fair distance to travel. I’m really interested in seeing how it compares to the original Pebble smartwatch and what sort of functionality I can get out of it compared to the Apple Watch. Not that I have an Apple Watch, but it’ll be interesting nevertheless.

I also want to see how it works with both iOS and Android and work out what’s best and where the most interesting and useful interactions come from. So expect Pebble Time posts in the coming weeks.

New Ototo sensors and some thoughts on the board itself

Posted by on in Making things, Sounds, TechLeave a comment

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I really like the Ototo board from Dentaku. It’s fun for trying things out and experimenting with ideas. I’ve just bought three new sensors for it, an additional light sensor, a pressure / force sensor, and a ribbon sensor. They’re all very nicely made and to the same high standard as the ones I already have, and, they’ve already been very useful.

But using the board has made me start to think about other aspects of the board. In the Dentaku faq about Ototo it mentions that they’re looking into a way of changing the sounds on the board itself. I think that this would be very useful indeed, as would being able to map the different sensor inputs on any given sound as well. I think it could be done with a simple app either for the desktop of mobile, but it would make the board a lot more useful.

The PowerUp 3.0 is pretty awesome

Posted by on in Stuff, TechLeave a comment

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I only got to try this out for the first time the other day but it is pretty amazing. Not easy to fly though. Not easy at all, but fun. I really underestimated just how much space is needed to fly this thing. You need a fairly large flat park and you need a very windless day to do it too. Even the slightest gust of wind can take the thing as it’s so light.

The app is amazing though. You get real control with it. The only thing I’d have liked is a front facing camera on the airplane which sends real time footage back to the app. That would have been so cool. Even so it’s loads of fun to play around with, and when the wind dies down a bit I’ll get another chance to mess around with it.

I had one, and yet, I still want one

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But I have to ask why? It isn’t like there’s anything you can do with a ZX81 that I can’t do elsewhere, and so I constantly battle with myself, sometimes wanting to get one, and other times deciding that it really is a bad idea and I just wouldn’t use it, and that is really a lot closer to the truth as that happens with stuff I buy, I’m sorry to say.

I also sometimes think about some of the things I could do with one, and then try and use an emulator, and don’t really get into that and that also tells me that getting an actual ZX81 would be a bad idea. Even though I think they’re awesome.

Investing in Chirp.io

Posted by on in Tech, The Internet of ThingsLeave a comment

I remember seeing Chirp.io back at a Music Tech Fest when it was at Ravensbourne college. It was an interesting idea and I was quite curious about it, but I wasn’t sure how I would use it and how it could be useful. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing of course. Sometimes it takes a while for things to find a place in my world and I like stuff to be actually useful to me.

So when I found that Chirp.io was equity funding on Crowdcube I thought I’d take a look. At the same time they’re expanding chirp into the IoT world with an SDK and Arduino code. It’s getting interesting now. Also, they’ve just announced a Chrome extension, which could be fun.

I wonder where they’ll go next.

Finally starting to do something with my TouchBoard

Posted by on in Making things, TechLeave a comment
TouchBoard up and running
TouchBoard battery
Back of the TouchBoard
TouchBoard in packaging

I backed the TouchBoard on kickstarter, but ever since I got it I haven’t either had the time to do anything proper with it, and haven’t had any ideas of projects to start with it either. But the other day I started having a few ideas of things I wanted to try out. So I got the box out and started to investigate what was in there as I hadn’t looked in ages.

It’s a nice kit, and everything works or at least seems to work just fine even though I haven’t touched it in ages. I’ll hopefully get to use it for a couple of projects soon enough.