CTV reported on the Imagination Station

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Jan 15, 2015 in LEGO, Press | 0 comments

Canterbury Television reported on the Imagination Station on December 19th, 2014. The clip is now available via YouTube:

One News reports on the Imagination Station

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Jan 7, 2015 in Event, Press | 0 comments

We opened New Zealand’s first LEGO play and learning center, the Imagination Station, on January 4th, 2015. One News came down a day later and reported. Here is their clip:

Challenge Completed

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Nov 25, 2014 in Design, Event | 0 comments

I completed the National Novel Writing Month competition. 50.000 words in less than a month. An amazing experience and I happy with the result. Yes, it will still require a lot of revisions and extensions, but the rough draft of the novel is done.

WordPress errors

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Nov 19, 2014 in Documentation, Technology | 0 comments

Askimet is a very excellent tool and it protected me from a whopping 80.000 spam comments  on  my WordPress based web site. That is for October alone. Those spam comments completely filled up my SQL database beyond the point where I could repair it following these instructions.

It was a classical Catch 22. To empty the database I had to “optimize” it, which does take some additional space. Which I did not have because the database was full. Askimet has just released their 3.0.3 update which might have solved the issue. Or it could have been my webhoster’s support worker I called that finally had mercy with me and hit the optimize button on his side.

In any case, getting from a “Warning: Creating default object from empty value in wp-admin/includes/post.php on line 567″ error to the conclusion that my SQL database is full due to comment spam that Askimet caught was a rather interesting journey. And it only took me two days to figure it out.

National Novel Writing Month

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Nov 19, 2014 in Culture, Featured | 0 comments

I am participating in the National Novel Writing Month of November. It is the first time I write non scientifically and from the few workshops I recently attended here in Christchurch I realize that this will be an interesting experience. I make steady progress but writing 1666 words daily is challenging. Most of all because there are all those other tasks that sneak up on me.

Sensor readings Mindsensors Glide AS with EV3 problem

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Oct 11, 2014 in Documentation, LEGO | 0 comments

I was working on a new version of my Spirograph Automaton and once I fired up the EV3 software on my computer it informed that a new version was available, including a new 1.06H firmware. I installed both and expected my software to work as it did before. I got some very strange sensor readings. One sensor seemed to overwrite the value of the other sensors. Moreover, once I unplugged and reconnected the sensors it sometimes seem to work again. After rebooting the EV3 it sometimes worked and sometimes it did not. These types of intermittent problems are really annoying and it took me more than an afternoon to figure out that it was not my poor programming skills that caused the problem. Eventually I made a video of the problem and contacted the Mindsensors support.

They replied promptly and informed me that:

“The 1.06H EV3 firmware has a bug in its sensor handler. Even when the i2c addresses are changed the error still occurs. It seems the error stops once the program in executed and then the devices are disconnected and reconnected. This will fix the error until you restart your EV3. If this is too much of an inconvenience, you can use the 1.03H EV3 firmware. 1.03H has been tested and works with the rotation test-ms code. We have notified LEGO about the issue. Hopefully a new firmware fix will come in the near future.”

This information was not available on their website and I hope that my post will safe you some time. In case you want to downgrade to the 1.03H EV3 firmware, have a look at this file. To downgrade place the firmware in the folder (on Mac OS X):

/Applications/LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Home Edition.app/Contents/MonoBundle/Resources/Firmware

You need to right click on the EV3 software and select “Show Package Contents” to get into the desired directory. The firmware will then show up in the list of the available firmwares in your “Firmware Update” under the Tools menu in the EV3 desktop software.

Misbehavior Exhibition

Posted by Christoph Bartneck on Oct 9, 2014 in Culture, Design | 0 comments

Katja Rosenberg has put together an amazing show entitled “Misbehavior” at the CMR Gallery in Redruth. The project features contributions by members of CMR and other artists from Britain including London, Manchester Cambridge and Margate, as well as from from Germany, France, Slovenia, Portugal, New Zealand and the United States. The show will be on October 8-29, 2014. If you are around, check it out. Or download the complete catalog. This is my second art object that is being displayed. Yeah!