Blog stats - March 2016

The blog has been going less than a year (first post was 15th July 2015) but I thought the statistics about the blog so far might be of interest.

The Top Ten posts based on page views:

mbots - graphical programming and Arduino

22 Jul 2015, 

716

It is a good time to play with little robots

14 Nov 2015, 

401

Raspberry Pi gesture controlled Minecraft X-Wing

3 Jan 2016, 

395

Scratch Robot Arm

23 Jul 2015, 

385

OhBot Experiment

13 Aug 2015, 

323

Experience at Raspberry Pi Cademy 7-8th December 2...

12 Dec 2015, 

318

Raspberry Pi Controlled robot from junk

19 Jul 2015, 

301

Playing with Tickle and Mini-drone

4 Aug 2015, 

300

Raspberry Pi gesture controlled Minecraft X-Wing (...

24 Jan 2016, 

299

Raspberry Pi - Python Junkbot

17 Jan 2016, 

286

So small robots and Raspberry Pi, which I was hoping for as they are my interests as well.



The audience based on pages views is an interesting mix and not really sure what to make of it, apart from I hope they are all finding it useful.

Pageviews by Countries

Entry	Pageviews
United States	8650
Slovakia	1664
United Kingdom	1390
France	394
Germany	305
Ireland	96
Russia	80
Singapore	73
Portugal	72
Sweden	43

Comments and ideas are welcome, i would love to find out what others are doing.



All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

waste as tool to inspire potential computing students

Originally posted as: http://computingnorthampton.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/waste-as-tool-to-inspire-potential.html in 2012.

A recent article in the Northampton Herald and Post " How a university is using waste as tool to inspire students" by Lawrence John discusses the Junkbots project. 

"FUNNY looking robots called junkbots could be the key to encouraging more children across the county to become engineers, computer programmers or scientists.

One force which is driving this idea forward is the University of Northampton.

For the past few years, staff from its science and technology department have been going out to primary and secondary schools to spread the word that science is fun.

By working with schools, the university hopes to show pupils a different side to computing and hopefully raise their interest in what they can achieve" Lawrence John

For the whole article click here.this takes you to the Newspaper site.


To read more about the junkbot project go to: http://junkbots.blogspot.co.uk/




I would be interest in hearing from others who are doing similar things, please feel free to add a comment below.


All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

Virtual Reality Minecraft on a PC

This is an update of the an earlier post.


As a little experiment with the Oculus Rift I wondered if I could view a Minecraft world through the oculus Rift. The answer is yes and relatively easily (certain easier than I though it was going to be). The Oculus Rift used with this was from the first developer kit, there are some latency issues (you move, it moves slightly later)

Download Minecrift from: https://share.oculusvr.com/app/minecrift

Unzip the files and run the installer file.

figure 1

You should get something similar to figure 1. All I did then was press OK.

Figure 2

Run the Minecraft launcher and create a new profile. After creating a new profile, edit it to change Use version to release minecrift-1.6.4-b12-nohydra which can be found in the drop down menu. 

Now save the profile.

Play the Minecraft normally, but with the Oculus Rift on (it helps to have two people one wearing the Oculus Rift, the other pressing keys to control the movement).

Figure 3

Most people who have tried it, enjoyed it; but you really can only play for a short while. If are susceptible motion sickness I wouldn't try this.


Related links
http://minecraft-vr.com/

http://www.theriftarcade.com/minecrift/

http://vrwiki.wikispaces.com/Minecrift 

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/05/10/minecraft-is-the-latest-game-to-get-oculus-rift-support-with-minecrift-mod/

http://riftmod.com/how-to-setup-minecraft-for-oculus-rift/



I would be interested in finding out what others are doing with combining Minecraft with other devices/software via comments.

All views are the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisations the author is associated with in any way. Nor is post advocating the use of approach described above, but is reporting on an experiment.