Blog

It’s been a great 7 years as CTO and co-founder at Future Visual, but it’s now time to look for new adventures starting later in 2023. I’m primarily focused on new technology and Unity; VR, AR, and Vision Pro are of particular interest, as is building and leading a team. I’m currently only looking for remote or occasional on-site roles. Take a look at my LinkedIn, or get in contact if you’d like my CV.

Since OpenAI released their ChatGPT Turbo & Whisper API’s a few days ago, there’s a whole bunch of voice > Whisper > ChatGPT > TTS demos, so I had to do one too. Though to make this slightly different, this uses Wake Word and Voice Activity Detection using PicoVoice, so it’s kinda like an Alexa.. ish..? The flow is: App starts > wait for the wake word (Helios — you can train your own wake words) > start recording the mic, and use Cobra VAD to detect when the user stops speaking, or wait a max of… Read more: Voice > Whisper STT API > ChatGPT Turbo API > Google TTS API demo

This is mainly for Google, as I couldn’t find anything that actually did this in OSM. I’d have thought there would be an option to draw the borders of a state/country etc including the coastline and land borders, but apparently not. Here’s the code for Overpass Turbo: You can see it here: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1rGa I think this will work with any of the ISO 3166-2 codes, eg: GB-SCT, GB-ENG, IT-78, etc – as long as OSM supports them. Let me know if you found it useful!

Thought I’d make a list of resources for models for 3D printing. Some are paid, some are free. Let me know if I’m missing any! https://www.toymakr3d.com https://fab365.net https://www.gambody.com/ https://www.patreon.com/mysterymakers https://hex3dpatreon.com/ https://www.patreon.com/mrbaddeley https://www.myminifactory.com/ https://cults3d.com/en https://www.printables.com/ https://www.thingiverse.com/ https://www.do3d.com https://www.patreon.com/FlexiFactory

Flappy Birds clone with ChatGPT and Python Originally posted on Medium Inspired by Andy Touch’s tweet, I thought I’d see if ChatGPT could create a Flappy Bird clone. Let’s go! “in python, make a flappy birds clone” It generated the following Python: Ok but did it run? It did! Repeatedly hit the spacebar to move up, gravity pulls you down. There’s no obstacles though. Let’s add some: Does it work? Yup! I want more obstacles though, so let’s just ask ChatGPT for that: Here it is in action: Let’s add some colour:… Read more: Flappy Birds clone with ChatGPT and Python

I feel like a farm worker in the early 1900s that has seen a tractor for the first time. Originally posted on Medium The future is here. I’ve seen it. I’ve used it. It has blown my mind. ChatGPT has been released in free research preview and it is incredible. While ChatGPT can do many different things, it’s the programming side that I’m particularly interested in. You can ask it — in plain english — to generate code for you by describing what you want the code to do. Recently I’ve been using MicroPython and Python… Read more: ChatGPT and programming: Incredible. Terrifying. I love it.

Galactic Unicorns and Custom Pimoroni Pico Firmware Originally posted on Medium I bought an excellent Galactic Unicorn from Pimoroni, with the aim of connecting a Time-of-Flight sensor (VL53L5CX) to use as input for the board, connecting it over the QW/ST using I2C. Sounds simple right? No. There are some examples for the VL53L5CX working with the Raspberry Pi Pico, so I assumed this would work OK with the Galactic Unicorn, which uses a Pico W (A Pico with WiFi, great for IoT!). Was I right? Also no. The example I needed for… Read more: Galactic Unicorns and Custom Pimoroni Pico Firmware

Ray-Ban Stories — notes Aka Facebook privacy nightmare shades. Most of my day, I have an Oculus Quest 2 on my head, so obviously I have surrendered my soul to Facebook already. Most reviews seem to cover privacy concerns, so I’m going to ignore that. Go read those if you’re interested in that — and you should be. I have several pairs of Ray-Bans, but no Wayfarers, so went for those, in blue, which make the cameras slightly more noticeable. This wasn’t intentional, I thought I bought black ones. Oh well. They fit well, slightly… Read more: Ray-Ban Stories — notes

Saving 6D.ai’s mesh at runtime as an OBJ in Unity For anyone who’s wondering how to save the meshes generated by 6d.ai, it’s pretty straightforward. I’ve seen a few people asking and no definitive answer, so thought I’d write it up in case anyone searching for this found it useful. The steps are basically: A hacky code sample that might help you out: //Get a reference to the SDMesh SDMesh sdMesh = FindObjectOfType<SDMesh>(); //combine the meshes MeshFilter[] meshFilters = sdMesh.GetComponentsInChildren<MeshFilter>(); CombineInstance[] combine = new CombineInstance[meshFilters.Length]; int i = 0; while (i <… Read more: Saving 6D.ai’s mesh at runtime as an OBJ in Unity