With support from Freya (doing some work experience in the lab) finally built the “Canary” to hang up in the lab. An ambient display to tell us if all is good with our Lorawan gateway at the top of the orbit. A great little project that went from sketch to install in a few hours, and a great way to learn about connected devices. But that wasn’t the highlight of the week.

V&A preview

Leah and Valerio had also got us tickets to the preview opening of the new V&A on East Bank. You could hear the passion in directors talk, the building is a treat to explore, but the highlight was “The Music is Black“ exhibition.

Director’s speech photo

Walking around with quality headphones listening to superb audio was quite the experience. From a technical perspective I would love to know how they manage the zonal and directional sensing (UWB?), and the mix of individual and collective audio. Is it all streamed? Or was it a mix of local and virtual? From an immersive perspective I loved that you could walk around in your own little world but then emerge into the shared experience by lifting one headphone off, often in response to seeing someone else doing the same little dance as yourself! Highly recommend a visit. The Why We Make exhibit was also excellent and one that we will be taking our students to.

The Music is Black

Experimented with a new drone last week - a DJI Neo 2. A really simple to use pocket drone which is essentially a flying selfie camera! I remember a demo at one of the Intel Developer forums (probably 2015?) over ten years ago demonstrating a drone flying through a fake forest on stage. This was just as Intel was making their many drone investments and the same time the drone shows were starting. 10 years later and I am carrying this in my cycle jersey! Half way through you might notice excellent avoidance of what are quite small branches! Very impressive.

The week ended seeing Imogen Heap playing at the Camden Roundhouse. Her first gig in 7 years and I thought it was pretty amazing. Her voice and technical skills are another level. The MiMu gloves were impressive to see - a project that I had a glipse at back in 2018 via Helen who was working on a Microbit version! The listening party at the end with John Hopkins was the icing on the cake!

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• only one this week a link to pen plotter tutorials!

Some time off over Easter meant I was able to spend some time getting started with the Bantam NextDraw 8511. This week was mostly about setting up the plotter in a slightly more accessible location and getting started with setting up inkscape and place to record progress. Hopefully to make it easier to continue than my false start last time.

So far I have been getting the workflow sorted. I created the website at https://www.iot.io/plotter/ since I was keen to store how I was making different plots and wanted to keep images of things created. I am curious about the algorithms behind the algorithmic art.

So here are the first few plots:

I managed to tear the paper on the plot below. Nature of the flow field meant that I was overdrawing a particularly popular “channel” in the flow field. Also got some reminders on Perlin Noise and flashbacks to Metaverse book research from last year and this resultant L-Systems demo.

Below is a plot of the Perlin Noise values (can be toggled on and off, I like to see the numbers behind the algorithm, or how the flow fields are generated)

In searching for a link for the NextDraw I came across an unboxing vide by Dan Catt which also led me to his Drawing Machines 101 videos - have added to my watchlist!

A quick update on the birdbox, eight healthy looking eggs:

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• another TPS music video via Kottke
• a video about duct tape
• John Deere right to repair court case settlement

A couple of making projects this week. A switch for my desk that turns on the lights outside in the garden. This was also an experiment with the HLK LD2410C presence sensor for monitoring presence in my work area. The second was the Lego AC Cobra pictured above.

I probably build one set a year, would build more if I had the space to put them once built. I like the manual process of sorting the pieces into colours and sizes, and the methodical process of following the instructions. This is not a creative process since I am following instructions, but it is a satisfying one non the less. I like the process of having a drink, putting on some music or a film that doesn’t require all my attention and slowly seeing the emergence of an object.

I take the photos as I go to remember and document the build process. My Flickr account has photos tagged with LEGO

My other project last week was creating a remote switch to turn the lights on in the garden. We have been doing this via a web app and MQTT for a couple of years but I kept meaning to create a physical switch. Since getting your phone out your pocket to turn on the light is weirdly annoying. I also wanted to try out the HLK LD2410C presence sensor for monitoring presence in my work area.

The LD2410 (centre of photo above) is a cheap way to sense presence using mmWave radar that can be configured via Bluetooth. My goal was to have one running at my desk so that I could gauge how “accurately” it reflects my presence.

Gave me chance to play around with Fusion 360 which always reminds me that it takes me a few hours to get used to the modelling process. The Arduino code and enclosure files are available on GitHub. Initial testing of the presence detection looks much better that I had experienced with previous sensors of this kind (see work on COACH) - I printed a translucent lid and used the RGB LED on the ESP32 C3 to indicate presence.

Feels like a while ago now but at the start of the week I was helping out with the install of a Nuna Green Wall Irrigation System at Avenue Primary School. Also posted a video to the Connected Environments YouTube

We are only just starting this project but already getting some great results. Am documenting work in progress in this Flickr album.

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• A light that can see radio waves - a lovely project!

Season 5 term 2 comes to an end. The annual tick tock of teaching seems to go so quickly. Our 5th cohort have come to the end of their main teaching contact time for the year (still a couple of dissertation sessions in T3). This means some crits this week and a fun last lecture lock picking session.

We started the week with GPP crits. Some lovely project work, the brief was “communicating across the miles”. I liked the idea of fluttering as an indicator of presence, some really good prototyping skills coming together and quite creative uses of technology! Projects included pianos that played each other, bikes that could ask others bikes for help, tea cups that encouraged you to stop and share a brew, punch boards that encourage you to spar together and customisable creatures that send emotional states across the world.

Valerio has also posted an update on the CE blog which includes some nice scans of the projects.

We ended the week with a lecture on IoT security and a lock picking workshop. Turns out our students are quite quick at learning! The basic locks started to ping open after 5 minutes, but more impressive was their ability to pick the more complex double-pin locks by the end of the session.

I called by at the MEng first year project showcase - some cool installations!

Also a proud Dad moment - daughters A level DT project arrived home for photographing in situ. Has been great to see this evolve over the past year.

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter (USB002, Alexandra Palace, London 27 February 2026) - missed out on tickets for this so nice to see the full set on YouTube - so wish I could have experienced this - gives me goosebumps to watch.
• The Deep Sea - doom scrolling but in a good informative way. I went all the way to the sea bed, will you?
• The Heart Cut #16 Fielden - went for an English whisky for the first time - met Fabrizio at Amathus where he was doing a tasting. Really nice guy and this will be great for an Old Fashioned!

A kickstarter delivery this week - the Cipherling by Mother Ultimate (campaign). A lovely little small batch machine (part of the Make100 series) that listens for numbers station broadcasts (actually connects via wifi to their remote receiver) and when a transmission is found, Cipherling alerts with a lovely audio ping and then you can listen to the broadcast, just like the one below (turn audio on).

Almost the end of term and had a great guest lecture this week. Joshua came to talk about his work at Hildebrand technology and in particular his experience of moving production of their IHD product (Glow) from China back to the UK. Some really interesting insights into their design process and was great to see videos of his experience of a week working on the assembly line in Shenzen to understand how his product was being made. Was also taken by the observation that only one of our students had ever been in a factory. I would love to introduce a site visit to an electonics assembly facility as part of the course.

Had a lovely dinner at House of Koko as a farewell to Paul who we collaborated with on Moorfields project - forgot to get a picture at the table so this shot of the toilet roll holder (for Kerstin) will have to do. I quite like these members clubs.

Last up, Will passed his PhD and I forgot to take a picture twice - once at the viva and then again at the pub - doh. You will have to imagine a group of people looking very happy.

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• the BBC number stations R4 programme - this was a really interesting listen if the Cipherling has peeked your interest
• Tiny Puppet Sound - another great listen but this time with something to watch
• Cursor for Hardware - an AI powered schematic editor
• Office EU - had a discussion with a friend about my hope and their pessimism about our ability to remove our dependency on US software. This project popped onto my radar the next day.

Having a bit of fun automating some of the analysis of bird box photos. Looks like we have a visitor to the bird box and am hoping they are nesting. In previous years I have managed to capture footage of the nest once it was setup, but this time I am hoping to be recording from the outset.

That meant I needed to be able to sift through lots of “empty” images and delete them to not overwhelm the SD Card (I am taking a photo every minute between 7am and 8pm - 780 photos a day). I used Python and OpenCV via Google’s Antigravity. This was also a bit of an experiment to explore how I might teach the process of prototyping with AI tools. In this application the process was quite smooth and I found the support scaffold helpful in getting the job done quicker than it would probably have taken me if I had been developing it from scratch and debugging via stack overflow searches. This code worked well for identifying empty boxes and flagging to me when the box did start to get occupied but then the changes in the “background” image meant that it started to capture continuously again. Still trying to decide if that is ok or not.

The GitHub repo is here. I had the opposite experience a couple of days later trying to use the same tool to develop a status dashboard for some MQTT and InfluxDB data. Felt like I was always getting further away from a solution rather than closer.

Screenshot of birdbox webpage

This week we our students had the pleasure of the excellent Josef from Arup along to chat about foresight and innovation as part of our Ethics, Sustainability and Business of IoT module.

Josef from Arup - can we predict the future?

This led to one of those lovely moments with students that can’t be scripted. The students were tasked with creating some foresight scenarios for UCL East in 2040 - one group highlighted the idea that in our future campus we will have no WiFi. When I asked what they would do during lectures they retorted “what did you oldies do during lectures”, touché. I replied saying we used to listen to the lecturer and make notes! (Continuous Partial Attention is an ongoing challenge!) A great conversation followed about how much they prefer the active learning sessions and workshops (vs lectures). Learning through making is key to our programme. Even though we only spent a little time on this activity, some interesting themes emerged around scope 3 emissions and AI (will potentially kill any net zero goals for our estate), space research becoming a thing (which then led to a living space station lab / digital habitation discussion) and the need for on site micro data centre that could be used to heat the pool in the aquatics centre. I think we need to do more of this next year.

Workshop mode

WIP continues on the Manifold light box. Wiring and inserting into enclosure is improving, very close to have the working version so we can start focusing on animations.

Also assembled and tested the solar battery water pump - was aiming for 7m head of water.

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• None - my page history looks like I was building not browsing this week!

As we head towards end of term we have a few guest lectures coming in and a visit to the Connected Places Catapult. The visit to was hosted by Geoff with talks from Bin and Andrew (some really interesting discussion around soundscapy). This also means I get to spend some time project work.

This week I nudged forward a few projects including giving Satrias Water Scout a quick clean out / check / cobweb removal. All seemed good and only a couple of loose connections to fix. Pretty impressive this student MSc dissertation is still going strong 2 years later.

Cleaning out Water Scout

Testing Charging

Checking TTN packets

Manifold lights progressed a little further. I re-wired the level shifter in a speculative attempt to remove some flickering. Seems to have worked reasonably well.

CD74HCT125E

Starting to juggle projects now as a few start to overlap. Had some success with internal innovation funding meaning a side project has come to life. We are working with Nuna Studio on a really cool rainwater capture project for slowing down roof rainwater running into sewers. More on this in a future week but it involves solar panels, batteries and lifting water up 7m with a small pump.

Prepping for the pump.

Noticed a great tit checking out the birdbox. Hoping they are moving in…

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• hints for moving off US based IT
• GPS jamming map
• Soundscapy

Spent time on installing UHI sensors on the UCL200 Greenwall and teaching Sustainability / SDG’s this week. Great to see the UCL200 project coming together and the wooden canopy looks like it will be a good one. Looking forward to seeing how much of a social space this creates on the street. Also continued working on finalising the waterproofing of the cabling for Manifold project.

Wooden Canopy

Green wall looking good

Sensors assemble

More photos are in the Flickr album over here.

Spent a few hours working on Manifold. Currently at stage of trying to get all the component parts into a waterproof form that will be installable, maintainable and hopefully last a year. A quick site visit with team building structure and panelling was helpful to see the scale of the project and the space it will occupy.

Squeezing in capacitor

Current challenge is that one of the two 10m strands is getting some flickering. Both identical set-ups, so am assuming I have some slightly deficient solder joints somewhere underneath the waterproof shrink wrap.

Testing continuity and resistance

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• this great desktop app satellite eyes by Tom Taylor
• an interesting post on using AI in research Claude code as my co-engineer from a tub of water to ultrasonic flood prediction in Cumbria
• a useful unconcious bias video from Royal Society
• an article that resonated - UCL is 200 today - so what would founding UCL look like in 2026?

New bike week. Finally took a ride out on the new Sonder Camino Ti GRX in Guisborough Woods. This weeks post is therefore a collection of bike pics. Beautiful titanium bike!

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• Have spent time prepping for a sustainability lecture and came across this XKCD timeline of climate and took a look again at climate stripes
• the story behind the RSS reader Current is worth a read

Spent a fair bit of time exploring solar battery setups for running EdgeAI applications this week. Turns out the requirements for two different setups came together at the same time. One a 10W system, the other a 100W. One for a resource constrained device, the other for a RPi that is pretty much running the whole time.

My house has a 3kW system, my camper van a 180W system, and I have used the adafruit solar chargers with small panels and lipo batteries a fair bit in the lab, but working out this kind of setup required a bit of searching in addition to knowing the basic theory of solar generation equations. Next step will be to build and test how closely the theory matches the in-situ use.

Here are the outlines of two different systems showing where the money gets spent. All are based on running in UK over all seasons. Note, these are total cost including RPi, microphone, enclosures etc for a device that is running BirdNet and reporting live bird counts via a Lora network.

100W panel / 100Ah battery - £800

• Controller - Victron SmartSolar MPPT 75/10
• Battery - Fogstar Drift 100ah
• Solar - Renogy 16bb - N Type 100W
• Buck Converter - X1001-Max buck converter 12-5V

10W panel / 30Ah battery - £450

• Controller - Victron SmartSolar MPPT 75/10
• Battery - Eco Tree Lithium (12V 12Ah)
• Solar - Victron BlueSolar 30W (Mono)
• Buck Converter - 12V>5V 5A Waterproof Buck Converter USB-C

Turns out the 10W version was also something very similar to the system the lovely folk at Nuna Studio where chatting to me about. In their case the need was to create an energy source to occasionally pump water up to a height of 6m. Looking forward to seeing that one installed on a school in a Newham.

To help me remember, the component parts of the system are sketched out below.

100W panel / 100Ah battery - £800

10W panel / 30Ah battery - £450

Also, I hadn’t realised (or remembered) that the Van Victron has a BLE interface - downloaded the Victron Connect app - useful:

Looking at links.duncanwilson.com, these parts of the internet crossed my path this week:

• PvPi is getting closer to production - update on testing
• Gallery of physical visualisations

(looks like I didn’t do much browsing this week…)