dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
So, as mentioned in previous weeks, I've been trying to TRONify my cargo bike and kids' bike helmets the last few weeks and I've never quite appreciated how much of small electronics work is shopping in general and specifically, shopping for plastic pieces of shit. This isn't what I thought I would struggle with. I'm a fairly skilled dev so I thought I would struggle with EE concepts or the dexterity required for soldering or even simply being able to work with a magnifying glass but no, shopping, which I find borderline triggering due to hatred of clutter, is the actual limiting factor for me.
And shopping for an enclosure for housing all of this junk is the challenge. For the bikes themselves I can use standard Hammond plastic enclosures and consumer battery packs, but for bike helmets all of the standard stuff adds way, way too much bulk.
The rough sketch of components I need housed are
- ESP32 board, mounted to a perfboard
- a boost converter to bring the 3.7v put out by the 18650 cell up to 12v for LED lights
- a buck converter to bring 12v down to 5.5 for the ESP32 board
- a charging board with USB-C[1]
- an SPST(?) switch for physically breaking the connection from the battery to everything else
- an N-channel MOSFET for controlling COB LEDs (if I supplement the WS2815s)
- a P-channel MOSFET for having the rest of the load shut off if it detects that a USB charger is connected
- nylon standoffs for the various boards
- a holder/receptacle for the 18650 battery itself
Finding an enclosure that isn't as bulky as shit for this seems impossible, so I'll probably have to 3d print something. Which means I need a 3d printer[2]. From my time being involved with a local Makerspace, my opinion of 3d printers is that they spend most of their time being broken, but I've heard from trusted advisors that that's because my experience has been with 3d printers made by the decadent and pathetic Western concerns and that the Bambu 3d printers from China have changed everything[3]
So... maybe that's my next purchase. Perhaps I can justify the 3d printer as some kind of educational value for the kids.
Does my experience here sound right so far? Small electronics success often hinges on shopping skill?
Notes
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I do see combination boost converter/USB chargers for 18650 cells, and that would cut down on complexity/bulk/work, but their amperage is much too low to run LED strips off of so I'm stuck buying individual components for this.
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Though I think if I want a really cool looking transparent enclosure so we can see circuit boards and blinken lights I'll need acrylic covers? Which requires getting a laser cutter too? I wonder what educational value for kids these have...
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So long as you have no opsec concerns from running proprietary firmware that requires a cloud connection to do anything from a nation state that we might go to war with in the near future. Though I'd be kind of amused to see the worst that can happen.
Switching gears (ha), but to avoid making another post, I'll consolidate into this one.
Aliexpress.com has incredible deals but takes forever, so that stalls my TRON helmet project out.
So, in the meantime, I've gotten to triangle dodge charger skydome in my 3d game (pic attached) that was inspired by binge watching the Fast and the Furious series while feverish. I made some generic cyberspace background while waiting for the right time to take a 360 panorama pic of a skyline in my town.
I fixed the texture banding issue. The camera now follows the car. The car can steer and accelerate. It runs okay on my hardware. So... I guess the next priority is to make a race track and add some collision detection to this bitch? A computer controlled car to drive against? Maybe incorporate some engine revving sounds?
I suppose a true Ride or Die Homies game needs something more inspired than a race track though. Like outrunning a nuclear explosion. Or battling a mechanized raptor.
I should be doing this smart and using Unreal Engine or something, instead of writing a 3d engine from scratch, but I got into computers in the first place because I wanted to write a 3d engine (before getting distracted by the world of Linux and networking), so coming back to this feels like addressing some unresolved spiritual concerns.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
huh. are all of the weekly threads done by hand?
is the Tinker Tuesday bot down? where's the May 13th thread? are these done by hand?! :screaming_face:
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I managed to find a ratty copy on ebay for $5 with delivery. So, only 30 years later there's somewhat plentiful supply ig.
Was not in any library or digital library catalogs though.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
No love for Excession? That's got to be in my top 3 among the series.
Apparently due to some legal tie ups this was never released in the US!
Though I see on Amazon it will be available November 11th 2025.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I just finished reading it. Pretty excellent. Would make a good miniseries.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
You have my gratitude for nuclear weapons as well.
They are explicitly designed to be much more fun and addictive.
A quote below from your article linked in the above line.
I leave you with a final argument from fictional evidence: Simon Funk’s online novel After Life depicts (among other plot points) the planned extermination of biological Homo sapiens - not by marching robot armies, but by artificial children that are much cuter and sweeter and more fun to raise than real children. Perhaps the demographic collapse of advanced societies happens because the market supplies ever-more-tempting alternatives to having children, while the attractiveness of changing diapers remains constant over time. Where are the advertising billboards that say “BREED”? Who will pay professional image consultants to make arguing with sullen teenagers seem more alluring than a vacation in Tahiti?
“In the end,” Simon Funk wrote, “the human species was simply marketed out of existence.”
Solid points.
That all said, switching gears to adult stuff.
I game, but I would have been better off if I had never been introduced to the hobby. At most, some of the very best video games I have played (Metal Gear Solid, Fire Emblem, Days of Ruin, Cave Story, Iji, etc.) have provided approximately the same level of enjoyment, emotional release, and intellectual stimulation as a great movie or a good novel, except that they took much longer to do so (your average video game takes 20+ hours to beat, compared to 2 hours for a film and however fast you can read a book). At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.
We're in adult entertainment territory here and I suppose I would disagree with this. Steam tells me I've played Cyberpunk 2077 for about 25 hours or so and I'd say I've enjoyed it a lot more than any movie. Maybe even more than 12x ~2 hour movies, though the median movie is bad.
The art direction in Cyberpunk is top notch and often inspiring and while some of the storylines are camp, some of them are really thought provoking and interesting. It's very good interactive sci-fi and I don't want it to end, though I'm near the end of the expansion pack now.
If I were playing video games 10 hours a week constantly chasing that high I might reconsider the category. But Cyberpunk is like an hour or two every few weeks right now. Seems fine.
At worst, games like Tetris and Civilization IV have consumed countless hours of my life through highly-optimized dopamine loops with nothing to show for it.
Yeah I hear this. I've only played like 20 hours of the first or maybe second Civilization in my life, when I was a kid, and it taught me a bunch, but I could see how if this grew to 1000 hours between all of the sequels I'd feel like they were a loss.
I suppose in my ideal society I would have access to video games but most people who seem to ruin their lives with them would not.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Action shot of the Charger on a "road".
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
It is, yeah. I downloaded a free Dodge Charger Daytona Hellcat SRT model from sketchfab.com.
Not Dom Toretto's signature black Charger but it'll do for now.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I am getting some banding in texture maps but I'm sure I'll figure that out eventually.
This ended up being caused by only some of the faces in the 3d model having textures, with the rest relying on material color and phong shading, but my fragment shader didn't know that so it was trying to use a junk texture for those which just led to this banding effect.
Creating another vec4 and treating the x component as a boolean to signal to the fragment shader whether it should sample from the texture is the best I could figure out how to solve this.
Anyway, looks much better now. Ride or die time with the homies is one step closer.
Still having trouble finding a 360 degree panorama I could use. I might just go to a parking lot in a scenic skyline park of town and take a photo sphere with my phone.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I have a 7 year old. He's never played a video game outside of a DIY version of online chess against me.
I notice a lot of kids play Minecraft. I've never played it. This is a little odd since the entire reason I have a career is because I wanted to get into game development and learned to program C.
I would like to expose him to video games since I believe they have upside, but I'm pretty worried modern games are crack and educational benefits or whatever are oversold and not real.
He has an excellent attention span right now and we play a lot of card (MTG) and board games (Catan Jr) and I don't want to ruin that. Other families say once their kids play video games they stop caring about all of that other stuff and see their attention spans go to shit.
We homeschool him so he's not exactly surrounded by other kids trying to relate to him re: games but it's only a matter of time.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
thanks!
how do you know so much about this stuff?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
The trick is figuring out what 'properly prepared' means -- 90% of the time just dunking in simple green and rinsing with water works, but heavily polished or painted and almost all rubberized materials can benefit a lot from primer, and I'd expect helmets will fall into this domain.
What about rubbing alcohol on the shiny (not foamy) parts of a bike helmet?
OK my stuff from mouser.com arrived w.r.t. my LED project.
I got charged a tariff!
I ordered $5.00 worth of MOSFETs. I saw a line item that said $1.50 in tariffs. If they came from China, and they were anticipating a 145%ish tariff on these items, aren't they telegraphing that their wholesale price for the MOSFETs was $1.00? Seems kind of not that big a deal. If I were a retailer I might simply hide this cost rather than give away proprietary business info like my wholesale costs this way.
Anyway!
My next biggest stumbling block with my LED lighting project for my bikes and bike accessories is coming up with adhesion. For the helmets I think I want to use double-sided tape but I'm concerned it won't hold. My experience with gluing/sticking things has historically been lousy, although I do note that Tesla Model 3 and Model Y license plate holders are stuck to the front with sticky tape so I assume it's possible. I'm eyeing 3M double-sided "very high bond" tape though not holding out a lot of hope.
If that doesn't work, or if I'm dealing with surfaces that are more porous, the next best thing might be to get LED sleeves that are more like tracks with a cover and try to rivet or staple them into the surfaces instead? Thinking of my cargo bike box here.
Thoughts?
While I wait for mouser.com to finish delivering some stuff for my LED project I dusted off a 3D racing game I had been working on.
I originally started it after catching up on the Fast and the Furious series and Dom Toretto's Charger was top of mind. I wrote an all software rendeter in Rust but every nicely detailed free charger model I could find was way too slow without GPU acceleration. So I began rewriting it to use wgpu but it was pretty frustrating due to annoyances around Rust ownership junk but also everything in Rust that's new and exciting is unusable with LLMs because they mix old and new incompatible APIs in their answers. So I stalled out.
The last few days I decided to start over in C++ with SDL2 and bgfx and it has gone significantly better. I can get the car models fully loaded and it's pretty fast, even on crappy ancient laptop GPUs. I am getting some banding in texture maps but I'm sure I'll figure that out eventually.
Currently working on adding controls to the car and having the camera chase it as it moves around an infinite plane, and also looking into making an animated sky sphere from 360 degree YouTube videos. I suspect it'll involve Blender, at some point, which I don't know at all. Probably not too far behind you, @FCfromSSC
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I have been increasingly souring on Trump's mockery of the faith for a while, this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. He clearly does not care about Christ at all, and only cynically signals his Christianity in an empty way.
I say this as someone who actually kind of likes Trump as a personality (though not a politician), but ... say what? If you asked me to write down a million qualities about Trump I don't think "cares about Christ" would ever make the list. How did you get here in the first place? I must know.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
It's odd that this is so underserved a market. I would expect it's not a huge money maker but plenty of Magic the gathering / game shops stay afloat and they're not raking it in.
There's an electronics shop in my town actually but it seems to serve a slightly different market, they pretty much never have what I need but there's always people in there with some kind of antique electronic device they need help fixing.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
IMO the 4chan transes are older and a little more doomed about it. But also possibly were into trans before it was cool. In the old days it took actual work and guts to research and source and take gray market hormones. You're probably cool AF to do that with no social support at all.
Nowadays, any retard can get hormones if they say "trans" and they are also more likely to hang out on Reddit.
Probably think of it like an alternate universe where, after years of being in the shadows, bodybuilders were validated for wanting to be swole and doctors would write RXes for as much steroids as you can handle, covered by insurance. That generation of broscientists would be SO annoying. And they would be all over Reddit while the OG bodybuilders stuck to 4chan.
A lolcow on Twitter the other day said there's two kinds of trans people. There's Reddit trans and there's 4chan trans. And then I was enlightened.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
I cannot believe what kids take away from movies.
I was really sensitive to letting my kids see anything at age 4.. Then a friend invited us over to watch My Neighbor Totoro and I thought surely this completely harmless Studio Ghibli movie with no bad guys, no violence, no anything but cuteness would be fine. Surely.
Then the next day my wife went for a walk on her own and left him with his older brother. About ten minutes later the to 4yo slipped out the door without older brother noticing. Mom was on her way back from her walk and found him, three blocks away(!)
4yo was re-nacting the scene in Totoro where the older sister runs around the countryside at length looking for her lost younger sister. Except looking for mom.
wdym?? that guy is peak sigma male
more seriously I'm thinking something closer to Cyberpunk 2077 motif, I'm saying TRON because it's more widely recognized and still involves the same tech tree from a lighting perspective
Parts arrived for my TRON helmet/vest/bike lighting project. I spent the weekend reading about ESP32 programming, buck converters, logic level shifters, etc.
I spent a long time trying to diagnose problems with the logic level shifter before just skipping it. Then the LEDs on the lighting strip lit up fine with the ESP32 driving it; got a basic POC working. Next it's time to pick a battery pack and also find a project box I can cram everything into. I guess also figure out if I want to use clear heat shrink tubing to protect the LED strips or get silicone diffuser tubing.
Also I'm getting a bit annoyed that everything I need comes in a 6-12 pack that costs $10 on Amazon. Prime shipping has it's down sides I guess.
Also there's, like, a lot of annoying one millimeter misalignments to deal with? My ESP32 doesn't fit into my breadboard, and neither does the buck converter. Only the logic level shifter does. Cool. Guessing it'll be some different annoying combination of issues with a protoboard?
It would be really nice to walk into a store or sit at a small electronics work bench just to see what all of the options are rather than blindly guessing at what I might need off of a web site.
This is what I mostly don't enjoy about small electronics hacking, feels mostly like you need to be very familiar with catalogs to avoid wasting a ton of time or making a lot of compromises.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8mo ago
Yeah I agree with this. I see these banned books week posters at my library. My ten seconds of thinking reaction is: good old librarians, defending free speech.
Then I think about it for a few minutes and wonder how books actually could be banned, and that that looks like, Also what happens if they don't take any particular stand on banning books, like marking it as BANNED in the online catalog, but instead reduce copies in stock to zero.
My local library doesn't stock The Bell Curve by Murray. That's odd. It's a best seller in psychology that sold more than a million copies. It never even shows up in the online catalog, period. You would never know it existed.
Did the librarians deliberately disappear it? Do they say "look even though we have a five story building downtown in a blue town in a blue state that allocates significant revenue to this library we have limited funds and cannot stock every book"? How would I even begin to contest this.
I assume the ideal librarian chooses books to stock based on some standard like popularity but also public good value but I realize it's probably much more arbitrary than this. And a lot more inscrutable for outsiders.
I note they do have eight copies of Gender Queer, 4 currently loaned out.
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