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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  16hr ago (text post)   215 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 13, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

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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

  1. ESP32 board, mounted to a perfboard
  2. a boost converter to bring the 3.7v put out by the 18650 cell up to 12v for LED lights
  3. a buck converter to bring 12v down to 5.5 for the ESP32 board
  4. a charging board with USB-C[1]
  5. an SPST(?) switch for physically breaking the connection from the battery to everything else
  6. an N-channel MOSFET for controlling COB LEDs (if I supplement the WS2815s)
  7. a P-channel MOSFET for having the rest of the load shut off if it detects that a USB charger is connected
  8. nylon standoffs for the various boards
  9. 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

  1. 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.

  2. 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...

  3. 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.

pic attached in last message wasn't showing up. lets try this one.

/images/17471501354596198.webp

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