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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   189 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for May 20, 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.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Continued from last week

I'm closer to having a prototype for a single helmet working. Right now I'm doing the grunt work of cutting WS2815 LED strips into segments, putting them into sleeves (because I accidentally bought one without sleeves, oops) and then wiring GND DO and 12V on the contacts of one to the GND DI and 12V on the contacts of the next. In some cases I have to use a coffee stirrer stick that my kids have been stealing from coffee shops to nudge the strips through the sleeve since they get so stuck.

I'm sort of getting the hang of the soldering crafting. I need to make absolutely sure I split the contacts in half evenly, which is tricky since they reflect on the cutting tool and the cutting tool is like, the size of the pads so it's hard to see around them[1]. Then I need to fill the contact with solder, then add solder to the exposed wire end, then kind of press the wire against the contact and put the solder iron tip on top until it kind of sinks into the pool of solder on the contact, then pull the iron away while still keeping the wire and pressure in place for a few more seconds. Then I can tug on it and it'll remain nice and together.

I can't quite find a way to do this while they're suspended on helping hands[2], I have to keep them all pressed against a silicone mat and weighted down with other random tools, which doesn't look very pro?

Anyway soldering to contact pads is resistant to tugs but not invincible. I put so much strain on one that a contact pad ripped out of the LED strip. I guess the problem is the 18AWG wire from the hardware store I bought is too stiff, and I should have bought silicone wire for that since it's more supple and bouncy and won't put pressure on them. Yet another thing where I order $7 worth on Amazon to keep things moving then order a big batch from aliexpress.com[3] for $4 to arrive whenever.

Man waiting for stuff from Aliexpress is torture. One batch is in the US as of 4 days ago but it's still waiting to clear US customs.

One thing I'm looking forward to with the kids' helmets is that I ordered ESP32-C3s[4], which are RISC-V based and also much smaller profile. They're like, a whole board with USB-C connector that's postage stamp sized whereas the ESP32 Xtensa I was using is more like, uh, the size of a bic lighter with 1.5x the width? It's kind of sexy how small you can make controllers. I don't know why I find this so impressive, the typical iPhone smartphone is a much bigger miracle of engineering but not as cool for some reason.

  1. I'm sure there's a perfect small precision cutting tool for $2 at Aliexpress
  2. Or maybe my helping hands are just not full featured enough. Maybe I should check Aliexpress for incredible deals
  3. Aliexpress!
  4. Surprisingly, the Aliexpress price for 3 was equivalent to 3 from Amazon. Huh?

--

Back to the Homies: Ride or Die 3d game, I got a track rendered now and have been doing some minor C++ refactoring since the last time I touched C++ was in 2014 and there's some new features IG. I'm using meson to build but thought I would have more compatibility with external libraries if I used cmake, but cmake is so much more baroque I'm backing off.

Now that I have a NASCAR style track rendered I can work on bounds checking, and add some sound effects of metal grinding if I bounce against the wall. ChatGPT suggests I use SDL_mixer.h, which is an easy lift since I'm already using SDL2.

Any particular reason for Meson over a nice build.sh script? I've found that the more I work with build systems the more I want nothing to do with them.

I suppose I thought some integrations would conveniently fall out of meson for free. Like making it work with neovim LSP, and uh, being able to wrap distributed other libraries easily. But I still seem to have to use a Makefile on top of it to monkey patch things like downloading third party deps and building related tools, like for the shader compilation.

Being a young cranky old man in training does suggest I should move in the build.sh direction though...

EDIT: okay well I just asked ChatGPT to pluck the relevant bits of my meson.build out and incorporate them into my Makefile and it worked. and I can use a tool called "bear" to run "make build" and that tracks and outputs the compile_commands.json needed for neovim/LSP to work with clangd. this went pretty smoothly and I could delete icky Python tools like meson from my workflow now. yassss

Thanks for the inspiration @John_Doe_Fletcher !

Heh, glad I could be of service. bear's saved me a lot of premature gray hairs. I'd still push towards not having to deal with Makefile syntax but I'm not gonna knock cutting your build system count in half. :P

:3

At a really basic level make is just a build.sh that remembers steps so I'm okay with it, even if I dislike the rest of the config language.

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