Nuke

cool, but i think id give the inside a bit of foil tape and ground it for emi shielding. i tried putting a bare board raspberry pi in my networking cabinet and it caused a lot of connectivity issues with the wifi. but if it aint broke no need to fix it.

i usually just pxe boot. its what oems do and only requires another computer on the same network (and unless you do some router fu like i did you have to use ethernet). i use something called serva, which is free for private use.

ive probably built a few hundred machines. so its all muscle memory for me. i had zero doubts that it would boot. i guess i was taking cds full of drivers for at least four operating systems for granted. not that i could open the cd since my last optical drive went tango uniform and im probably never going to buy another.

its not like i didnt try, the big thing was i couldnt get networking to work, and without that fixing the other things would have been a nightmare (my other computer is upstairs, and i dont like stairs).

tell it to the mobo manufacturer. never buying asus again. every time i buy their hardware i get burned. yet that 8 year old asrock board that everyone told me not to buy still works.

thats the only reason im using windows 10. its an 8086k (which is just a high binned 8700k @ 4ghz stock). mobo driver support for windows < 10 is non-existant. i tried to get 8.1 (which i prefer to 7 for its much faster boot times) to work when i set it up but much of the hardware didn't have drivers (at least not any available from the manufacturer or windows update). i spent a coupele days trying to make it work and then just threw in the towel and installed 10. worst os experience since vista. i still use 7 on my 3d printing rig but im contemplating moving that one over to linux.

windows 10 is fast becoming the bane of my existence. things that no longer work on an install that is only 3 months old: bluetooth audio dhcp windows firewall network discovery it was innocent enough when it all started, but all the workarounds are starting to stack up to make the system somewhat less usable. id love to use 8.1 but there is like zero driver support for my hardware on older oses. reactos is still in alpha, hows linux these days? i havent seen a windows os this unreliable and ive used every one from 3.1 onward.

its not that it isnt still usable, windows comes with both apis. its that almost everything is a console port now. and its easier just to use the same code on pc as you do on the xbox. ms was also actively encouraging developers to stop using direct input in faver of the newer "better" library. add to the fact that there is no built in translation layer between the two facilitating the need of a third party program. they couldn't flat out deprecate direct input either because there are a lot of non-gaming applications where you need to build control interfaces. direct input supports a lot of functions on one controller. like 8 axes and i think 128 buttons, and 2 hats (maybe 4 idk). when you look at the xinput library, controller capabilities are a lot more limited. pretty much if its not on the standard xbox game pad, its not supported. i think that limits you to like 10 buttons and 6 axes, plus a dpad. im of the opinion that it wasnt broke and it didnt neeed fixing. if ms wanted to do things the right way they would put out another input library that can work with any kind of controller imaginable that would instantly obsolete both libs (even on xbox). windows still doesnt support a lot of things out of the box. usb and bluetooth hid stacks are pretty versatile you can cram in controls until you are out of bandwidth (or more likely flash mem on your microcontroller, those descriptors are huge). things that can output more than what can fit into a byte or two, think absolute positioning systems or controls that actually indicate real world units at really high resolution (usb hid actually supports this), but for the purposes of game apis only a small subset is made available to game devs, and xinput was a major step backwards. it was a cash grab plain and simple.

i got lots of standard game controllers (usb hid devices) you cant use in xinput games without a 3rd party wrapper. a product of ms trying to merge its xbox and windows codebases and push xbox branded devices on windows users rather than support industry standards like usb hid devices. i remember when they were doing that games for windows bs, where nothing supported my high end ch controllers without hax.

should come up as a standard game controller. problem is a lot of games use xinput, which i find grossly inferior to the legacy direct input. there is software to convert direct input controls to xinput controls. just google 'directinput to xinput'. ive used several but cant remember any off the top of my head.

im kind of in the middle of modeling one my pi tablet side controllers. when i built my pi tablet i included several hard points for external addons, and this project puts one of them to use, the right side. the electronics side is mostly complete, i got 4 high end keyswitches, the kind used in mechanical keyboards, a joystick module from an old xbox controller i found in a dumpster, a small slide pot to act as a throttle axis, a blackberry trackball breakout board, a custom 3d printed hall effect rotary encoder that will serve as a mouse wheel, and there is an extra adc channel which i havent decded on what to do with. easiest would be just to stick a trim wheel somewhere. everything works over an i2c bus. its all built on a home made pcb (a couple actually). ive already tested it and verified the data coming off of the outputs. i already wrote a linux driver for the prototype, and expanding it to work with more functions should not be an issue. but it needs some ergonomic casement. i think ive extracted the secret sauce for a good gamepad using various salvaged controllers. figured the correct proportions between the distances between the various interfaces. comparing the dual shock ps2 controller with an xbox controller ive determined that the angle of the grips seems to correspond to the placement of the shoulder buttons. like the steep grip on the ps2 seems to promote more comfortable use of the high triggers while the flatter design from the xbox controller seems to want lowered triggers. my pad takes the shallow approach with a mostly flat controller, in order to support the 4 rather large shoulder buttons. they will need to be mounted at an angle so as to allow optimal reach of all buttons. also the distance between the stick center and the dpad/face buttons is about the same on all sticks. ive tried to maintain it the best i can but the trackball is a tad offset, but still close to the center of where the face buttons would be on a ps2 pad. the left side will just be a pure usb controller, because thats where the ports are. im thinking it will keep a second joystick, and have a trim wheel in the same location as my rotary encoder on the right side. im debating replacing the dpad with a proper hat switch as well as the same shoulder button layout. i came up with a fairly good design not too long ago, and will just need to miniaturize it. it will likely also have a 4th analog control. it will just use an arduino pro micro 3.3v, so i only get four analog channels, but i might throw in some extra goodies like an ir transceiver since i will have plenty of extra io. maybe also throw in a long range radio (i got a module that can do 2 mbit out to a kilometer making it great for r/c applications) or perhaps a com port for future expansion. anything goes. heres some pics

sometimes you need to do something stupid, no, really stupid to put things in perspective. also its a good idea to keep everyone ignorant of how smart you really are. everyone includes you. otherwise you might convince yourself that your thoughts are infallible.

it was one of the multitude of elite clones. alas if you google for it you either get elite dangerous, or the elite books, or star wars stuff.

i actually think i liked mostly harmless (or was it new kind, i dont remember) better. not that i can find it anymore.

i used to. but having played every version of og elite and this being more or less of the same, ive say i played it to death. its why i havent spent more than 15 minutes in elite dangerous. i really need to dust that off and give it a serious playthrough.

the most convoluted spreadsheet i have is probably the one i use for my mechwarrior online stats. i also had a few for some aerodynamics stuff for a physics heavy mod to a not so physics heavy space sim.

silly me, i think my problem was power related. the 3 18650 lithium ion cells in series i was using were getting a little low, so i stuck them in the charger and grabbed 3 more out of the pile. motors were holding torque for a little while and then stopped. i guess i may have over discharged my cells, one got down to 1.8v which is a hair into the danger zone. il probably dig out an old atx psu and break out the 12 v line. i already got one rigged up to my 3d printer, so i guess il just patch into it. everything worked fine with one motor but there just wasn't enough juice to power two. i guess i forgot that stepper motors draw power all the time as opposed to only when they are moving.

things are about the same. i plugged the cd drive stepper into that channel and it worked fine. at this point i dont think its the motors. its either a cold joint or a bad mcu. there also seems to be a trim pot on each controller, maybe they need some calibration, but i didn't get any instructions for how to do that..

ah the wiggle it technique. my wiring harnesses tested ok but they are far from perfect. i got some low quality crimp pins and the crimper was just crushing them. but the continuity was ok.

i do believe the a4988 is what im using. kit came with the shield and 4 controllers each sealed in its own esd packaging, they also included some heat sinks as well, but i had to attach them myself. i did test all the coils with a multimeter which was necessary to identify the pairs. they passed a continuity test, i also checked the resistance which was in the neighborhood of 7.2 ohms (which was actually on the sticker on the side of the motor). i also tried powering the coils on the motors breifly and the hold torque was actually pretty strong. so im starting to expect my controllers. i did try the test you suggested anyway and got about the same increase in turn resistance from all pairs. need to trace pins all the way back to the mcu to make sure the board was assembled properly. i thought it was supposed to be a kit but it came fully assembled. could also be something with the atmega, i have several blank 328ps and some of them have been abused. i also tested an actuator from an old cd drive. and that worked pretty well. though the control was a little too aggressive i had to use a weaker battery.

ive been gathering components for a cnc pcb mill. so far im in the preliminary steps of gathering parts. i started with the electronics part of the build and will build the machine itself later. im gathering the parts slowly, rail systems are kind of expensive but i got some spare 3d printer parts left over from a bed upgrade, and i got some spare linear bearings. i got a rather thick piece of acrylic salvaged from a dead monitor which would serve as a good base plate, since i have a lot of other salvage displays i figure much of the structure would be build out of acrylic and 3d printed parts. will probibly use a dremel flexi shaft as the buisness end with the dremel elsewhere to reduce the mass that needs to move around. anyway its going to be a small machine, so long as i can mill a 4x4" pcb with it. anyway i got an old arduino (i tried building an stm32 version of grbl but had trouble flashing it to the board, using arm has some advantages, more memory and has an fpu and hardware divide that the atmel chip doesnt have) running grbl with a 4 channel cnc shield. i only have a few steppers salvaged from junk, several laser actuators from dead cd/dvd drives, and a couple mitsumi motors from an old sewing machine. at some point im going to get me some nema 17 motors like the ones on my 3d printer. not sure whether im going to use lead screw drive or belts, but im concerned that belt drive wouldnt have the torque neccisary, but that extra torque costs speed, but its going to be a small machine so thats not a big issue. anyway i cobbled up some wiring harnesses and im using some lithium ion batteries for power. anyway they are unipolar 4-wire motors. i did find a data sheet on the motors, but they didnt cover the electrical connections. the drivers have 2 channels and its not hard to trace out the two coil sets in the motors, each pair of wires to one of the chanels. but im not sure if polarity matters. the channels are powered by an h bridge and will alternate between positive and negative between steps. anyway i connect the motors, load up bCNC with an svg file and initially i get them to spin. one motor is holding its position just fine, at least up to the limit of its hold torque. the other seems to be freely rotating at a significantly lower torque. this made me question my assumption that polarity didnt matter. maybe they are like encoders and operate with a grey code, maybe having reversed polarity on one of my coils is breaking that grey code. i rechecked my harneses and noticed that i had the coils flipped on one of them so i made them identical, matching the better of the two and im still getting one to spin freely, swapped motors/cables, controllers same difference. i tried lubricating the motors since they are all sleve bering type and have been in my junk bin for awhile. so long story short is there a right way to wire these things?is there some secret sauce that im missing?

ive put my particles on hold while i tend to more workable problems (mod is full of those). i still got some of my old particle effect mu files but i lost the scene i set them all up with (i actually tried to migrate to the new system and accidentally saved over my old version). maybe i got a copy on an old hard drive. setting up the old unity tools is probably my best bet. would be nice if the full shruiken system was supported because i made some really nice effects.

its not hard to come up with spectacular particle effects in the unity editor. problem is you export them into the game and they end up turning into generic particle streams. i had fairly good looking particles before squad changed the system. so what am i doing wrong? its not exactly wysiwyg. e: did some research and it appears that not all of the shuriken features are supported. so all these numbers im tweaking do nothing. investigating use of plugins (smoke screen looks nice) but i still want fallback plumes in case the plugin is not installed. would be supported through a mod man patch. but if anyone has any tips on how to make the fallback plumes look good with stock features only, that would be great. some of my effects survived the particlepocalypse so i might retain them (my mpd plumes still look nice).

i just use firespitter core for my mod. i already had it because i needed prop spinners so it was a good choice.

im not to happy with the way i implemented tankage especially with the tiny girder kit. im thinking about adding fs fuel switch to all my tankage parts. since i already use firespitter core for my turbine spinners i can just support it throught some mod man scripts. also going to rethink fuel crossfeed on some of the girders, maybe providing versions with internal fuel hoses. i kind of want firespitter to be optional so things should still work more or less as they do now should it be absent.