richfiles

Not directly KSP related, but I built a Retro Chip Tester Pro! https://8bit-museum.de/sonstiges/hardware-projekte/hardware-projekte-chip-tester-english/ It's a pretty neat tool that was originally designed to test vintage memory chips, but has been expanded to support a wide variety of additional functions. It can test not only memory chips, but also test logic chips, test ROMs (against a checksum database), dump ROMS and EPROMS, write some EPROMs, and more! Recently, there has been some limited support for extracting the logic configuration of PAL/GAL chips! There's many dozens of adapter boards to add additional support too! I spent 11 hours building this, and it was worth every minute. I did record the whole process... It's not edited down at all, so... Yeah... Feel free to skip around a bit.

Left desk leg is wired up too! I'll have a total of 6 available outlets on the front legs, and one pair of outlets under the desk switched by the switch on the right leg. The construction of the electrical boxes and mounting of the outlets is identical to the other side, just with two outlet pairs, and no switch. Look Ma! Nuffin' blowed up! I will also be adding a 4 foot long 15 outlet power strip under the legs. The 4 outermost outlets at either end will be where the riser power strips and the front leg outlets plug in. That gives me the 6 outlets on the legs and leaves 11 outlets remaining under the desk. An additional 12 outlets are on each riser... That's 41 outlets and 2 switched outlets! It's a LOT of outlets, but it means I have plenty room to plug in a few monitors, a few computers, and LOTS of bricks! Oh, there are so many small bricks! Lighting here was dim, so the quality wasn't as good, but you can see the power strips mounted to each riser. Pay no mind to the extra wide hole for the power cord... I only wrecked a drill bit hitting a screw and had to move a hair to the side... At least the other side had perfect hole placement. I'll use a brush to dab a little stain down the hole to "fix" it. So, small issue with the lighting... the cables that link one light to the next are too long to fit the narrow gap between each fixture. The solution was simple. Remove the socket from the two endmost fixtures, and hardwire the cables internally. ... it's two pics cause the three fixtures are too long for my workbench, so imagine the gap between them is longer. Now the plugs reache only as far as they need to plug into the central fixture. Also got a new switch and that second order of guards I had mentioned. Note the tininess of the left switch. They also make Space Shuttle style guards sized for smaller toggle switches, and that, is a smaller toggle switch. Why the attention on this switch? It's a locking toggle switch! You have to pull the lever up to be able to move. https://i.imgur.com/nL8WWz4.mp4 === Now, for something entirely unrelated.... Birb. This is birb. Heh, anyway, I watched over a friend's bird while he went on a fishing trip, but that was but merely an excuse to play with some obsolete, but very fun tech. We had a bunch of unsold inventory that had been sitting on our shelves for ages, some items were from 2015-2017. A few were older yet. We got authorization to mark those things down to "any price that moves them"... and my coworkers and I promptly "made shelf space". I bought a pocket projector, a sketch pad that can send your sketches to your phone over bluetooth with a single button press, and a Fuji "Polaroid-like" camera. As basic as this camera is, I genuinely love it! It's kinda this Lofi analog toy that I can hold and point and shoot, and I kinda miss that physicality in photography. Best of all, it gives me almost-instant, but not instant results that I can physically hold in my hand, that I can watch fade into being. The film all expired in 2020, but seems to still work just fine. For size reference, that's a 2.5" SSD the photo is sitting on. Just a tiny birb in a tiny off-brand "Polaroid". I love it! Honestly, spending a whole $22 on this and 120 shots worth of film packs was totally worth it for the experience of reliving pre-smartphone photography. All my photo albums just end after graduating high school. I was an early digital adopter. I never knew how much I missed the physicality of photography. Maybe I'll go buy some glossy paper and print out a few of my favorite photos... === I also acquired a Retro Chip Tester Pro kit (and by kit, I mean I got a circuit board and I had to go buy all the parts) The board features a ZIF socket that can accept THOUSANDS of different kinds of chips. It can test chips, read ROMs and EPROMS, program EPROMS, check known ROMs against a database of checksums, and a lot more! The manual is over 300 pages, between the instructions for use, assembly, bill of materials, and all the possible accessories that can be built to expand it's testing capabilities! I found an appropriately sized 3 ring binder and even organized the sections of the manual with index-tab sheets. This is analog tabbed browsing, folks! I also have experimented with streaming... I did a 4 hour soldering session about 2 weeks ago using a recycled and wiped iPhone 6s literally taped to my workbench as my camera. The soldering was for my second job, but it was fun chatting while working... Even if I did more chat than work! LOL I definitely wanna try streaming the assembly of this chip tester. Might try to do that next week at https://www.twitch.tv/richfiles I plan to try streaming any future work on the Kerbal controller. Right now I'm only set up for overhead workbench recording, which is fine for most projects. Maybe someday, I might try to expand on my capabilities. I enjoy showing how I build these kinds of things. Video makes sense.

I'm quite annoyed that Apple prioritizes their tablets and phones, over their consumer laptops and iMac, over their Pro and Studio desktops... I get it... Financially it makes sense to give the greatest support to iPhone and iPad, and then to the Macbooks, iMac, and Mini. Cater to where the greatest number of sales are... But professional and power users are exceptionally left high and dry with hardware updates... Mac Pro users know that the "pro" in Pro stands for "prolonged waiting". Both the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are now TWO GENERATIONS behind... Behind the tablet!? I get the technical reason (yield and scalability of a new process) for putting the M4 inside a tablet first, but could they SERIOUSLY not even bump the "pro" machines to M3? I've been using a first gen M1 Studio since I finally replaced my old Hackintosh that got zapped by the transformer that fell into a sink hole in front of my place, and I am still happy with this machine... It runs well, but I also bought the literal lowest end version of the release version of the Studio... I'm in a far better place financially, and I was feeling like it was time to step up to a new one... I was quite impressed with it being able to easily fullscreen Baldur's Gate 3 at 5120x1440, and I was just as impressed running Palworld under CPU/GPU emulation (Wine+Rosetta handled executing x64 instructions on the ARM64 CPU, and Apple's GPTK did a stellar job translating the Direct X API to Apple's Metal). If a first gen M1 could do that, I felt ready to see what the newest chip could do. I was waiting for WWDC for an announcement that simply never came. I'll still wait for the M4. I want my upgrade to be worth the expense (and oh boy... With the Apple Tax, it'll be expensive). Definitely a PROlonged wait... I'm also getting quite disgusted at the absolute inability to upgrade anything anymore... Again, I understand the benefits of having RAM and storage be part of the SoC... Yes, it's blazingly fast, but there has been a long line of computers all through history that had differing tiers of memory speed. Nothing wrong with having fast SoC RAM, selectable only at purchase, but still include an externally facing memory I/O controller and RAM slots, to allow for slower but higher capacities for future upgrades. It's 100% a choice to not support this feature. Apple is all too happy charging a $200 Apple Tax on a measly 8-->16GB upgrade, or a 256GB-->512GB storage upgrade. It's absolutely obscene what Apple charges for bumps in RAM or storage. They couldn't do that if they had RAM slots. It's annoying how much I like using Mac OS, cause the company behind it is just plain awful. They've never returned Target Display Mode back to iMacs since moving to the 5K displays. The first gen 5K iMacs, like, I kinda get it. DisplayPort didn't yet support that resolution at full refresh rates, but the very next iteration DID support it... but to this day, nearly a decade of iMacs with STUNNING displays will never be able to be repurposed as beautiful monitors after their CPUs become long obsoleted. Just eWaste. Apple, the green company that loves to make eWaste. Apple loves recycling, cause they can pretend the Reduce and Reuse parts of the old slogan don't exist. Ugh. === On an entirely different subject than Rotten Apples... I really wish the place I worked for would hire another tech. When I started, we had 4 full time workers, 3 techs and a front desk person that handled more of the inventory and logistics stuff. Now we are down a tech, and the front desk person is semi-retired, down to 2 days a week. She's being retasked with logistics stuff from OUTSIDE our area, so her time is even less able to be utilized. While mostly holding on, occasionally, things will get busy, and things fall behind. Even when we are keeping up, it's just more stressful... Walkins, back room, phone support... Add occasional onsites and internal tech support, and it's easy to see where having 2 vs 3 people could be stressful. I still love this job. It's great, but I do come home a bit tired, a bit burned out... It's been approximately a year since I started my KSP instrument panel desk build. I ONLY JUST NOW finished the electrical work on that desk, and STILL need to take the old desk apart and replace it with the new one. (I'll try and have an update on that soon). It's just hard to do projects when all you wanna do is crash and veg out in front of youtube after a long day's work. I know part of it is just getting older. Less energy and all that... That's not even COUNTING my second part time job. I've always loved that job. If I could have done that full time, I would have, 100%, but it's typically only the scarcest of part time. Most months, I'd only do about 12-14 hours in a 3-4 week period... It's usually just good for a little extra spending cash. We just got orders for parts that we haven't done since October 2021! I'd been doing that job with far more hours during the pandemic, till parts shortages caught up with us... Now that work has become more hectic at my primary job, things picking up again at the part time job are becoming very... much... I can 100% handle both jobs, and I like both jobs, but at the same time, getting up at 8am, going to work at 9, leaving at 5 (sometimes 6) and grabbing a bite to eat, only to go and work another 3-4 hours at the machine shop makes for a day with no real free time. I do enjoy youtube videos while working... I like to put on stuff like documentaries and such, tech channels, whatever sound like a good listen. It's not like I get no me time while working that second job, It's just the timing was rough. I suppose I should try and sleep. I'm gonna force myself away from work and personal projects to spend time with family tomorrow... That's another thing being so busy robs from me... My parents are in their 70s. I would definitely like to spend all the time with them that I can. I know that time keeps ticking. You never know when your time will come... I just learned this week that a cousin of mine just lost his son in an oil rig accident. His son was only 24, about to get married. Just like that, gone. My cousin lives nearly across the country from me. The last time I remember seeing him, I was the older cousin, showing a little kid his first video game (an Atari 2600). Sure, there was occasional updates, but I feel like it wasn't even that long ago being shocked that this grownup was that little kid I showed my video games to... Now enough time has passed that his own kid grew up. I never met his son. Not once. I haven't been to the state where he lives since 1992, and the last time he was here where I live was the late 80s. Outside of pictures, I have not seen him in 32 years. Try to set aside a little time now and then for those you care about. If you don't, you might just find out time came up and passed you by. Don't let the years go by like that. You can't buy time.

And the leg has been reinstalled into the right desk segment. I just need a cover plate to close up the desk lighting outlet. That outlet is switched by the light switch on the right front desk leg. https://i.imgur.com/RKavg1y.mp4

Not big updates, but I redid the electrical for the right desk leg, cause I was unsatisfied with it. The light output has an internal strain relief, and will go to an outlet box that all the lighting can plug into. The outlet box now reuses the cords from the pair of power strips I got for the vertical riser posts, and i will attatch removable plugs to the end of those cords, which were cut down to length to save on cable clutter, and allow the cords to be threaded through holes in the desk. The old desk's long workbench power strip will now be located under the desk.the teo endmost outlets on that long power strip will power the leg outlets and riser outlets. Been busy with spring cleaning, so only did a bit with the desk's electrical. Work's been busy, so I haven't had much free time. Partly why I finally got the switches. Now is a good time, money wise, to splurge on parts. Might stop at the harware store tomorrow and try to find what I need to finish up the legs. I bought a miniature trim router for doing small work, like the other leg, and the openings I need to make for it's outlets. It should be notably faster than the dremel was. Depending on how easy it is to work with, I might go ahead and moint the CRTs I have in the left desk segment, while things are still dissassembled.

Minor update. The switch guards were cheap enough when ordered with the switches at the quantity discount, that I just opted for all switches to come with guards. Originally, I was gonna make my own guards... Then I was gonna order guards and only fill in every other odd switch... Like so: [_O_] O [_O_] O [_O_] Since every switch has guards, I figured I could use the guards saved by only filling in every other guard to provide the needed guards for my other switches. The thing is, I also have realized, The guards have cast bases, and so a switch with a guard and without will look visually different. I don't like that. Would it work? Yes... But these guards look so great, I WANT to fill in every space now. What I will do, is I will follow the manufacturer's milling guidelines to remove the guard from one side of some of the guards. This will permit them to butt up together, and form a continuous line of guards. The first guard is intact, and additional guards in a grouping are modified. [_O_] _O_] _O_] _O_] _O_] This ensures they all look the same, including the cast bases. This also means I won't have any leftover guards for the Case New Holland International toggle switches I got from my local Case IH farm implement dealer. As such, I have ordered a few additional guards for those CNHI toggles, since I had always planned to use them on the panel. It was worth it to spend a little more so every toggle has a guard, vs every other odd one.

Just had a coworker leave for another job. It's gonna be rough being down a person for the forseable future. Due to the nature of my work, there is no such thing as 2 weeks notice. We deal with customer data and communications, so once a person says they are on their way out, they are pretty much given their exit interview and escorted out. It took me 2 months to go through hiring. That's not including the time they collected applications. I JUST TODAY got the reproduction NASA style toggle switches for my KSP instrument panel... Just today... The day after I learn my workload is going to increase 50%, and my free time is probably going to lithobrake into the Mun...

They arrived! The toggle action feels SO GOOD! The tab levers are definitely metal! These things are top quality! If you want some for yourself, I got them from southbridge_massachusetts on ebay (can also reach out to Perihelion Design to buy direct). Today is Thursday... I started COMMUNICATING with him LAST THURSDAY! The turnaround was PHENOMENAL! HIGHLY recommended! this is how they came shipped. It seems to save space in the box. I can't wait to put these to use!

Oh wow! They shipped already! Like, not even tracking number waiting on a shipping label... They LEGIT shipped! I thought it sounded to me like the guy said he would need a little time cause he had to make them... That was THURSDAY! Either he had a few on hand and only had to make a portion of them, or he worked through the weekend to get these out! Very impressive! One thing that differs with these is that there are no double switch guards. I may need to pop some of these on my mill and basically machine out the corners and guards on one side, so that they can interlock. I want tight switch spacing... |O|O|O|O|O| <--This |O||O||O||O||O| <--Not this As you can see in the pics, the guards stick out a bit past the edge of the switch guard base. If I mill the diameter of the guard loop, then I can make strings of these that interlock with each other, and I think it'll look good. For my auxiliary Action Group panel (separate from the main panel), I'll have to mess with the shuttle style guards and just see how they look. Might do the wider spacing on those. All the action group and control toggles will be tied to digital inputs and rather than send a fixed state based on the toggle position, they will change the state for every toggle action. Basically, Turning the toggle on would act like pressing the associated key on a keyboard. Toggling it back to off would be the same as pressing the keyboard equivalent button again. I will have a button on my DSKY, probably called "State Inhibit", which will allow toggling of the switches without sending a command to KSP. This solves the problem of toggle positions not matching between different vessels. Last thing I want is to change vessels, and have all my solar panels retract cause a toggle was off on the previous vessel. Instead, the toggle remains in it's position, and the vessel state remains in it's state. I can still read the state of every command, so I can also do something like have a red LED that lights up of the toggle position is opposite the read state position. If I inhibit the toggle action, and flip the switch, the red light should go out, and the switch should now match my vessel configuration. If I switch to a vessel and need to react fast, I can still toggle the switches in the opposite orientations, and it'll still register. I don't *have* to correct the switch positions to match the vessel state. I just can if I want to. Makes for a much simpler to implement system. Allows me to correct vessel change state mismatch at my leisure, but still instantly react in an emergency vessel change. I'm actually really excited to have these switches on the way finally! It's been a long time, and I think things are gonna start feeling more real once things begin to come together! One thing I do know, is that making the control panel is gonna be an insane part of the project! I have several of the panels I plan to use, but i really also need to get it just right. I can only screw up so many times before I run out of panels to cut. Probably gonna be a lot of hand nibbling and filing. If I use power tools, I'll surely cut from the bottom, and be extra careful! Backlighting alone is going to be an endeavor of madness, especially if I want every switch to have different lighting zones!

Good news! I appear to have found a second source for NASA styled switches, and I am in active communication with them. The price is good, and I can get switches with the correct tab lever as well as my choice of Apollo or Shuttle style wickets (guards). The real choice now... Is Apollo or Shuttle style. Now that I'm finally at the point I can purchase, I need to commit to one style or the other. Tough choices! Hmm... I do like both styles, and every single person I've asked in person seems to prefer the Apollo style... I was considering doing 20 action groups using a mod. If I do that, maybe I can just put 10 shuttle style switches on an overhead panel with my Atmosphere Density meter and huge VFD. Much like the old ORDEAL box, it can be a "last second" addition to my console, and thus could justifiably "work" with a different style switch guard. That would let me enjoy the best of both worlds. I might consider that. I'd need: 22 Switches with Apollo Guards 10 Switches with Shuttle Guards I could order an additional 4 Apollo Guards by themselves, but I don't think I'll even need to do that at all if I am simply using every other guard to flank odd numbers of switches. 5 switches only need 3 guards. 3 switches only need 2 guards.

I get the logic behind it, if you're doing atmospheric flying, but it just feels like it'll make my life programming a physical navball very messy. I'll have to map those three differing variants of axes, including that one mashup of two axes, to three identical physical 360° rotational axes. Just not looking forward to that... It's just that it's all a very flight oriented way to look at things, which is fine If your vessel's being built in the hangar. This is Kerbal Space Program, after all... When I'm in space, in a vessel I built in the VAB, I'm almost always working from an attitude based reference, not a heading based reference. In space, I can be pointed dead backwards, but my "heading" is still the exact same orbital path I was on already. I'm still hurtling away through space, along the same orbit, in the exact same "heading" as I was traveling before my attitude correction... I'm just in a retrograde attitude. In space, it's about the attitude in relation to said orbital path... your "heading", if you will. In space, I don't want my navball to show my heading at all. I want my attitude shown in relation to my heading, specifically, my orbital heading. The direction I point doesn't affect where the orbital heading that I'm referencing is until I actually initiate a burn and change my orbital path. In the real world, having the navballs corrected to an orbital horizon reference instead of directly displaying relative gyroscopic heading was not actually considered till later in the development of the Apollo program, but was ultimately considered so critical, that in a vessel where every ounce counted, they literally strapped the ORDEAL (Orbital Rate Display Earth and Lunar) module and all it's electronics in box on the wall next to the "waste storage bags" and wired it into the navballs. They didn't have time to redo the main instrument panel, and they decided adding a heavy box and wiring wrapping half way around the command module was just that important! Now I get to figure out my very own ORDEAL spaghetti code to fix my navball's reference. I somehow feel like I get the name...

Okay... been busy with work, then winter happened, and it's tougher to go out and work on projects, but I'm trying to get back into my momentum, working inside... That said, I was doing some brainstorming, and it hit me... There's a SUPER simple way to do non light emissive flag indicators. I remembered that Dave Jones of the EEVblog did a video series on custom LCDs a few years back. There are other parts to that video series, but the gist is that Dave goes through the entire process of designing and ordering a custom LCD. He discusses the one time and bulk costs involved. The cost per unit actually ends up being very low. Tooling costs are generally the big cost... a couple hundred bucks typically. Per panel though is often $1-5, depending on size and complexity. A simple grey LCD module, with a barber pole segment pattern could offer a modern and elegant option to replace this old electromechanical style flag indicator. While it wouldn't be identical to the old Apollo and shuttle indicators, it would definitely offer a good, low cost compromise. I'll have to look into this. It'd make a good "stuck at home" project for winter as well. The one catch with the LCD solution is that I'd be dealing with white and black, or grey and black... These 3D printed "fake" flags are nice, but would be hard to reproduce as LCDs. the issue is the reflective layer is either gonna be white or grey or somewhere between. I'd be quite happy to settle for grey with black barber stripes. There might be off the shelf options too... they wouldn't match the Apollo style, but other people might opt for them... These 5-segment and 14-segment e-ink modules are available from Digikey. Setting these horizontally above or below a switch would make a nice, unobtrusive indicator. These e-ink displays are very visible with their white background, and won't overwhelm your senses with that Christmas light effect that masses of LEDs can do. Darkening alternate segments might look very good on the 14 segment part. Might only light up a portion of the segments too, that one's a bit longer than the other. The 5-segment module is pretty affordable too, $26 at this time for 10x pieces. The 14-segment module is much costlier, at $96 for 10x. The biggest catch with these, is the smaller e-ink display has an active area of only 3.00 x 10.30 mm and the larger has an active area of only 3.00 x 21.50 mm. They're kinda small... Honestly, I could totally see getting a custom grey and black "barber pole" style LCD custom made. Most of all, the size could be perfected. It would effectively be just one pixel (though it could be made with all segments as individual inputs, so it can be repurposed as a diagonal bar indicator). If wired as a "single pixel" then in theory, a whole array of these LCDs could be wired to a common LCD controller as if each whole LCD module were a single segment. If I order custom flags, I'll probably order them in bulk, and possibly have more than I need by myself. Much of the cost is the upfront tooling. The more ordered, the cheaper each piece is. Another option might be to pay extra for an onboard controller chip. Would be nice too be able to feed power and ground, and have either a direct digital I/O input, or an I2C or SPI serial input for addressable control. As for desk updates... When I designed it, I did a BIG DUMB by not pre-constructing ANY mounting points or pass throughs for things like wiring, monitor arms, etc. I decided to undertake the chore of reverse-disassembling it, so I can correct those missed elements. I also wanna seal the interior areas too, so the wood is more resilient to humidity fluctuations. It's not hard... just a chore, and one I can't do in the big open area of my dad's barn, given the bitter cold temps right now... One of the things I want to do is route out (I finally bought a small router) the openings for the CRT displays I want to mount, as well as modify the desk so the panel they mount to will be easily attached/detached, and the assembly be able to slot in and out. Might do the same with the other side too. Constructing that panel like a drawer would make for an ideal place for small accessories, etc. to be hidden away. It's a minor, but I think very worthwhile upgrade to the desk.

It looks really nice! It's about as tight a fit as possible, without overlapping the tabs. I didn't want to do that, cause it might affect whether they both sit flush. Pre-drilled all the holes by hand, to ensure I didn't punch through and ruin the aesthetic. mounted both the switch and outlet, as well as the two cover boxes. I used some plastic as a strain relief to clamp the two wires coming out.It's a little unorthodox, but it works. I love the finished result! I could have done the openings a bit better, I'm sure, but I'll touch up the few nicks with some stain and call 'er good. Honestly, I want to throw everything together, be done with the desk, and get to the Kerbalin'!

Labor day weekend... I had to labor on Saturday. I would have just taken the Saturday off, but thanks to reasons not in my control, I absolutely had to be there for seven hours so that I could help that ONE customer with their $14.01 transaction... Mind you, one employee had been getting supervisor approval to take off every one of his Saturdays for months, just to prove how unnecessary us covering Saturdays even was... When higher management found out that we were successfully demonstrating that even our own customers didn't care if we weren't open on Saturdays... Well, they had to nip that in the bud real fast, once an actual holiday was up and someone else wanted their chance at a three day weekend... Well, I was just out of luck!

As someone who has had family that absolutely disrespected the final wishes of a deceased family member... Go ahead and communicate what the final wishes were to the other relative. Explain the situation as best as possible. Even if the decision was made disrespectfully, it was still made (in a skewed mindset) to benefit that other relative. If they can understand why the one cousin's actions caused such offense, they may be willing to honor your uncle's final wishes and send the flag. Even if what the one cousin did felt disrespectful, I'd say don't poke or prod at them, and definitely don't try and goad the other cousin into any collective "embarrassment" or chastising. That never ends well. If the one cousin asks why the other doesn't have it. they can simply say they decided to follow the late uncle's wishes as their priority. No conflict, no hurt feelings, and no escalation. I imagine in their mind, the one cousin must think they "know best", and probably doesn't even realize the offense they are inflicting. If they are aware... then I'm sorry you have to deal with that kind of person... That's how it was in my family... In those cases, it's still better to be friendly with everyone else, and leave them to stew in their own antagonism on their own.