richfiles

You're so gonna hate me! I barely even remember... I'm 95% sure I got them for free from the swap table at the robotics group I barely get to visit these days. Theres a tiny chance they came from a surplus store called AxMan, in the "Twin Cities" (Minneapolis, St. Paul) region in Minnesota, but I doubt I'd have actually bought the blood pump, so it's almost certainly likely I got it off the free table at the robotics group. Probably brought by someone who bought it surplus, or who scavenged scrapped parts from an employer. Sadly, I rarely get to this meeting. It's nearly 2 hours away from where I live, and since losing my primary job in 2009 (company was bought out, simply to acquire one of our products, then our site closed) it's been hard to justify the trip. My employment since has never been as good, and I've had less reliable cars in that period of time. I did get back there once or twice last year though, which was very nice. They used to meet in the basement of the Science Museum of Minnesota, but now meet at a maker space called The Hack Factory. Additive vs. Subtractive color mixing never seems to make things simple. The problem with LEDs is that they have a narrow peak bandwidth corresponding to their emitted color. It's hard to get green from a yellow LED, even though they are adjacent in terms of wavelength, because there's just next to no green light in the emitted light. A filter is removing wavelengths except for green, but if the green component is minimal to start with... Meh... Meh is the result you will see. It gets even more confusing if I try to illuminate pigments, as then we get to switch into the cyan, magenta and yellow mode of thinking.

I got these boards ages ago, and they've been in storage till today. I finally found my old top loader NES, my Dreamcast, and these annunciator boards from some early 1990s medical devices. Every LED you see below is socketed! That said... There's not ONE green annunciator LED in the entire lot! They're all yellow! Grrr! I tried a green filter, but that just gives the LED all the lovely color quality of green mud, with just a tinge of "not really brown and not really yellow, but it's yellow". So close, yet so far away! Y U no green annunciators! I wonder when my fingers will stop feeling this way*... *The way fingers feel when yanking, prying, levering, and otherwise removing 120 SIP LEDs and 40 DIP LEDs from their sockets. *EDIT* Did some research, and the PC boards came from a Possis Medical AngioJet 3000A Rheolytic Thrombectomy machine, used for restoring blood flow to thrombosed (clotted) arteries and veins. Nifty. I had guts from five different machines, apparently. They date from around 1992. Also, my picture is upside down. Interestingly, I've also got one of the blood pumps from one of these too! Once I saw the photo of the machine, I was all like, I know that lower part It's sitting inside my 19 inch rack in my storage unit! Ironically, these DO have a green LED... the one above the dial... The one LED that was already stripped from every single one of my boards...

You generally wouldn't drive the lights directly from the Arduino anyway. You'd need a driver. A driver is typically a transistor or more often, specifically a MOSFET driving each light individually. You can also do a grid of drivers (you'll need to be able to both sink and source current, depending on whether the driver is in the rows or columns of your grid. You probably could use a MAX7219 to drive something like that. It will take more searching, but it's also possible to get switches that don't have their illumination wired for 12 volts. Those switches are generally meant for automotive installations, and are pre-wired for 12 volt supplies as a result. Better switch options exist though. The switches I'm using for my DSKY have a replaceable socketed LED inside. The LEDs I have installed only take 2.1 volts to light. I have PLENTY of extra switches. I'd probably even consider letting some of the smaller style ones go, since I have so many. I've only used 13 out of a total of 127 of those smaller switches. I'll repost the pic of a small keypad made from the smaller and my DSKY keypad, made from the bigger switches below. You can print out whatever you want and cut it out and insert it into the switch housing, under the clear plastic part. The small switches are 10mm square. They currently light up amber/yellow, but you can change the LED to any type you like. Then it's just a matter of driving the LEDs with a MAX7219, and using a level shifter to interface that to your Leonardo. **EDIT... Or just driving them with a shift register and transistors, like @stibbons said. I know the pic is a repost from earlier, but it's simpler to show than to tell.

You can try some fine grit sand paper on the back of some of the clear plastic, if you feel like experimenting. Paper will work too, but you may need a bright LED to get it to light up brightly. And yes, "milky" is a proper English way to describe what you were trying to say. Nice to see you getting into this hobby! I tell ya... You got it GOOOOD... When I was young, I took apart busted blenders. I OCCASIONALLY got an old radio to tear apart. Parts were more discrete back then, so it meant I could genuinely salvage parts. There was no such thing as ordering parts for a kid back then. UPS and the postal service both took 4-6 weeks for deliveries back in those days. There was no PayPal, and kids didn't have credit cards. If we DID buy something, it came from either a brick and mortar store or a paper catalog, and we got our parents to write a check to physically mail out if it was the latter. Radio Shack was the ONLY local source of new electronic parts, for a kid back then... Garage sales were the grand gold mine of salvageable affordable electronics! These days... I ordered a custom aluminum plate, paid for by PayPal, laser cut, and anodized blue, for my custom keyboard. It cost me $50. I ordered a ready made miniature microcontroller for $20. Didn't even need to make a circuit board. Still got my wire form Radio Shack though! LOL! It's insane what resources are available, to young and old alike! The double edged sword, is that electronics is becoming more like Legos, where you attach a few pieces and get a project. There's less fundamental understanding of how circuits work. There are more custom, specialized part that can do one, and only one thing, and simply have no reuse value. The most dangerous part of that, Is where we cease to service below the module level (or even at all!). That's asking for literal tons of e-waste, when all that might have been needed was a tiny bit of knowledge, and a part that cost a few cents. If you get into the electronics hobby, definitely keep at it. Get good! There's a special kind of satisfaction in completing a project, even the individual successes that string together to make a project feel mighty nice! As for me and 3D printers... If I REALLY set myself to it, I could probably save up for a decent 3D printer, but it's such a mental struggle... I really don't wanna waste money on a cheap tiny one that'll be nothing but trouble, and not be big enough for my needs, but that I could afford now. Problem is, I can't afford a bigger, more reliable one either. I also have a mill, but It's not set up, as I've been stuck in an apartment for the past 4 years. I'd just as soon mill parts myself, If I were set up for it. What the! Did I just do a "Back in my day" post! Dear God, I AM getting old!

It's kinda bothersome for me as well. I wanted to have "flags" to indicate when I change ships, which switches are "wrong", so I can manually reset them, and then hit a flag alarm reset button. Under the current state, I'd only be able to do that with 14 of x action groups... Other than the basic ten, plus lights, brakes, gear, and abort... There's no provision unless custom coding is done... Granted, custom coding would be needed for my idea too. It could also apply to RCS and SAS controls as well. Any toggle. You need to just store every local toggle state as a local value. Then compare it to the toggle state of the incoming packet. If there is a mis match, then indicate the mis-match and light the flag alarm. It could even be a thing that's manually controlled. press a vessel change button, and it flags toggles for x seconds. All these ideas... No C coding experience to execute them with...

The problem with a large portion of America, is the country is just "so gosh golly big, shucks!". I live in a rural area. There is a "near by" maker space... about 2 hours away. A smaller town just doesn't have the population diversity to drive the operation of a makerspace. Too much corn. Out here, most tinkerers are tinkering on tractors, not hobby gadgets.

All my flag plaques tell a story... Usually about my B team... Billy-Bobdan, Alley, and Geofemone*. They are an inseparable team! Billy and the girls are a trio of Bad Assed™ kerbaonauts who are basically a Jeb and two Vals. Welcome to the 12000 kilometer high club, folks! Hans got stuck with them on that trip to the Mun... He never forgave anyone... ANYONE! for the experience, ever! Mike is just a normal dood that got drug along with the B team to Duna... He had fun, lots of fun... but really... they pretty much led the way the whole time. I carried a narrative of discovering the anomalies on Duna, and them realizing they were not the first to set foot on the red world. Geoffemone had an "ejection" accident during the capture burn... One that almost required deciding between he mission and her (made it work, but she got over 2km out before her tumble and the ships tumble was under control). Billy and Alley are taking a departure from a Kerbin circumnavigation after Alley lied about knowing how to change tires... Kind a big deal for the Gilly Vanilli rover... It sorta has 32 tires. Funny how it takes going to space to learn the art of changing a tire. Kerbals are an odd bunch, I tell ya! They occasionally get "messages" from the A team, provided there's no occlusion. The A team is... Well, the A team. Not that A team, the other A Team... Capsules, not vans. In all seriousness, That's my super happy fun ball time... Giving character to my Kerbals. Most of them are faceless drones, filling seats in stations, but those few, along with Wilsy, Nello, and Teddo, have all got a special place in my save file. Wilsy is a rescue that hitched a ride to the first Mun landing... then got to be first, to Jeb's dismay... but only cause we had to leave him until the "Outtagas" probe made it to the landing site. Oops! Probe worked nicely, and Jeb has always been annoyed he didn't get to step foot on the Mun first... That'd be like if we found some random Cosmonaut stranded, picked him up, and sent him down in the Eagle, and let him take the first step on the Moon... cause we knew the Eagle didn't have enough fuel for ascent! Only in KSP... Ultimately, I love building large stations, large bases, large rovers, and overall large ships. Silent Running, The Southern Cross, Minmus Waystation (so I had a brain fart on that last one)... Gilly Vanilli, my signature rover is 44 tons! Silent running and Minmus Waystation both feature a torus (25 meters, the full diameter of the VAB), and the second has four 8 meter biodomes. I launched it in one piece! The asparagus staging was glorious! 13 stacks of the largest tank, stacked 3 tanks tall... Mammoths at the bottom of every stack... I had to hang oscar-b mini tanks from structural girders to act as middle connections for the fuel lines, cause FUEL LINES DON'T REACH that far! The outer most tanks took three fuel lines to reach between stacks! I like building BIG! *It is clear that Geofemone's parents are dastardly beings... I mean, WHO even names their space spawn "Geofemone"!

Guilty as charged! I love those Mailbag Mondays and Teardown Tuesdays! Besides those types of videos, I swear I've learned more from YouTube than I ever learned in college! You'll also find me watching a lot of Louis Rossmann's videos. Man's got the mouth of a sailor, but he knows component level repair! STRONG supporter of proposed Right to Repair bills. Big companies like Apple and others have strongly lobbied against passing such laws, which would guarantee people's right to modify and repair the devices they buy. Those companies would rather sell you a new $2000 gadget, and send your old stuff, killed by a defective 5 cent part, to the recycler. So awesome you got the 3D printer up and running! I'm so jealous, though! I STILL don't have such a wonderfully amazing contraption! I can't offer you any recommendations for gear making... or 3D modeling... or 3D printing... I have no experience there. I wish you luck! My Kerbal Kontroller progress... Nada... Zip... Zilch... Work has been a killer, and I've been busy at home. The few free days i have had, have been spent tryyyying to decipher the gobbledygook known as C code that is supposed to make my keyboard function... I finished the keyboard in April or May! I can't even remember anymore! I still don't have it up and running! I'm beginning to dread the thought of coding software for my controller! I wish I had the kind of money to just hire a coder! Honestly, I haven't even so much as bought stamps, or even stopped at the local screen printer to ask about flexible ink recommendations for my tape meter. Nor have I stopped at any of the local metal shops to get quotes on the enclosure. Ugh... NO progress at all... Well... I made SOME progress... Somewhere, on a Post It note, is a scaled set of dimensions for the vertical Instrument face. JUST the vertical face... That's it. On a side note, I did manage to snag a valid Windows 8.1 activation code, and got a Windows 10 install on my Hackintosh within hours of the deadline! LOL Nothing like single digit hours remaining to a 1 year count down to light a fire under my procrastinating behind! Doesn't make much difference as far as KSP is concerned, as I play on Mac anyway, but it does mean I was able to download the Xilinx programming software. It means I can get back to programming CPLDs (Complex Programable Logic Devices). CPLDs allow you to create reconfigurable logic blocks out of standard logic gates. You can either use a specific coding language, or literally draw a schematic using logic gates to program the chip. Not sure how much use I'd have for these types of chips in my controller, but I might be able to use them to create custom drivers for some of my DSKY and alpha readout LEDs. I can't drive those with the MAX7219 chips, as they are common anode. I was gonna use a diode matrix to drive them (It's really simple, but requires manual wiring), but I could create the drivers entirely on the Xilinx CPLD chips. I can certainly live with that! LED drivers are certainly something I've designed from scratch before! Well, that's one thing I can do with my Xilinx chips!

LOL. Use of navigational computers, totally cool. Apollo had the AGC/DSKY. I can have MechJeb. Kerbals ain't cave men launching into the sky on exploding trees... wait... As for infinite fuel, I avoid it like the plague... with the exception of one scenario... I have abused it extensively to rebuild a fleet after the 0.25 --> 0.90 transition bugged out ALL my craft and made everything disintegrate. Needed fast rescues for my over 50 kerbals in orbit. I also replaced the big toroidal stations using infinite fuel, rather than asparagus staging them again. Jesus, that's hard to asparagus stage 13 stacks of Kerbodyne s3-14400, three tall!, to launch a 25 meter, wide as the VAB ring station into orbit... in one go! TOTALLY fine using infinite fuels for it's replacement!

It was weird for me (Using Safari on Mac). I had to right click the image (no image save option, and the "gear icon" was non functional) and I selected open frame in new tab. In the new tab, I then used the Inspect element feature to get a listing of the page components, and was able to extract the full resolution images that way... It was definitely weird. I couldn't even click it to just go to Imgur!

Well, there are at least still the Imgur albums on that linked thread. They have to be clicked to be seen, but they'd be fine for providing references for Pine to draw detail from. Still miss those parts... They were bee-yoo-tee-ful Last time I tried to using them in 1.0.something, I had difficulty attaching things to them. I suppose they're derped pretty good...

The torus has the trees and stream (yup, a stream) on the side wall, which is fine for a gravity ring in space, but oh so wrong for a landed base.. If you wanted to creatively alter the ring, feel free to. Maybe put the ground on the... you know, ground. You could maybe even fix up that industrial side wall by continuing the glass to make it more appropriate for a ground base. As for the biodomes... If you wanna alter those, feel free to do that as well. Heck, you can rotate them if you like. Up to you. I'll leave you to your creativity. If you want references for the interior and it's overall look, or the glass, there are several images on the imgur album on the Small Stanford torus and Biodome models page.

Go for it! You gonna focus on just Gilly Vanilli, or do it with the base? Either way is cool.

There you go. As you can see, the first pic is of course a very cool angle, but the second one really shows Gilly Vanilli in detail. The base in the second pic is based off of @michaelhester07 way out of date pack Small Stanford torus and Biodome models. It's been broken since 1.0.0, sadly, but it's an old favorite of mine... Mainly cause that ring has IVAs for some 40 kerbals sitting in lawn chairs sipping on mugs amongst the trees and grass. It's also why I mentioned the base is gravitationally oriented bass awkward. All that matters in KSP tho, is it looks cool! Also, that base is suspended on 48 landing legs! I think it was 48. You can walk under it. it has even amassed a collection of... defunct vehicles that entered the ring, but could not escape the ring. Lets just say I had some very... poorly designed escape pods. Imagine a throwing star made of Mk2 Cockpits. Now imagine it had centrally mounted engines that thrust sideways, and that is was designed to rely on MechJeb's Smart A.S.S. utility for stability. Now imagine I forgot to install a MechJeb unit onto each pod. Oops! Oh yeah. I forgot to mention. back in 0.90, before deadly reentry heat, Gilly Vanilli was a launch to landing vehicle, hence the numerous radial parachutes. My launcher mounted two Gilli Vanilli vessels to the end (for weight symmetry) and reached LKO. From there, Gilly Vanilli's NERV could get it out to it's destination. For super low gravity bodies like Gilly, Ion engines was all that was needed to land. For something like Minmus or larger, chemical engines are required. Not shown are the long gone "blast away struts". I had a number of decouplers mounted at the ends of the rocker bogeys, and another set of decouplers mounted on the ends of the belly engines. all that was attached between he decouplers were struts... LOTS of struts! This was to keep the rather springy rocker bogeys from flapping' in the breeze during launch. I'd blow the decouplers before landing at my destination, so all the little parts would destroy themselves as they smacked the ground. That freed up the suspension. I actually have a video of the Gilly Vanilli, with the suspension in action. It's just me driving it around the KSC. I have another video in editing limbo of the actual Minmus mission itself... I REALLY ought to finish it. Interestingly enough (and I don't know if this still holds true, with so many changes to the core of KSP's physics engine in the past year+), is that I have never had a death in Gilly Vanilli. I eventually figured out it was the construction of the double rocker bogey that was responsible, but the structural elements act like incredibly efficient brakes when he wheels shear off. It's like coming to a stop on springy pegs. Sure, EVERYTHING disintegrates, but the crew modules somehow don't! I've popped tires at 30 m/s in the rolling hills north west of the KSC and NOT crashed it. I've come off a "General Lee" jump off the end of a hill peak at 48 m/s and shredded 3 of the 4 rocker bogeys... and had the vessel core still in one piece! I've even rolled it at 24 m/s (55 MPH) by stupidly turning while coming off a jump over the runway! Jeb even looked a little freaked, but he lived! The last one is in the video! "Gilly Vanilli" 44.8 ton Kerbal rover catching air at 55 MPH (Pardon the framerate... a virus scan had kicked in right as before I crossed the runway the first time)

Kerbal Space program is an obvious one, but outside of that... I do like other games too. Adventure/RPG/open world type stuff (like Zelda, Fallout, Elder Scrolls, GTA, Assassins Creed, etc), Simulation and sandbox type stuff (like Farming Simulator, Infinifactory, Little Big Planet). Mostly those. If I have a chance to play a pinball machine, I'll hit that up too. Outside of video games, I do electronics as a hobby. That breaks down into a few main areas. I like vintage tech, and collecting things like old computers and calculators. I have over 100 calculators in my collection, some of them from the 1960s and 1970s! I've restored a few machines, such as my old Sony Sobax ICC-600W, which is an old nixie tube calculator I also like to build robots. None of my robots (yet) have used computers, CPUs, or microcontrollers of any kind. They use neural networks and nervous networks. All rather simple, but they work! I'd love to get back into working with robotics, but have not had time lately. My largest robot controller is 16 "neurons" (4 neuron central pattern generator and 4 branched chains). It has a logic based signal conditioner that prevents the robot from burning out the motor drivers if the network "seizes" (it happens sometimes... Poor, poor robot... ). It's frame is made from brass wire and brass plate salvaged from old water and steam meters salvaged out of an old meat processing plant that was torn down in my home town (I salvaged a lot of random stuff there... at night... ). The cables that connect the leg motors are plain wires fed through medical oxygen tubing. I also happen to enjoy documentaries and science shows... I don't have cable, so basically, half of everything I watch airs on PBS! XD I suppose, when not tinkering or watching TV though, I enjoy reading. I read both science things (like stuff about electronics, neural networks, biology, nature, etc), as well as the occasional fiction. I'm an MLP fan too, and a long time one at that, since season 1. Finally, I've most recently been considering my computer. In recent years, I decided to move up from stock standard computer cases into custom work. I started out with a 1939 Philco radio cabinet, and modified it to contain my i7 quad 3.5 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 23 TB (1.24 TB SSD), 16 fanned beast of a Hackintosh (Mac OS run on standard PC hardware)! I even built a custom hardware fan controller that reads the voltage or PWM from the motherboard headers and drives power drivers to run all 16 fans at the motherboard derived speeds. It has a nixie tube clock int he front, and since the radio control panel was long gone when I found the cabinet, I made a replacement for the opening using a pair of brass art deco-ish mail/post box doors. After that, I decided I needed a keyboard that was as custom as the computer, so I made a custom 75% + 1 keyboard. It uses a 75% layout, with one extra column added to the right side, to allow standard key caps to be used with it, unlike a traditional 75% layout. The key caps are a custom doubleshot set called "Danger Zone", inspired by the movie Top Gun, and made to follow an "aviation" theme. The switches are Gateron blues, and the top housings were disassembled, dyed blue, and the internals lubed and the switches reassembled. The plate is blue anodized aluminum. The trim and the wrist rest are wood (keyboard and rest trim is oak, wrist rest is cherry). The rest trim was painted to follow the key color style, with the yellow being exactly 3 keys wide, just like the arrows and WASD clusters. The keys are "under-lit" with amber LEDs, meant to evoke the glow of an instrument panel. On the right side of the keyboard, is a MagSafe style magnetic connector. This is for magnetically attaching an optional (and sadly, not yet built) number pad. Building an input device was pretty crazy! Construction, on and off, took half a year, thanks to me having to wait for parts to be made! In the meanwhile though, I have also been working on another side project. This time, I'm bringing my electronics hobby right back into Kerbal Space Program, by building a controller for KSP. I already have most of the meters, but I have to make the housing, cut the notch out of my desk, assemble and wire it... and then figure out the programming... It's a work in progress, but here's an idea of what to expect out of this project...

Man, it's great to see you back, and it's good to see you've gotten through your hard times. It's never easy... Now that you're back, I'm tempted to post my own request soon, but I wanna wait till you are definitely up for it again, and are open to new requests. Honestly though, It's SO HARD to pick just one pic though!!! I guess I can describe my top 5 picks and let you decide. If you wanna see a photo, just say so, and I'll post it. A: My first successful mission to another body, the Challenger Titanic Fitzgerald✶ IV.✹ It performed orbital surveys of the Mun, and landed on Minmus (without landing legs, no less)! I never even planned to go to Minmus, but I had SO MUCH extra fuel✹... It's an Mk2-3 on a Science lab, and has a huge stockpile of RCS and Xenon tanks, with Ion drive at the tail. It has a few small solar panels and a ton of RTGs. Fairly traditional rocket shape, but with the tail being a ring of 8 tiny stacks. Set to a backdrop of Minmus. B: There's my rather silly pic titled "A space porcupine sits on a rock"... Picture an Ion+NERV probe, roughly the shape of a 4 legged stool, towing a class E asteroid on KAS tow lines. LOTS of solar panels sticking out at every possible angle. C: I rather find I like the design of my Ike'n'Duna & Eve'n'Gilly probes (they're almost identical). It's a pair of side by side probes launched on one stack. Nice symmetry. Each probe is a triple stack of Science Jr.s, with survey scanners on the end, satellite dish on the side, and a three way solar panel symmetry. It uses 1-2 and 1-3 adapters to make the symmetrically stacked parts. An example of a probe that splits from one stack to three and back to one. x2! The backdrop is just SPAAAAAACE, but if you wanted to be creative, Eve and Gilly, or Duna and Ike could easily serve as a good backdrop. D: There's a really cool night shot of Gilly Vanilli,✶ when it popped two tires. Turns out Alley lied when she told Billy-Bobdan she could change a tire!✤ Gilly Vanilli is a 44 ton rover with 32 wheels, a NERV on it's back end, and either ions or small chemical engines on it's belly (depending on where it's heading) for landing. It uses the Mk-2 inline cockpit attached with some of the curvy adapters to a science lab and some huge feel and xenon tanks (depending on the deployment). The wheels are suspended on double rocker-bogey suspensions, made using docking ports as joints, and modular girder segments as the beams. It has it's own landing legs to protect the tires from hard landings, and to jack the vehicle up to make tire changes easy. This image does not show the vehicle in a very detailed angle, but it's a really cool angle. It's part of an attempt at circumnavigating Kerbin. The backdrop is a tree to the right of the rover, with numerous trees on rolling hills behind it. A mountain rises up on the left. It's a night shot, but it could be lightened up. Also, Gilly Vanilli has rainbow headlights so it can roll in style! E: Finally, there's the Minmus deployment of Gilly Vanilli parked next to the Minmus Biorefinery Base... A single, 25 meter diameter ring base, with four 8 meter biodomes (ALL in a totally incorrect gravitational orientation), launched whole and landed on Minmus without refueling. Gilly Vanilli drove 105 km to rendezvous with three science waypoints on it's trip across 1/3 of Minmus's circumference, before it ended it's journey to the great flat where the Minmus base was landed. Gilly Vanilli is at a great angle to show off the entire rover, and has it's solar panels all deployed. I was using Kethane back in those days, so there's a light dust cloud around the base's central stack. I have no idea which one I should post when you're officially open to new submissions. I suppose you could decide what appeals the most to you. NOTES: ✶ I name most of my vessels after terrible disasters, such as Columbia, Titanic, Challenger, Edmund Fitzgerald, Milli Vanilli. ✹ CTF I was drifting in a heliocentric orbit. Jeb kicked Bill out after he ate all the snacks and failed to push the vessel back to Kerbin. CTF III rescued CTF I... Bob and Bill still don't speak of CTF II... Jeb routinely laughs at "those idiots in that seriously ΟP rocket" I bet those guys are still screaming, somewhere out in deep space... "So much extra fuel" seemed to be a recurring theme with the CTF series of vessels, usually to the detriment of the vessel and it's occupants... ✤ Alley swore she could change a tire! Really swore! She even put a Kredit in the "swears for snacks" jar and everything! The Wiki even said so! (the skills unlocked at different levels for Engineer were listed incorrectly at one point) She ended up going on training to learn the art of tire changing. Turns out, Kerbal has no roads, and the runway is apparently too busy, so she was forced to go all the way to Duna to learn how to change a simple tire! I don't wanna actually post any pics till you are ready. Anything you're interested in having a look at, I can post.

I loved the even older Small Biodome and Stanford Torus pack. That 40+ kerbal IVA was SO lovely! I miss my trees, lawn chairs, and mugs! I even launched a pair of 25M torus based stations into orbit on near stock parts (I had tweak scale and MechJeb, some custom capsules, but no extra tanks or engines, and no scaled tanks or engines, so pretty much stock), and one with the controls oriented 90° from vertical! THAT was HARD! The asparagus staging on those two vessels was beautiful! I learned fuel lines have a maximum length, and I also learned you can use Oscar-B tanks suspended on the ends of the long structural girders to make longer fuel lines made of three fuel lines and 2 Oscar-B tanks! It was big.

Nope, it started life as a TI-82/85 overclocking page. That slowly grew, adding info on building a variety of add ons (serial port flash memory, speakers, light controller). I also came up with a process for adding a small 10 pin expansion port that allowed a more "cartridge" like experience with those accessories (rather than using the link cable to attach the calculator to an external box). Also showed how to add backlighting. I had addend a page for my models and art projects. It said coming soon... It finally appeared last month... It's been there since 1997. I often compare my models page going from "coming soon" to "being there" to that one video game that came out in far less time... You know the one, Duke Nukem Forever. After the first two years, I added robotics to the page (as the primary focus). Hosting started at GeoCities, and moved over to Xoom, then to ticalc.org, and calc.org, and eventually, to it's long term home, http://richfiles.solarbotics.net. I never once had a page dedicated to X-Files on the site!

Naw, that's what Bill did... Before "not landing".

Jeb and Val stand on a small island on Laythe, a swarm of monoliths somehow glaring angrily at them... ▋ Jeb: "We weren't trying to land!" Val: "And we didn't 'land", so much as crashed..."

I'm jealous @davidpsummers came up with the name first!

Take your time, and I hope things will be okay for you and your family.

And then we weren't. Rapidly.

There are records that indicate that some of their meters (including the standard edgewise meters) had their graphics created on film, but there was an alternate style used as well, that used etching. The Apollo CM and LM used differing methods. Color areas were paint... which they had a lot of trouble with. The 8mm film idea is interesting. Sadly, film isn't as easy to come by these days, save for the occasional disposable camera, and the few places left doing film development. The NASA machines, rather than use a capstan and pinch roller, appear to use the cogged drum as the actual drive/position roller. You can see exactly how the gear train is set up because you can actually see it for the tape not he next layer in. The gears at the bottom front are fro another pair of reels and another cogged drum roller The spool gears are spun opposite of each other, and each spool is bound to the gear driving it with a mainspring. Pvt. KASA, if you can make those with your 3D printer, you're pretty much good to go. The little tape meter is different. It has two reels, one smaller, the other larger. I suspect that one is sprung, and the other is not. The one that is not is directly driven, and the sprung drum lets the tape unwind. It really is a shame we don't have a good way to selectively expose and develop camera film. I certainly don't have a darkroom, nor do I have the materials to do a controlled film exposure. That'd make great tapes! I'm fortunate to have actual tape meter hardware on hand, even if it was just a display for a manually controlled device. The fact that I already have perforations and a cogged drum is great, but it doesn't help me or anyone else with new creations. For that reason, I think the second meter picture I showed is more relevant to custom builds. It does not appear to use cogged indexing system. I think one reel is sprung with a mainspring, and the other, I suspect, is a direct geared drive. Interestingly, the easiest way to mark out divisions on a setup like that... Is to just step the drive equally, and mark out your divisions on the tape (assuming you're making your own tape, maybe with stamps and a screen printing ink). By stepping the drive equally, the tape will move to the desired spot, you can stamp your next number, and then repeat. Over time, the numbers will gradually space a little wider apart as you take up more and more tape, but you'll always use the same number of steps between numbers. Depending on reel sizes, you might even be able to get half division numbers printed between your number steps, which would be nice for when you're getting closer to the ground! You get a mildly logarithmic tape out of it, with more detail on one end, and you can drive the motor easily, with no software corrections, and the same stepping between numbers across the entire tape. It also needs the fewest custom parts 3d printed/machined, with only a single sprung reel being required (as the reel attached to the stepper motor is fixed, connected directly to the motor).

Y... you baked them!