richfiles

So, now that we have new "Magic Boulders" integrated into the asteroid system... Does that mean there is a parameter for Magic Boulders an MB colors now, and does this mod know about these elements? When it spawns, is there a random chance for the spawned potatoroid being one of the magical variety, or are all space racks this thing makes of the bland all grey variety? Just curious. Thanks

The ancient ruins have been normal and on the surface where they belong since I started playing, in 0.25. I also only run at the highest terrain graphic setting. The graphics settings did used to cause some objects to appear below the ground or in the sky.

You were saying? You can see at 10 seconds in that he's playing KSP 1.1.3, however, watch below, and explain... (skip to 3:40 for the actual demonstration) Are they selectively "substantial"? Do some have colliders and some not?

You know... If a green one was most rare, and could be spawned with a monolith... I'd respect that. It'd give us magic boulders, and The Magic Boulder™. Extra props if it can only spawn in a near polar orbit around Ike.

Hmm, I'm curious... Does the object class, object information, tracking info show anything even remotely unique, or are the new magic boulders informationally identical to any other normal asteroid? Form various comments, I'm getting the impression that this is indeed the case. Such a shame. I already read earlier that all science text is also bog standard stuff too.

Oh, thank goodness it's still there on Bop! Thought we were getting zombie Krakens for a second there!

Wait! The Krakken is on the move!? But it's supposed to be dead... ... KILL IT WITH FIRE!!! Jeb! Crash fiery bits into it!

Specifically, the oxygen tanks of the command service module had heaters and stirrers. During the manufacture of the tanks, a spec change went un noticed, and old specced parts rated for a lower voltage were used on a higher voltage supply. The testing resulted in the thermal switch that regulates the heaters being fused. This caused the tanks to reach extreme temperatures internally, during the manufacture and testing phase, and also resulted in the damage that caused the accident during the Apollo 13 mission. In order to get accurate pressure readings of the cryo tanks, they must "stir" the tanks. A fan inside stirs the contents so it's evenly distributed. In the Apollo craft, there were oxygen and hydrogen tanks in the Command Service Module. These tanks feed into fuel cells to generate the craft's electricity, and the "waste" of catalysing oxygen and hydrogen is H20... the water they use for everything from system cooling to drinking. The oxygen tanks had been stirred multiple times on the trip already, and would have been stirred multiple times later, had they not blown. One tank eventually sparked during one of these routine tests, about 3/4 of the way to the moon. When the oxygen tank exploded, it ripped up the plumbing, and they pretty much lost all the oxygen needed for the fuel cells. Mind you, they still had oxygen for breathing. Other systems were capable of providing that. Without the fuel cells, they could not keep the Command Module's batteries charged. They had to preserve a minimal amount of electric charge for re-entry, and worse, the C/SM was so badly damaged, they were afraid if they burned their main engine, the whole shebang would just go up in a bang. They had to shut down the Command Module, including the AGC (Apollo Navigation Computer) after copying the data out by hand to paper and entering it into the LM AGC. They all had to pack into the tiny Lunar Module, using it as a life boat. Because they didn't have a replenishable source of electric charge on the CM, they couldn't run the heaters, meaning the craft got VERY cold inside. There was very little water as well, thanks to the fact that they got their water from that lost oxygen and the fuel cells it fed. The only water they had for 3 men was what the LM could supply, a vessel only meant for a 2 man crew, and only meant to be used during the Lunar descent, surface EVA, and Lunar ascent. One of the astronauts got a urinary tract infection due to the dehydration and near hypothermia they were suffering from. On top of that, the 2 man LM couldn't filter the carbon dioxide out of the air for 3 people on the full duration of the return trip... Suck in a gulp of air out of a bottle of carbonated soda... That's what breathing high concentrations of CO2 feels like, and they were near the unsafe limit. Beyond the safe limit, they would have lapsed into unconsciousness, and then death. The exceptionally talented ground crew, and the highly trained Apollo crew managed to figure out how to fit a Square Peg into a Round Hole. The CM Lithium Hydroxide CO2 scrubbers were square, and would not fit the round hole for the LM scrubbers. They got it figured out with duct tape, a plastic bag, the cardboard cover from a checklist, and some hoses off a space suit... Duct tape, sheer genius and determination, and a bunch of junk saved Apollo 13. Anyway, they used the LM engines to do their course corrections, and at one point even had to shut down the remaining LM AGC. They had to do a manual burn at one point, using the sight of the Earth through a window as a reference, and all around, never even knew if their parachutes would even deploy, after all the time spent frozen, or if the heat shield was even intact, as it was directly up against the C/SM, where the explosion had occurred. Remember kids... These guys managed to fly their craft back home and MADE IT, after having nearly frozen like popsicles, without drinking hardly enough water, and while nearly suffocating at one point in the flight! They endured those hardships for 4 days! They had the "right stuff" indeed! Those men were truly the best of the best of the best, picked out of the toughest, most resilient of candidates. Mad respect to them. That's the mess of explodyness they managed to not die in! See that stuff hanging out... That's all supposed to be inside the round bit. Oh yeah, please don't stare at the stirrers too hard. They get embarrassed and their little fan motors get all red and then they just can't take it anymore, and then boom! They just can't handle the pressure anymore!

The ratchets don't work, because when a reel wants to unspool, it'll be turning the wrong way, and lock the ratchet. Remember, the other half of a ratchet looks like it locks in the other direction. You can visualize this by considering a bicycle. You can pedal forward, and coast in the same direction, but it you reverse the tire, suddenly, the pedal locks and is forced backwards. Same with your reels. If you attached two bikes facing each other like the reels, and then linked the pedals with a chain... it'd lock up. It would not let the other side slip. You may as well not bother with ratchets then. Also consider, that both meters need to be able to rapidly change direction. those two meters are the ones that most need to change direction. ratchets need a small lead up to lock. Even a good ratchet needs a tiny amount to do so. If you're relying on the stepper motor counts to keep accuracy, this will quickly become impossible, as direction changes introduce backlash in the position count... It'll quickly loose accuracy. It's why I highly recommend an encoder. You can mostly ignore backlash with an encoder. The only reason I went with the side by side drum configuration, is that a large diameter drum basically absorbs much of the error, since the tape does not end up forming as much difference in circumference. A small reel will have a larger error, due to the tape layering over itself as it spools up, increasing or decreasing the diameter (and thus the circumference) more drastically. A large reel will show less error because of this. You certainly don't have to do it that way. You could have a roller and spring, just like in your original configuration too, but making a floating mount makes the entire drum keep itself taught, and reduces the part count and the number of surfaces flexing the tape. It also simplifies the drive mechanism. Also... totally wish I had a 3D printer!

I'll start by saying, i think I found the ideal solution, but that's later. I wanna get the problem with ratchet and pawl type systems out of the way first... Don't be discouraged... I seriously think I found the ultimate solution for SIMPLE one motor tape meters! First off, you idea is sorta kinda maybe a little similar, but not quite what a VCR does. If you use a ratcheting mechanism, then it can't work. You need to be able to actually fully disengage the other reel. When it's unspooling, it goes against the direction that would lock against the ratchet, not with the release direction of the pawl... Aka... It'll lock up. VCRs have a swinging lever with a gear at the end. There is another gear that rotates around the same pivot as the lever's fulcrum. When the gear rotates one way, the swinging gear swings in the same direction and engages one reel. When he gear reverses, the lever flips the other way and the swinging gear engages the opposite reel. There is a tiny delay as the gear flips from side to side. That delay would not really work well with a tape meter. Think how long it takes for a VCR to switch modes between fast forward and reverse... Now imagine trying to display measurements on the moving tape... Then add to that, the fact that you need to have mild braking to prevent the supply reel from unwinding if the take up reel suddenly stops or slows (You need to stop inertia from unwinding your "loose" spool). If there's any delay in switching directions, it could get problematic with some types of data display? Hmm... I actually don't recall. Were you using it for your radar altimeter, or something else? I honestly have no idea what you're doing with it. A radar altimeter needs the capacity to do rapid changes in direction to register uneven terrain. Something that just displays speed, or some other thing like that will not often change directions all that rapidly. In all honesty, if you use two separate reels, you're far better off using either two separate motors, or a wound spring and one motor. A wound spring keeps one reel tight, while the other reel is attached to the motor. You just wind it up or un wind it. One motor, nothing fancy. You can even wind a cable around a pulley attached to the reel and attach that to something else... A weight, a different sized wheel (so you can use a shorter spring, etc). As cheap as steppers are these days, it makes no sense to skimp on functionality, especially with complex mechanics... that quite frankly, are going to introduce more points of potential failure. How many VCRs out there eat tapes too! I know I've posted this before, but this is NASA's actual mechanism. Examining it more closely, it seems they use spools geared to each other, that are counter wound, with a spring linkage between the gear and the reel itself. This "absorbs" all the slack and makes up the difference in circumference. They are driving the drum with the sprockets to actually feed the tape and have absolute positioning for it. The reels are "generally" wound under power, but "float" on springs, keeping the tape tight. NASA chose to use a mechanism that's held under spring tension. Their contractors have the precision machining capabilities to make this mechanism work well. Still, it just simply comes down to one simple fact, if you do not have the option to do precision machining, then 2 reels, 2 motors. If you have separate reels, the most reliable and mechanically simple mechanism possible will eliminate any fancy mechanisms and just use two motors. I may not be a software guy, but I know that adjusting for all the quirks of the mechanism in software will be way more reliable in the long term than relying on ratchets, pawls, disengaging gears, etc. Ooooh! OHHH!!! THIS! This is a GOOD idea! Here's another NASA goodie, and quite frankly, one that I TOTALLY missed before! So, your tape isn't SUPER long (it's basically a tailor's tape). It's just too long to be otherwise all that easy to work with. This is a VERY interesting concept. Take note of the larger black drum. The tape is spooled around the drum and into a retainer in a slot. I think the tape at the top does the same, but is wound in the other direction on the small drum beside the first drum. if you ditch the second drum, and reel the tape side by side on the same drum, It lets one drum be both supply and take up reel! If you make the diameter kinda bigger, you won't have to worry as much about slack, and I think there are two simple ways to take up the slack. The easiest way is a simple roller and spring, like your original idea. You could also attach the drums together with a spring. The only catch is the tape has to wind up side by side with itself, and you need to extend it far enough to reach the drum. You also need to probably set your end rollers at a teeeensy tiny little angle, to get the tape to line up right with the offset side by side spools on the reel. THIS. This is your simplest solution, and probably your absolute best bet for control. It only takes one motor, handles the spooling and unspooling, is instantly reversible, and isn't terribly complex! To make this, you need a drum wide enough to fit your tape side by side. Maybe glue some manner of ring in the middle, to keep the spools from overlapping (not even sure how necessary that is, but better to keep it simple. Then you just secure one end of the tape to one side, spool it up, and when the other end of the tape (when fed through your display and two rollers) reaches it's max length, where it just reaches the drum, secure it to the other side of the drum, from the other direction. You could secure it with a flat topped screw, or whatever works. Then you'd have the mechanism below. The larger the drum diameter, the less slack will be introduced spooling from one side to the other, and a simple spring roller should be all you need to maintain tension. Heck, the whole DRUM itself could BE the tension roller. You just mount the drum and servo to a plate, mount it loose at the bottom, and have a spring pulling on it at the top. As slack tightens or loosens, the whole assembly lightly flexes forward or back. Super simple! the drum and servo, the top roller, the bottom roller... and that's it! It might look kinda complicated, but this can be made with a drill and hand tools. It's basically a plate with a few holes and a slot cut in it. Everything else can be strips of metal with holes drilled into it, and the metal can be bent as required with a a pair of pliers. You could probably just get some angle brackets from the local hardware store and bend them to the correct angles. Mount your rollers, pivots and slides, as required, and you've got it! The drum might look hard to come by, but honestly, you could probably make it from a piece of trim hardware (again from the hardware store). A wood cylinder can probably be cut from something that you would buy to make a stair railing or something. No reason you couldn't use wood there. The stepper motor is just that, nothing special. All you need are 5 holes... the shaft and 4 screws to secure it. I think this thing could be made quite easily!If you wanted tapes side by side, you could have one set with a little longer tape, and have the drum set behind the other. It's just a matter of spacing out your pieces so everything has clearance for everything else. And, if the width is a concern (say you have instrument mechanisms that have to sit beside it), you can use a hollow drum, and mount the stepper inside the drum, with the shaft attaching to one side of the drum (it would be shaped like a larger version of a bottle cap. Open on one side, and solid on the other. If you want custom numbers, like me, then buy an office stamp with as many digits as you require, and get yourself either a measuring tape with only one side printed (use the back then), or look for some type of fiberglass reinforced plastic or vinyl strap. That's basically what those tailor's tapes usually are. I still need to ask the local screen printing shop what ink they recommend for a flexible surface. If I find out, I'll share their recommendation here. If you have more room to soak up slack, then there may be one MORE option... (confused yet! ) If you mount two reels on a sliding mechanism like above, and use two large reels, you can probably gear the reels together and use one motor for both. The whole reel/motor assembly would pivot like above, and as long as the pivot amount can take up 100% of the slack in the reel circumferential differences, then I think you might just be okay. Remember though, large drums are your friend, as that minimizes the difference in circumference change as it spools in and out.

Guys... I found something super cool! I'm gonna link you guys my web page "The Richfiles", so I don't kill ALL my bandwidth with hot linking. It's not that the host has ever actually complained about hot linking, but I made these pics SUPER high resolution, so I'll play nice! So, just click "Models" at the top of my navigation bar. The page is still being worked on... after only 20 years... No, seriously! What you'll find is the model of the space shuttle's cockpit I built when I was in grade school, using some VERY NICE prints of the instrument panels. I think I ordered two copies of the book these came from a few years ago... I got them somewhere. I dug this out of my stuff in storage though! VERY awesome blast from my past! Brought to you by glorious cardboard, staples, and Scotch™ tape! A couple pieces have been lost over the years, such as the left instrument panel area and some of the structure of the right side. It also sags. Badly. Out of frame, this is being squeezed together by stuff on the left and right. Whatever works! I used to know the pre-launch, launch, OMS retro burn and landing checklists, and all the switches involved... Man, that was ages ago. Forgot it all since. Anyway, I put high resolution pictures up on my website. Most are 2560 pixels on the long dimension. You'll need to specifically click the link to the high res page. If you wanna download them, feel free to just right click and save.

It's an amalgam of two different elements. The background is a "nebulous starry field™" inspired by the mane of Mun horse herself... aka, Princess Luna, from MLP. It's just a really nice looking backdrop, if you ask me. The foreground is a PAINFULLY reduced pixel level rendition of the Periplaneta Computatrix... an AI insect created back in the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s by Randall Beer (Jesus... imagine getting anything done in college with that last name!) Periplaneta Computatrix was a neural network inspired by Periplaneta Americana, aka, the American cockroach. Rather than focus on the intricacies of simulating a real, physical robot and dealing with real world issues that come from that, they did the entire AI and the environment it "lived" in, all inside the computer. In those days, desktop computers were still averaging between 1-33 MHz, and memory was still measured in kilobytes and at best a few megabytes. Doing tasks involving real world interaction in a computer was hard. The AI was a neural network that was created to study emergent and adaptive behavior from neural systems. Beer acknowledges the work done by Rodney Brooks on his hierarchical subsumption architecture to be, in spirit, very similar to his own design philosophies. While the two differ greatly in execution (Neural networks vs hierarchal sub systems of finite state machines, Simulated AI vs physical robotic hardware), they both have the same design philosophy... Create an adaptive "instinctual" intelligence that can navigate its environment without the need to higher order processing to figure out how to actually do it. It's a lot like how we walk. We don't think about how we walk... We just intend to go from point A to point B, and our subconscious drives out bodies to get there with little actual thought involved. Randal Beer's AI consisted of a 78 neuron, 156 connection neural network. The virtual environment was a 2 axis plane that could have obstacles, food objects, and could simultaneously run multiple "insect" AIs in the same environment... All with about 5000 lines of LISP code plus object definitions, running at 3-10x slower than realtime on an old Texas Instruments Explorer II LX LISP machine. I figured out a lot of it on my own, from a 2 inch (4-5 cm) tall image of the neural schematic, in a magazine. Not enough to actually decipher how it worked, but enough to get a fairly close approximation of the schematic. Over two decades would pass before I had all he details figured out, thanks to Amazon... Apparently, the guy published a book on it. If only I had found that earlier! My avatar was edited pixel by pixel (no, seriously! ), to not look like absolute bovine manure™ on select sites (aka, YouTube). Sometimes, I have to use it on sites that have a slightly different resolution that what my original was edited down to... My response to that is... meh. whatever **uploads anyway**. Too much trouble to re-edit. That's why it may be a little... not perfect on some other sites. It looks good on YouTube and alright here, so I'm satisfied with that. It usually looks fine here on the forums, but can look blurry depending on scale. The fine details are... finicky... 8 is a "food" object. The rectangles are "brick" objects (obstacles). The other numbers just define points where the AI changed it's path. 2, in particular, is a point where the AI chose to flow the edge of the wall. I first discovered all these amazingly creative people and their creations, thanks to Scientific American, back in 1991. I had to drive my dad to the hospital, after he split his knee cap trying to straighten a cultivator shovel that had been bent by a rock... Ouch... I spent a lot of time at the hospital visiting him while he recovered. The cover of a Scientific American sitting in the waiting room had a spectacular picture of a 6 legged robot. Needless to say, these "insect" robots had me hooked at first sight, and within a few years, I was making my own legged robots, using simple neural networks to function. To date, I have still never made a robot with a "computer" for a brain. Spyder Walking - Dailymotion "Spyder". 4 legs, 8 motors, 16 neurons, a signal conditioning circuit, and orientation sensing. It's frame is made from brass rod, brass hinges, and brass sheet snipped from salvaged brass gauges from an old poultry plant that I "raided" before they tore it down! The "head" is the shield from a flyback transformer out of an old black and white portable TV. The wires to the legs are protected from wear and snagging with medical air/oxygen tubing. All the PC boards are laid out by hand and were etched at home. In general, Rodney Brooks, Misha Mahowald, and Randall Beer drove my early interest in neural networks and emergent behavioral systems more than any other people. Mahowald also grew up two hours from where I live, which totally made her way cool in my book! Rodney Brooks is a master of hardware, building physical robots and driving them with electronic control systems. Misha Mahowald was a master in biology and created biologically inspired electronic hardware that mimicked the aspects of biological neurons. Randall Beer was a pioneer in neural network simulation, and created virtual environments and placed virtual AIs into them to observe their behavior. Me, I have a passion for hardware, but I've taken elements of all the fields of these creators and let myself be inspired by all of them. So that's what my avatar is all about, @monstah. My long time passion for neural networks, insect robots, and brains made it a no brainer for me. P.S. Sorry for the quality of some of these images. They were taken with a potato from the 90s. Some book and reference links: Heterogeneous neural networks for adaptive behavior in dynamic environments (PDF) Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior (at Google Books) Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior (At Amazon) LOL! Price for the book varies wildly... I bought my copy for $2.11 + shipping ... Sometimes it's over $70! That doesn't hold a candle to the crazy prices I've seen for some of Misha Mahowald's books! I've seen prices higher than $130! Thankfully, there are some PDFs available online of some of her papers, which cover everything in the book. Misha Mahowald's Thesis, 1992 CIT

I'm thinking the easiest way to do it with your setup, would be the two stepper method. You honestly don't even need to know any fancy electronics or do any complicated mechanical stuff. At best, you might use a roller on a spring to keep constant tension. That's still not a bad idea. As far as software controls go, what you need to do is figure out a stepping pattern for the two motors that keeps nearly all the slack of the tape. You can store the stepping pattern as a lookup table, and step based on reading opposite ends of the table and scanning across. Where the spool is smaller (has little tape), the stepper will have to make more steps. Where the spool is larger in diameter (has more tape rolled on it), the stepper will have to make fewer steps for the same movement. It's just a matter of balancing it out so one motor doesn't end up going faster than the other. You can also save memory on the device and do it mathematically. If you have any errors, the spring roller will take up that slack, but it'll be very little error if you figure out the formula right. I don't know that off the top of my head though. Imagine the "O" is a spool. When it's small (o), it needs to step more than once, to match the amount of tape spooled by the large spool (O) stepping just once. When the two spools are half empty/full, they step equally. When the first spool is nearly full, it becomes the larger spool, and must step less than the other spool, which now is stepping more, to keep up. Make sense? You can handle the number of steps in software, but you'll likely need to actually do experiments... Build the hardware and test out what the difference in steps is. See how much slack happens if you step them the same, see how many steps it takes to take up the slack. You'll need to determine if the relationship is linear, or if it's non-linear (linear is easy to work with, but since we are dealing with circumference on a spool with a changing diameter... Ugh... my brain doesn't have that answer for you off the top of my head). Trust me though, it can all be done right, and software can indeed do it. o O ..... . .... .. ... ... .. .... . ..... O o It's still a good idea to have an index mark/hole at the two ends of the ribbon. If anything mis steps, or if the numbers end up off in any way, then you can re-home the tape at both the lowest and the highest altitude. Unfortunately, you'll have to search for the VCR stuff... Everyone spends time describing the video head and how the tape works with that... I actually had a hard time finding anything remotely useful about the clutch and engagement gear used for managing the reels of the tape. It does occur to me that a VCR is NTO a good mechanism, as a tape meter (especially if it shows radar altimeter) is a BAD idea... Ground can drop nd come up at you rapidly as you fly over the surface... VCRs have to "change gears" to switch directions... Not suitable. That's why a single stepper and a wound sprung reel, or a dual stepper configuration is absolutely the best option. Gives you instant tape reversing response. Now, the reason I suggested the option of going with DC motors instead of steppers is super simple... You take all your measurements off of an encoder, so you end up with an absolute feedback relating to where the tape is at. After that, it's only a matter of controlling direction and braking. You can handle that with just one PWM wire, and one digital wire. (or you can use multiples, and select the right ones in software, if you don't wanna build the very basic controller that would operate it). I think the circuit below is close enough to an approximation of how DC motor control would work. I could have something off... Basically, D0 and D1 are always meant to be opposite of each other. If you use a transistor inverter, or a logic inverter, you can do that in hardware, but you can also do it in software too... But NEVER let them both turn on at once. Both off, one on at a time... but never both on. The PWM signal runs a MOSFET that provides power for the motors, and the pair of MOSFETs in line with that select which motor actually gets the power. The pair of MOSFETs that tie the other motor lead to ground are there to short the opposite motor to ground, thus connecting it to it's other permanently grounded lead. This turns the motor into a generator that is basically shorted, which means it acts like brakes. This prevents the reel from unspooling and losing slack. You could use cheap DC motors and belt drive the spools if you like. For position feedback, you'd add an encoder to one spool. You'll have to have a calibration table in the controller's memory, again, cause spools don't ever keep it simple and run a uniform circumference as they fill up. -[Motor A]----o---[MOSFET]--o---[MOSFET]g---[PWM] |+ - | g | | | [MOSFET]g / `--+---[D0] [+] | | \ / | o--Ground---o X | | | / \ | | [MOSFET]g \ ,--+---[D1] |- + | g | -[Motor B]----o---[MOSFET]--- Hope that makes sense. At this point, you really have to just make something and experiment with the software. I have no good advice in regards to software, because I've only done a very limited amount myself. Personally, i keep building hardware,c use that's just what I know, and I haven't even LOOKED at the software side of things.

Unfortunately, I am beyond new to the software side of... all of this. I'm a hardware guy. My best recommendation would be to experiment. The idea with software adjustment, is you step the motors in different amounts to get a net uniform movement of tape. You can still have your spring roller, but it's there to just keep the tape tight enough to not flap around when it moves. Might not even be necessary. If the reels and tape move smoothly, and the steppers have no problem rotating, then you won't need an encoder. You could have an index hole at the top and the bottom of the tape though, so you can index it for both launching from the ground, and landing from above.

Not sure if it was clear or not, but those types of latching switches hold the button down until you twist them (to release). They don't "lock out" the button. They "lock in".

Having an index point will help, but rolling from the spools is not that precise. It's also not an issue of "error" but of speed. If both spools are fed at the same speed (by belt), then the supply reel will unspool faster than the take reel until they are the same size. The amount of unspool has to do with the circumference of the spool being unwound, so depending on how thick your tape is, that could be a few centimeters difference. I used a small 5 foot/150 cm tape and it had a difference of 4.5 cm from beginning to end of the spool's diameter (5 cm to 9.5 cm). It's more than 5mm. One possible mechanism would be to find a windup clock and use the mainspring on one of the two reels, and then have a stepper on the other reel. The spring will take up the slack, and you can then have one motor wind and unwind the whole tape, with the spring pulling it taught. The other benefit of this, is you can attach an encoder to the stepper for accurate position feedback, if you really want to (though step counting is fine too, as long as it won't unwind), and you can calibrate for the differing spool diameter in software. One catch is that you might need to keep the stepper powered to keep the spring from taking put he spool and back spinning the stepper, if the spring is strong enough. In general, you don't need much spring... just enough to keep it tight. Another alternative, is a worm screw. I have found DC motors that use worm screws. Add an encoder to the reel, drive it with the DC motor with a worm screw, and it will never unwind. An index hole can still mark the "home" position not he tape, and the encoder will tell you exactly how far the spool has spun. Again, adjust for the growing diameter of the spool in software. If using that method, I recommend that the "un-wound" spring configuration be orbital altitude (aka >10000). You are unlikely to launch anything so quickly that the motor can unwind the reel faster than the spring can take it... Though I've seen some INSANE 5 digit landing speed before at steep angles that would spin an altimeter from 10000 to 0 in half a second... If anything survived long enough to reach radar altimeter altitude without popping first! Still matters for that last "Oh Shi..." moment on atmosphereless bodies. Also, since you only have 3 posts, that's why there the mod approval thing. it'll go away after you've made a few posts. Another trick is if you have a pair of motors (one on each reel), making your circuit short the terminals of the supply reel motor will turn it into a generator (this is best with a permanent magnet DC motor). That means the supply reel will create mechanical resistance, tanks to the shorted motor. When the altimeter wants to reverse direction, the circuit unshorts the previous motor and drives it, and shorts the other motor instead. Since the motors only ever turn one direction, you can handle it with only 2 bits on a controller. Direction and speed. Speed can be a PWM. Direction sends opposite actions to the motors (and would use a VERY simple driver circuit). You can still attach an encoder to one of the spools (you only need one) for position feedback, and have your index hole/mark on the tape to re-center the home position.

Very nice work!! Make sure your wheels and belt both have matched teeth. You'll need that to maintain accuracy of the tape position, or it'll slip out over time. If you have a controller with enough processing omph, you can use something like a scavenged optical mouse as a mini scanner to scan the markings on the back of the tape as a position guide. That takes some more powerful processing power though. Oh yeah, and you might want to look at a VCR for inspiration for your drive. The supply and take up reels do not spin at the same speed, except for a single moment when both reels have the same amount of tape on them. VCRs handle this with a gear that engages one side or the other, and a slip clutch

It's okay... try not to think about the load times... They end eventually... Thank you though, for at least trying. At least we know what the game's limits are now. What about the Asteroid Day mod. It's able to figure out that the sentinel probe is in an orbit between planetary orbits. Can we create a system that specifies collecting ANY Kerbol science in ranges of orbits sin a similar matter, using whatever system Asteroid Day is using?

I have a pair of big old red switches. Anodized red aluminum pushbuttons meant as stop switches, but from before the times when everyone required latching. Never used 'em, cause I went with another type instead. I KNOW there are plain pushbutton "Big Red Button™" devices out there. They exist. Specifically look for the term "momentary" when searching. I even found a pair that is momentary on eBay, for $5, Comes with one red and 1 green (staging, abort?), which isn't a bad deal.

Oh! OH Nice! I contacted the supplier of the futura stamp set, cause the numbers just DID NOT add up. At all... They said the stamps in the small set were 50x80x.... 370mm... That seems... not right... (for us weirdos using inches... that's 14.56 inches)! So I contacted them, and they confirmed my suspicions... Somehow, their product page had an extra 0 added to the end of every dimension listed. Weird. They also shared the actual text dimensions of the small stamps as being about 3x4mm... In other words, these stamps are THE perfect size for me! Now, If only I could find a US seller. The product is from Korea, yet I've only found it sold in Australia!? The ebay stores don't even offer US shipping, and the only places I found selling it will charge me $20 for international shipping. Joy. I can certainly handle that, but it'll also cost me at LEAST $30-40 for the numbers alone, as each set only has ONE of each 0-9 digit, and wastes a ton of stamps on symbols and punctuation. As in there's MORE symbols than numbers... Ugh... What were they thinking! It's obvious they expect you to buy extra sets for doing numbers larger than one digit... But why so many duplicate symbols int he process! It's a waste! They should have had a symbol set, and number set with duplicate numbers. The letter set at least gives you two letters for the most common letters... To add insult to injury... No < or > symbols at all... I so wanted ">9000" (or at least ">9999") for my high altitude reading! I suppose I could buy the alpha set, and turn the "v" sideways. So long as they don't bleed my wallet completely dry, I should be able to get a set of futura stamps. Wish I needed them for more than a SINGLE project... Truth be told... I need a MINIMUM of three number sets and one letter set... and that's if I cheat and do my proposed top meter reading as ">9999" by flipping a "6" upside-down and using the "v" sideways. I could skip the letter set altogether and use numbers only if I switch that to "+9999" (there is a "+" symbol). If I stop it at "+9000" or "+9900", then I'm down to needing only 3 number sets. Numbers like "1000", "2000", etc force me to buy 3 sets, no mater what, as I absolutely need three "0"s. Even buying 3 sets, I pay nearly as much in shipping as I am on the sets! It's hard sell, just to go with futura over whatever that font style on your average office number stamper is. The thing about that, I I can spend $10 on the basic office number stamper, or spend 5x that for the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM to do the numbers in futura. Up to 8x to have some variety, text, and make the stamping go easier... That's a REALLY tough sell...

Nonsense! Jeb says add moar table! No room? Walls were meant to be ripped out! (or flown through in a rocket) Seriously though... AMAZING setup!

So... Asking around, a lot of the local sign/printing shops are unsure of how they'd go about actually printing new tapes with their particular setups. Some aren't set up for small narrow stuff... None have an idea how to to the sprocket wheel perforations. I think I have a simple solution though: Flip it! So, the tape has two sides, and one side is blank. I'll flip it and stamp it with a rubber stamp! I'll ask the shops what ink would recommend would work best for me (in terms of durability, bond, and flexibility). Once I know what I need, I'll order some white (and maybe some red ink too). I'll also need a stamp to do the numbers. Those are pretty cheap. Sadly, I am unable to find rubber stamps small enough in futura... I found one, but their "small" stamp claims to be 50x80 mm!!! YIKES! Even if that's a misprint, and they meant 5x8 mm, that's still a bit big. A standard 1/8 inch / 3mm number stamp is small enough to fit a 4 digit number in the printable area. Really bummed I can't find a stamp with the futura font that small. Oh well. It'll still be quite impressive! As for how I would intend to actually do the stamping? Well, I'm thinking of building a jig to do it. I can set it up so I can step the tape one increment at a time. I'll have the tape exposed (I'll have to remove the sprocket wheel from the housing, so I can openly access the tape) and have the tape pass over a solid surface. Attached to the solid surface, will be a guide arm with the stamp attached. The idea will be that I can increment the tape position one step at a time, and then ink the stamp and swing it into the tape. The number should always remain aligned and evenly spaced. I'll be able to support 72 positions using the stock switch un-modded, and 144 positions modded, presuming the rotary switches, with the detents removed, will rotate smoothly enough for a stepper or DC gear motor to actuate. I might also consider other sense options. The original switch IS rather bulky.

You got room for three more screens on the right side!

Back in 1993, I got my first Mac. Went online for the first time... Went offline when we saw what it cost back then... Anyway, I had a stack of floppy discs, and each had different things. I used to label mine Rich Write, Rich Stuff, Rich Pics, Rich Files... Well, I was a big X-Files fan from the start of the series, and I sorta kinda sketched an "R" on a folder, similar to the "X" from X-Files is done... In 1996, I learned HTML in high school, and set up a rudimentary webpage... and this was the logo I created, in MacPaint. Site best viewed at glorious 640x480 back then! At some point, likely the first time I used it as a username, I truncated it by removing the space and set it all to lowercase. The name has stuck ever since!

I know I sound like a broken record, but man, this deserves to be stock!