@ancientjames@mastodon.social
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ancientjames

@ancientjames@mastodon.social

In New Zealand, making things.

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ancientjames, to random
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ancientjames,
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A Young Person didn't recognise what game this was, so after I'd finished crumbling to dust I made a video showing the original view synchronised with the volumetric version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V53ICnJzi94

ancientjames, to random
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Fiddling around with Doom in 3D, and struck by how well the Doom engine maps to cylindrical scanning - column-based and only horizontal and vertical planes (almost-horizontal planes stairstep quite badly).
I'm rendering to a voxel buffer then scanning out from that, but I think I could avoid some aliasing by rendering straight to the panels on the fly.

ancientjames,
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I also need to settle on a scale.

gparker, to random
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My view of the solar eclipse was photobombed by a satellite transit.

© Brant Smith. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

video/mp4

ancientjames,
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@gparker @joat It would have to be huge - 50m diameter at 160km? Could it be a balloon?

ancientjames, to random
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Spaceship

ancientjames,
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Large blocks of voxels are difficult to interpret visually on this display - simple sharp shapes, particularly wire frames, work well.
But the result is scruffier than the hardware is capable of. There's aliasing when I rasterise the lines to the voxel grid, and further aliasing when the display sweeps through the grid.
I wonder about switching to polar coordinates, but the voxel grid is a big part of what makes it fun to program for. (Poke a byte in a 3D array and there it is in 3D space!)

ancientjames,
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@gray17 @ancientjames this is for my volumetric display - concentric cylinders of lights are a feature of the design.

ancientjames, to random
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An increasing number of websites seem to be popping up boxes telling me I can't proceed until I disable my ad blocker, even though I don't use an ad blocker.

ancientjames,
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@csilverman no vpn, and across different browsers.
My approach tends to be more along the lines of "didn't want to look at your stupid website anyway" and flouncing out.

ancientjames,
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@bobulous I'm wondering if it's a library that has rolled some other privacy settings in to its test (notifications? location?)

ancientjames, to random
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I needed some hydrogen peroxide, so I ordered some online from a place that seems really into hydrogen peroxide as a lifestyle choice. It came accompanied by a leaflet which uses the term "nature's own magic water".
I've decided to find it charming.

ancientjames, to random
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Someone building their own voxel display got in touch asking for the BOM and I thought that might be of interest generally, so here's a list of the components I used in mine.

It's a collection of things I had or could easily get in New Zealand, rather than necessarily the best part for the job. If I made another, I would change some of it (lazy susan bearing, finer pitch LED modules, shorter motor) but this configuration has at least been shown to work.

ancientjames, to random
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You never see the film crew reflected in a car door or shop window any more. Another of life’s simple pleasures taken from us by computers.

ancientjames, to random
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If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 300rpm you're going to see some serious shit.

A prism of led matrixes (matrices?) displaying noise and rotating faster than seems safe.

ancientjames,
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In the continuing quest for higher rpm, I've moved the controller down below the screen and across the axis of rotation. It's a lot harder to get at if I need to rewire anything, but it does improve the balance.

ancientjames,
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It feels as though I'm endlessly rebuilding it, for diminishing improvements. But in the most recent rebuild I finally solved a mystery that has been bugging me. When the display had been running for a while, it would quite abruptly lose balance and start vibrating. After the last occurrence, it was never quite the same. On stripping it down I found this.

ancientjames,
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That's the mount for the slip ring. A cylinder carrying a couple of copper bands fits over the pillar, and an M4 bolt goes own the middle to hold it all together. It has very clearly become bent, and without any signs of cracking. Presumably, as it spins, it heats up enough to soften the PLA, and the spring loaded brushes push it out of alignment.

I've reprinted it in ABS; going to see how well that lasts.

ancientjames,
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Pi 4 model A

ancientjames,
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I continue to fail to shoot footage of it that does it justice.

A video of the voxel display, with a wireframe model of the Dream Chaser space plane floating inside. There's a circular base of black fins supporting a 400mm smoked perspex globe. The background is a distracting mess of tools and horrible lighting. The camera tracks up and around to show the effect from different angles.

ancientjames,
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This feels like a good match of style and content.

The voxel display from this whole thread, displaying a primary coloured low res floating wireframe of the Voyager probe, as you imagine it would have looked on a futuristic NASA display in the 1970s.

ancientjames,
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I’m now suspicious of all the PLA parts. The little pit with the Pi in it is getting very warm.

ancientjames,
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kind of feels like it needs monsters?

A walkthrough of the first level of Doom, rendered in a cramped little bubble on a volumetric display. No mobs, no sprites, no collision.

ancientjames,
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Monsters.
https://youtu.be/yIfgjr-B8xI

ancientjames,
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I do like an ample window and natural light, but it makes it hard to see the leds. Hence this pirate astronaut.

ancientjames,
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Doom running at a larger scale. Easier to make out what's going on, harder to see what's shooting at you.
https://youtu.be/bRe1OSkeiQg

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