Weekend project! Making a little gameport <-> adapter, using the https://github.com/necroware/gameport-adapter firmware and PCB design, and adding a bunch of voltage-dividers to drop the 5V down to the KB2040’s 3.3V logic level (read: adding a lot of 100K and 51K resistors).
This is my second ‘real’ breadboard project. The first one was a dog’s breakfast of soldered-down ‘rails’ and components. This time I instead a) used a breadboard with rails on it, b) marked it all out in sharpie first.
Still to do: chopping the board down a little and drilling mounting holes, connecting the gameport IDC wires to the resistor leggies sticking out, printing an enclosure, and porting the firmware. That can wait for next weekend. :)
(After trying to make FreeCAD vaguely readable, I now understand why the default background uses a gradient: so you can shift the unreadable UI element around to put it against a more contrasting background bit SO YOU CAN FUCKING READ IT.)
Further explainers on the MiniBrute replacement cheeks I posted pictures of earlier:
I used a plane to do the sloping nose bit (shaded in pencil, pic 1), then coarse sandpaper on a sanding block at an angle to get a flat surface to use the plane again to make the big 45° chamfer (shaded in pencil, pic 2+3) on that now-smaller nose.
I chiseled out the inset rabbet (??? the step the bottom metal panel fits in) first by scoring with a knife (to reduce tear-out), the using a mallet + chisel to take half of the amount out, then half again, then rotating the piece 90° to come at it from the side, then using the (resharpened) chisel directly to clean up the edges, rotating it a couple more times. I’m very new at this kind of thing, and I’m not happy with my edges, but it’s good enough for now.
Oh! I fucked something up while chiseling. I went too far, and took a chunk out between the front of the piece and the inset cut-out. PVA + clamping sorted it out.
(Then I did it again. Oops. Oh well, I don’t think it’s visible.)
@aphistic it was the opposite for me! sustained/constant excruciating pain for tattoo, but I can almost sleep through the second half of electrolysis where I can lay on my side and disassociate+doze
@buzzyrobin Oh, wow! At some point during my tattoo sessions it almost just feels like a little electricity that I can tune out (unless she starts going over a raw spot again), but the electrolysis is just a constant tiny hot poker over and over and over.
Phantom power is just DC bias. You know how audio is just kinda tiny-AC, little voltage wobbling around a ‘zero’ value? What if you simply had it wobble around, like, +40V instead, and used that bias / offset / extra power for other stuff that’s using the same wires as the microphone signal or whatever?
I also love the 1-wire protocol. you connect a single line and ground on a device. you can now communicate with it bidirectionally. no DC bias, either - it works directly from a single GPIO.
the way it works is basically just a teeeeeny capacitor inside the device acting like an internal UPS, and the protocol is designed to always have enough +v pulses to keep it charged enough to operate. super clever.
@gsuberland@buzzyrobin I’m convinced 1-wire was invented by someone who successfully talked to some i2c sensor and wrote half a driver library before realising they’d never connected VCC and GND. It probably wasn’t, but I’ve had so many prototype boards where parasitic power has made things appear to work 🤣
Through some accident(? intention? I really don't know), the lily58 keyboard PCB my one is based off has four neat holes inside the footprint of the through-hole TRRS jack that perfectly suit a 4-pin Mini-DIN socket's through-hole pins.