Now, this is a project I’ve had in the works for quite some time… It started out simply as a clever way to read Twitch chat whilst doing my professional imaginary spaceship pilot gig, without taking my eyes off what I’m doing, but I believe it has a lot more potential. Read more…
First of all, let’s take a moment to talk about prop making; It’s something that I have a real interest in but I can never seem to afford moldmaking and casting supplies… Well, I’m not going to let that stop me from making some props before I have the ability to duplicate them.
Right now, my biggest obstacle– putting aside money issues and for the moment just looking at what I have –is the surface quality of my 3D prints. To that end I spent some money on some basic necessities like Bondo body filler, Bondo spot putty, some quality automotive wet/dry sandpaper, and a sanding block. Bill Doran has a great video on using Bondo, and his video on preparing mold masters also contains some applicable info.
Propaganda! By which I mean videoblogging! I just got a cheap little steadicam thing for my video camera so I can do handheld shots that are actually stable. It’s really quite something.
Programming! I’ve got some cool Arduino ideas I want to play with, one of them is inspired by this cool post I found about making an Arduino Wi-Fi scanner that displays the SSIDs of open wifi APs on a little OLED display.
Projects! I’ve got a 3D printing and prop making project in the works based on my current favorite videogame; Tom Clancy’s The Division, which inspired an additional project which I can’t talk about right now… ;D
Gonna be pretty cool though!
So, for my birthday, and to keep from losing my mind while waiting for my 3D printer to arrive, I bought Elite: Dangerous. Even with my Saitek X36 HOTAS it quickly became clear that there was an element of immersion drastically lacking. The game was developed with the Oculus Rift, and later the Vive, in mind, but that’s a little out of my reach at the moment…surely there’s an intermediate step, I thought. Head tracking!
A couple years ago I bought a bunch of cheap Chinese digital calipers with the notion of using them to build my own DRO (Digital Readout) for a mill or lathe, or getting one from ShumaTech which now seems quite defunct. A couple weeks ago I stumbled upon a newer project using an Android device as a DRO, with a simple Arduino hardware interface to some magnetic scales. The developer has since added support for the Texas Instruments MSP430 Launchpad board, and is in the process of adding support for the cheap Chinese scales and calipers. I’ll do a full write-up when I build the system. (I’ll be installing it on the lathe, since the mill will be converted to CNC in the near future.)
He was supposed to release an updated version of the firmware that supports the Chinese calipers the weekend this was originally posted, but it’s been two weeks now, and nothing. So I think I’m going to have to get back to writing my firmware now that I have my sample voltage shifter chips from TI.