Recent content by ThreeFN

Thank you sir. It's not completely dead yet (cue Monty Python) but it's requiring some serious morphing in order to keep up with the times. I think I'm reaching an inflection point with hardware availability. Raspberry Pi 2, Intel Compute Stick, and the inventions that are being spawned from...

Took a minute but I thought I knew that there were more specifics on the type of paint used. In the instructables tutorial, it mentions that black enamel was the paint used. Hope that helps.

I can't remember off the top of my head what Volpin used, but I'd read through his Thomas build and find out. I think he may have used liquid electrical tape. It's basically liquid rubber and sticks to a lot of stuff and is extremely opaque. It will probably hold well enough to the LED legs and...

My caution would be to try out whatever LEDs you wish to source. Generally I would recommend difuse for that 'pixel' look rather than a 'light emmiting cannon' that clear lens LEDs look like. Two small orders of LEDs to test with now will save you second guessing yourself later. If you have...

Most of the builds I've seen use fairly standard 5mm or 3mm round 'barrel' LEDs. Typically these are 5-10deg half angle LEDs (cone of say 95% of the light is in a cone of 5-10deg from the midline, 10-20deg overall) so they concentrate the most brightness looking forward. Diffusion will make...

Generally cracks should be treated like cracks in windshields. If you can, you should sand or drill out the damage until you get down below the crack to virgin, pristine material. Cracks propagate with any load on them at all (the sharp edges create stress risers) , but if you remove and patch...

Almost no progress unfortunately. I have to focus on 'me' right now, ie the new job mostly. I'm back in research mode, considering more and more that I'm going to move to embedded linux for the main processor. This implies a new language (or relearning C++ with a focus on object oriented coding).

Specifically, the square chin is often attributed to the TRON Legacy rendition of the helmets. My CAD predates that so does not include it and hasn't been 'grossly modified' in probably 2 years. And now I will segue into something related. So this brings up a long standing 'thing' for me...

I recommend You have a look at Paul's work here. It was featured on HackADay yesterday and that's the 'high speed library' I was referring to. He's using Direct Memory Access (DMA) for basically no processor load required to drive the display. I have yet to dig into it yet to see how I could...

Haven't decided yet. There are the obvious solutions: hang it on the wall, sell on ebay/etc, retask for some other project, so on and so forth. That would depend... Assuming density is constant during the shrinking: A) your skull would become so brittle it would crush under it's own...

So... bad news first. I cooked my test rig. Circuit popcorn. When power cycling the display (very common when messing around) I inadvertently set the power supply to a higher voltage range. High voltage to rainbows, very not good. So that leaves me with only the main display to work...

So, news. New news at that. Managed to get the Arduino DUE 'working'. Which is to say, everything you see in the 'threading' video is now working again on the DUE. Thank the creators of the Saleae Logic. I now love this little guy. I did manage to borrow my friends o'scope a couple...

I'm all for any of those! Or all of them.

Cheers. If only that very naggy voice in the back of my head would take the same hint. Or if it could overcome the voice that says "finish Dishonored"... Oh, it makes some progress pretty much all the time, just not in any way that is presentable. Invariably when I have nothing to do and...

Aye, 3D printing isn't cheap. Haven't run the numbers recently to see. Yep, it's probably also one of the slowest :behave I did buy that one. It's actually a sampler for a diffusion plastic, the kind used in car buttons and stuff (raw plastic that's can be injection molded and similar)...