GRG's Miscellany

I am loving Shenzen IO at the moment.  I am also incredibly annoyed with Shenzen IO at the moment. It makes me feel like a real electronics engineer in the same way that Guitar Hero makes me feel like I'm a real guitarist.  It's almost certainly nothing like the real thing, and yet... It is SO COMPELLING.  I just want to tweak that circuit, or have a stab at the next puzzle, but each puzzle takes me AGES.  I have never been one to stick at puzzle games before, but the rigid logic of it makes it certain that failure is my fault, not the game author's.  Somehow this makes failure stir even more determination in me and it's near impossible to break away!

Today I got my lazy backside away from the computer and made something REAL with REAL materials and REAL tools. I also cut my finger doing it. :( But here is the result of my ham-fisted work!  Behold: a throttle control! I've been thinking about making my own HOTAS setup for literally years - ever since I managed to make a USB steering wheel out of cardboard and prayers. The thing is, I have a Saitek X52 already, but the joystick is just too sticky and jumpy to properly control the UH-1 in DCS World .  So I want to make one which has a wider range of movement and higher sensitivity (thus making it much more precise).  Hopefully my dumb ass might then stand some chance at controlling that damn chopper. Over the years, I've thought up various infeasible ways of magnifying the movement of the joystick, making the potentiometer move through a larger angle.  I even tried to fabricate my own cogs using wooden discs and timing belts (which would probably have...

So I managed to get the edge rotation on a single grid cell to work: And because it wraps all the edge rotations across the grid boundary, it tessellates perfectly! Woop woop!   (...but sorry for the rather large gifs) There is still an issue with the relaxation system 'flipping' triangles over sometimes (one point getting pushed across the opposite edge), but for now I'm going to bask in my success and think about how best to incorporate the ridge-elevation model into this...

I am still in my long, drawn-out pursuit of a semi-procedural terrain system. My most recent experiments have involved trying to produce a single block of triangles which tessellate.  In this way, I can re-use the triangulation with different elevations for each point (similar to the island terrains I did previously, but INFINITE). I should be able to produce a regular, tessellating block of equilateral triangles, and then apply the edge-rotation and relaxation system.  The beauty of the wrapping would be that one edge of the graph would pull outwards on the opposite edge, keeping everything from collapsing inwards. What I have discovered over the hours I've invested so far is: building a data model for a wrapping triangle graph is chuffing maddening.  I have twisted my brain into so many knots it hurts. I've tried making the edges take account of the wrapping, then the points themselves, then the triangles.  The closest I've got is having a two-layer point s...