SHENZHEN IO is eating my brain!

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Micro:Bit and SPI display

I want to explore the full potential of the BBC Micro:bits my school has. Making rock-paper-scissors games and the like is all well and good, and the students love it (for the most part), but it always feels a little bit gimmicky.  But when students really get engaged and suggest ideas for them (e.g. games, compass display), it all gets a little bit cramped and feels like it could  kinda  work, but not really . Then I found out that all the tiny strips on the edge are actually GPIO pins, not just the fat 0, 1 and 2 ones.  Since then, I've wanted to explore what I can do with it. Hence, over the last few days I have been trying to get the microbit to control a TFT display. I first went for this 2.4" display with a touchscreen.  The SPI interface is just for the microSD, not for the screen but I didn't think that would be a problem because the micro:bit has so many pins.  After much frustration, I discovered that there are many of the pins you can't reliabl...
Read more

DCS World with TrackIR under Ubuntu

This is a record of my experience of setting this up.  It's meant more as a record for my future self than a tutorial, but maybe somebody will find it useful. 1 - Install DCS First step, install DCS World via the Steam client as normal.  2 - Install LinuxTrack Linuxtrack Download here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Downloads   Instructions here: https://github.com/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/universal-Linuxtrack-package   Using the gui (ltr_gui) requires qt4 libraries, which I could not find in my standard Ubuntu repositories, so I had to use the ppa instructions here: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2020/07/install-qt4-ubuntu-20-04 Run ltr_gui from linuxtrack's bin directory to check everything works so far before moving on to get it running under Proton.  3 - Install LinuxTrack into the DCS World prefix NOTE: Attempting to install for Wine games WON'T WORK e.g. here https://github-wiki-see.page/m/uglyDwarf/linuxtrack/wiki/Wine-Games   Th...
Read more

Polygon Triangulator!!

For my 3D games, I've been playing around with ideas around semi-procedural geometry, by which I mean geometry which is generated from a small amount of authored data.  For example, I could draw out the shape of an island in a dozen or so 3D points, and the actual terrain geometry could be generated from that. A big step along the way to that is splitting up a non-convex polygon into triangles.  The triangles mustn't overlap, nor must they cover any space which the polygon itself doesn't cover.  For example, this diagram . Today, I managed to get a python program* running which took a list of 2D points defining a polygon, split it into sub-triangles and displayed them in a tkinter canvas**. I am certain this has been solved by clever people in much better ways, but I still feel proud to have figured this one out (and I haven't managed to break it yet!). The basic algorithm is: Create a temporary copy of the polygon points list start with the three points fro...
Read more