GRG's Miscellany

  Last Month's Projects Physical make: This is not finished, but is going okay.  I decided to make some gears so 90 degree of wheel turn is about 150 degree of potentiometer turn.   I encountered a problem trying to 3D print the gears: the weather and workshop was so cold the filament snapped as soon as the printer head moved! So I had to wait for some slightly warmer weather for the printer.  A silicone mould is currently setting around them so I can cast them in more durable resin. Coding make: DOS Raytraced Helicopter Game.  This has not happened.  I've started writing a proper X-mode VGA manager class, and thought carefully about how to do the pixel-plane rendering, but that's about it.  I'm going to switch to update my F-Z game and post it on gotm.io but I'll be back on the raytracing project once that's done. Reading: Black Holes, Wormholes and Time Machines by Jim Al-Khalili . This is a reasonably dated book (pre-Higgs Boson and Gravitat...

 January Projects Yeah, I know January started a while back now, but my brain is still catching up. Physical make: New USB steering wheel.  My previous one was made with a Teensyduino , which doesn't seem to behave in exactly the same way as vanilla Arduino Micro clones.  The wheel itself has lasted impressively well considering it's made out of cardboard with some really shoddy soldering.  Even more so considering it went through some of its life with pedals attached.  Unfortunately, it has now stopped behaving properly and re-figuring out how the Teensyduino thing works makes me feel tired.  So I'm building a new wooden-framed one, with real bearings and everything! Coding make: As you might have seen, I have started to try my hand at raycasting in C++.  I am going to try and get a playable DOS helicopter game made for the Kajam event .  I'd like it to include shooty missions and transport missions.  Maybe in the fullness of time it'll e...