GRG's Miscellany

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 reliably use extern

This post follows on from a previous post about my recent attempts to implement the Wave-Function Collapse algorithm in Godot's GDScript to generate tile map levels. I'm only just posting it now because I didn't realise I'd left it as a 'draft'.  Woe is me. As I mentioned in the previous post, this isn't meant as a set of instructions - more as a reminder for my future self so I don't fall into the same traps again.  That said, hopefully someone else finds it useful as well. Dealing with contradictions When you are trying to generate a grid of tiles using Wave Function Collapse, each cell in the grid can be the top-left corner of one (and only one) super-tile.  As soon as you choose a super-tile for one grid cell, it limits which super-tiles the nearby cells can be.  This is implemented as adjacency rules: essentially there is a set of tiles which is allowed to be to the right of (or left of, or above or below) the chosen super-tile. A contradiction oc