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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  2mo ago (text post)   489 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for October 1, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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I am working on a membrane testing system for blood contact. Basically when blood makes contact starts to foul the surface and may start to coagulate. This is something I don't want. So we need a fast way of optimising surface coatings/membranes that prevent this from happening. All current systems are kinda shit and not meant for this purpose. We have animal experiments but these are costly and time consuming and not well controlled.

So I have currently a small fluidic loop that contains all the blood needed for the experiment, a peristaltic pump and a syringe pump. The peristaltic pump moves the blood around at the right rate so it doesn't aggregate or get damaged by excessive shear forces. The syringe pump keeps the system pressurised at a certain level. This is the neat part because then you don't need small diameter resistive tubing to do the pressure, which means blood gets less damaged.

I built the 3 syringe pumps from an old ender 3 printer. You should be able to control the pumps through the electronics of the ender but its super clunky. Especially if you want to interface with a pressure sensor and keep the pressure at a set point, via PID control. So I now bought an Uno and a CNC shield so I can do it low level via this. The syringe pump also means I can measure exactly how much flow is going through my membrane which is neat. But lets see if the interface works out, especially on the talking with the pressure sensor. Because the sensor is connected to a different arduino, so I think the simplest way is to send signals from my computer to the Uno based on this. But the nicest would probably be to integrate the control and the sensing together. But I think that would take a bit too long.

No movement on the passive cooling vest. I'll get access to my beloved workshop again next week, maybe that'll restore some enthusiasm? It would at least remove a step, by removing analysis paralysis about DIYing a vacuformer.

DIYing a vacuformer.

Uh... yeah, that seems like a handful.

I'll get access to my beloved workshop again next week,

Is that a part of your house, or some rented space / open workshop?

Uh... yeah, that seems like a handful.

It's easier than you'd think, it's just really annoying to make a big one. If you're doing small stuff (ie less than 1ftx1ft) you can just throw a bit of pegboard over a sealed (most tutorials will say glue or caulk, but camper mounting tape is amazing effective) wooden box with a hole in the side for a shop vac to plug in, and then just some aluminum angle iron into two squares for the buck. Find a used toaster oven, mark it not-for-food, and the hard part is finding decent PETG without having to ship it all in.

Scale up and you either end up drilling a ton of holes by hand or by CNC machine or buying some (often expensive) specialty boards, you need some sort of guide so the buck doesn't misalign, and it starts making more sense to build an 'oven' for uniform heating and that is miserable.

A work perk, actually. It's pretty badass and has toys I could never dream of affording, like a Tormach CNC mill with all the trimmings and a 3d printer farm, as well as the vacuformer I was making progress with. I was too casual with leaving some non-compliant tools around, so copped a month ban and a requirement to retake the safety training.

@Southkraut, how's your project doing?

It seems I may have been a tad too optimistic about Godot, though I suppose I'm still not wrong about it's license.

do the bannings interfere with actually using the engine, or is this mainly a social media thing?

It's entirely a social media thing, but also includes all the official channels for talking about the engine - discord, forums, github etc.

I saw reports of bannings on Github as well ... which is kind of a grey area? AFAIK a blocked user can still download your code, but they can't interact with you there in just about any other way. So if you're happy using the engine as-is or with forking it, then yay Open Source Software, but if you have a bug report or a feature request or a patch then it's time to get happy with forking it (or hope someone else's fork takes off).

There's already been issues in the hyprland/wayland space, where banning one of the more significant devs in the former space has lead to some clusterfucks reporting issues upstream.

fuuuuuuuck.

@Southkraut, how's your project doing?

Not at all. First the wife got the flu -> pneumonia, then I caught the same bug off of her. Well, at least I didn't need antibiotics. Anyways, no progress whatsoever, my brain was snot.

It seems I may have been a tad too optimistic about Godot, though I suppose I'm still not wrong about it's license.

Huh. RIP. The article states that an official statement from the Godot Board is to be published on monday, so I suppose I'll be looking forward to that. Honestly, you're still technically correct, but this kind of stuff just takes the joy out of it for me. Thin skin I suppose. Previously at least I could tell myself it's just their Discord moderation.

So damn it all, no idea what I'm going to do. Wait for monday I guess.

Previously at least I could tell myself it's just their Discord moderation.

Remember, if your opinion includes the phrase "it's just ...", it's cope. Admitting this has helped me both to predict future changes, as well as deal better with them. Also - I hope - it will help to resist them appropriately instead of first denying them and then falling over when it's too late. We have a younger PhD candidate in our group that has trouble working together with social scientists on a project who shit on everything she does up to and including calling it some -ism and that it shouldn't be done, and past me might have told her to be nice and considerate since it's just some other PhD candidates, but imo the correct way is to be polite but stern, get the backing of our Prof since these PhDs also actually have the implicit backing of their Profs if you read between the lines, and to throw everything back at them.

Of course it was cope! It was a strategic cope that helped me utilize the software without associating it with the people who make it. It was a useful cope. Now the cope is kaputt.

@ArjinFerman is right though; according to the Godot license it's still viable to completely disassociate the one from the other and use the software with a complete disregard for politics. Probably still better than Unity's "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.". But man is it annoying.

I thoroughly miss the days when I just used Unity and didn't even think about the drama.

Wait for monday I guess.

Oh, that must have been yesterday! I wasn't paying much attention to the news this week, and am now catching up. Here's an update, which is... better than a full-throated endorsement of what happened, I suppose, but not really an honest response, IMO.

Honestly, you're still technically correct, but this kind of stuff just takes the joy out of it for me.

I know how you feel, this sort of stuff used to bum me out too. At this point I just wish I had the time / discipline to make some edgelord game and cover it with "Built with Godot" splash screens.

Okay, thinking time.

  • Unity is retarded.
  • Godot is gay.
  • Unreal is morbidly obese.
  • Making my own engine is manic pixie dream stuff.

This is why we can't have nice things!

Stride? I played around with it back when it was Paradox and didn't like the scene-editor-centric approach (I was coming from XNA), but I guess it's de rigeur for 3D engines these days.

Stride

Just checked it out, and the only game made with Stride that I know of is Distant Worlds 2, which is a complete mess. Ambitious, but just about the worst example to demonstrate technical capabilities.

scene-editor-centric approach

Are there any that don't do this? I can live with it either way, but don't really need it.

Edit: The more I look at Stride, the more I like what I see. You may have been on to something.

Those that don't are mostly aimed at hobbyists that like working on games, not making games and/or are 2D-only (usually for the same reason).

I suppose there's "wait until Friday and hope the Godot minus wokeness thing pans out".

Oof. That'll take a lot of hoping. Still, I'll keep an eye on it.

HighSpace

Much like predicted at the beginning of September, this was a pretty slow month so far, I didn't even post in the last week's, but I managed to get some work in. Everything still revolves around the reinforcement mechanics. Calling in reinforcements actually removes them from the list, and I started working on ETA / availability depending on the distance. But as I was working on these and ironing out some bugs, I figured I'll have to take a detour. Since I'm getting into pretty specific features (reinforcements only being available in mission, when another ship is within a given distance, for example), it would be handy to save / restore the game state, and jump right into where I left off during the last test. So the goal for the coming week will be:

  • Saving / loading the System Map game state.

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