site banner

Tinker Tuesday for January 14, 2025

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

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Still no luck finding tinkering time. How are you doing @Southkraut?

Minimally better. I did more-or-less finish up on the tutorial series I had followed. I'll admit I skipped some parts at the end because I felt I had gotten all out of it that I wanted for now. After that I experimented a little with various basic player interactions, but ended up making a bunch of mistakes in the C++ and Blueprints integration and had to scrap it again. No big deal; something to learn from.

Then I had a whole day, free and to myself. I told myself I'd use most of it for tinkering, witch just a bare minimum of other activities. So I tidied up the apartment, rearranged furniture, cleaned the kitchen, went for a long walk and visited the cemetary, and by the time I was done with all that the sun had set and I was pretty much ready to turn in.

I did do a little more writing, but it's mostly gibberish. Fun to write, not fun to read.

And I formulated a plan to get a little distance from my usual proc-gen madness and instead make a bit of a visual prototype. A mock-up, if you will, to later work towards via proc-gen again. It'll help me familiarise myself with Unreal's feature, and having some visible results is always motivating, in my experience, even if they don't do a lot.

Update on the arcade cabinet from last week. The drawer has been fabricated and installed. It could be a tiny bit better, but it's Good Enough that only I really know the issue. It's maybe 2mm or so out of square... it's not the end of the world and it functions the way it should.

Next up will be all of the wiring. So many wires for all of the controls and buttons. I'm really hoping that I can get all that done by next week. It should be eminently doable. After that it's mainly going to be finishing the wood.

Did you plan the wiring in advance or are you going to do it on the fly?

I have a MiSTer FPGA with the Jammix card and a JAMMA (Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association) harness. So, in theory at least, it should be mostly plug and play. But there's a rats nest of wires so it's a bit intimidating.

It's a pretty standard two joystick and six buttons per side setup so there shouldn't be that much hardship. I do have to add a couple of wires myself since I'm going to wire it up using CHAMMA. (CHinese vs. Japanese -- The Chinese one support six buttons without an added harness)

The whole build was an adventure. I designed the basic outline of the cabinet and cut that. Basically everything else has been a matter of cut-to-fit after that. It's probably not the best way to do it, but it's fun and it's been a learning experience.

It's probably not the best way to do it, but it's fun and it's been a learning experience.

Story of my life. Sounds fun!

I think much of this is an effort to get out of a loop of analysis paralysis. I have a bad habit of overthinking things and not doing the things. A lot of this was (after getting frustrated of not doing things) just forcing myself to just take the next step. The worst likely outcome that may happen is I waste a pile of wood and time and trade that for experience.