Wraithan @wraithan@mastodon.art

Oh, cool! Mastodon.art is healthy again. Tonight (in ~8h), when I'm not playing video games to unwind after work, I'm going to try to model a kinesis advantage keyboard in FreeCAD. I'm using the keys and part of the case of a dead one as part of my homebrew laptop.

Goal is to post progress pics every 15-30 minutes. Fair warning I've spent a grand total of 4h using FreeCAD so this ain't gunna be pretty, just gunna do some learning in public.

Bummer, https://www.jameco.com/ has been down for a few days, originally just 500s, then "scheduled maintenance", now "network outage and completely down".

I love their service, being able to order chips and other parts and have USPS get them to me in 2-3 days from order time is SO MUCH better than I can get from any bigger part company. Really hope they bounce back from this and I can still use them as my main source when building 8bit computers.

Y'know what makes it hard to have energy for art or my 8bit projects after work? Work days with 4h+ of video calls.

That said outside of capitalism, I'm currently learning FreeCAD for 8bit computer stuff, so look forward to seeing a bunch of pictures of amateur part model of exciting stuff like card edge connectors, and other bits like that. Building up to designing my own 6502 based laptop in the next year or two.

If I'm doing capitalism, I have an obligation to stick to what I was I assigned or said I'd work on. Taking some time to build some tools has to be carefully weighed against other priorities, how it'll be received by the org, if I can even use a language that would make it worth doing the development, etc.

At home, I now have a codebase with 1 mdbook, 2 C++ AVR projects in it, 2 Rust projects, and a folder of oldstyle 6502 assembly for this project.

Yesterday, I finally got a shipment of parts that include things like a 6522 VIA (Versatile Interface Adapter) which will give me the input/output pins I'll need to interface with my 8-bit delight.

But I want a nicer interface for working on my 6502 machine before I write the subroutines that'll test/debug my 8-bit delight.

Basically I'm 4-5 meta projects deep on in this and I'm having a blast, even on the bothersome parts, having the space to stretch like this feels soooooooo good.

My 8-bit delight build book I was working on is still up to date if you only consider the 8-bit CPU I was building, but in the last two weeks I've also built a 6502 computer that I'm going to be using to replace the Teensy I'm using to debug my 8-bit machine.

As noted in a previous toot, I'm still using a Teensy to debug my 6502 machine, and it's an 8-bit Teensy++ 2.0, so everything is still 8bit on the board.

Teensy debugs 6502 debugs 8-bit delight. No way this project has gone off the rails.

Working on turning a Teensy I have hooked up to a 6502 computer I've put together into a proper debugger interface with breakpoints and memory watchers and such, as well as a better way to flash the 6502 computer's EEPROM than I currently have.

Spent last night tokenizing some strings in C++ on AVR over the serial connection. Made a ring buffer, read/write pointers, etc. Remembering why I haven't implemented raw parsing stuff like this in a decade and just use off the shelf code in most cases.

Did some writing in my 8-bit build documentation book after work, filled in some info on the clock, the qa module, and some references I'm using.

https://wraithan.gitlab.io/8-bit-delight/

I've been working on the Ben Eater 8-bit computer, with plans on extending it and having various bits of fun. I had taken a break for a few months and forgot how it works, so I decided to write up build documentation for myself in the form of a book. So far "Preface" and "1. The Build" are the only sections with content.

https://wraithan.gitlab.io/8-bit-delight/index.html

Logged in to post some stuff after a long while and it seems the allowed media sizes have changed? Anyone know where I can find out the limit without just rendering my art over and over at different sizes and testing? It seems the server will happily tell me 1024x1024 is not allowed, but not tell me what *is* allowed.

Ok, got the head attached to both ends, some awkward angles/faces still but it's got the shape I want

Making a wrench for a friend's risk of rain 2 mod. WIP but happy enough with the head for now to start working on the rest

This is a low poly tree I made when I gave myself a hard 30 minute limit:

#blender #3d #newbie

I've started learning Blender, I made a simple little space ship. This was a couple hours of modelling.

#blender #3d #scifi #newbie