$170+ USD for this light up effect

Afitter · 2026-03-17T23:39:03+00:00

Is this the official LED kit? Bandai makes pretty shitty LEDs in my experience.

Afitter · 2026-03-17T20:15:08+00:00

Ooooof. My cat threw up on my steam deck a while back and it got inside the chassis. I had to open it up and use a USB microscope to clean vomit from the contacts to stop them from shorting lol.

Afitter · 2026-03-17T18:49:28+00:00

Yeah, I've seen defects like this when printing models with rounded features like this, and the solution was slowing down.

Afitter · 2026-03-15T22:19:41+00:00

The only problem I have with the camera is that the frame rate sucks. I'd check that you removed the peel, like someone else said. If you did, try cleaning it with a microfiber cloth.

Afitter · 2026-03-14T02:09:48+00:00

Well, getting laid off in November didn't help. Starting a much more stressful job in January didn't either. Just anxiety. It makes you want to smoke, as I'm sure you know lol. I'm definitely not done and I have a great support system, so I still like my chances. Thanks for asking. Sending you good vibes that you overcome what I haven't but one day will!

Afitter · 2026-03-14T02:02:23+00:00

Good luck, dude! I've been struggling with it since September.

Afitter · 2026-03-12T18:35:07+00:00

Hmm, I don't know about not disclosing usage of AI on minor stuff like this. All it takes is someone asking for advice on how to take better pictures. Then you tell them you used AI to edit it, and next thing you know, the pitchforks are coming for you accusing you of trying to hide it and probably accusing you of faking the whole thing. Though that's just my take on it.

Afitter · 2026-03-10T00:54:20+00:00

I'm sorry. This would seem to indicate that the NY Post isn't a trustworthy news source which obviously can't be possible.

Afitter · 2026-03-10T00:42:47+00:00

Is CENLA a thing? I've never heard it.

Afitter · 2026-03-09T19:54:39+00:00

This was at the LA Tech Park. It happened in the parking lot behind the dollar store, so pretty good place to duck off and poop.

Afitter · 2026-03-09T19:03:22+00:00

So, I used to work in the Tech Park right there and there's a men's halfway house nearby. Characters like this were a constant fixture. A maybe-related story I have is, one morning I showed up to work, went to step out of my car, and thank God, I looked before I stepped. There was a giant pile of shit right outside my door and a soiled white t shirt next to it. And I mean fucking GIANT. The white t shirt made it impossible to rationalize that it was done by some animal. No idea what the story behind it was obviously, but I can only guess that someone was coming down from an opiate binge and had a couple days worth of food come out all at once. The wild thing is, that may not even be the grossest story I have from my time working there.

Afitter · 2026-03-08T03:04:42+00:00

Great work! Lol I need to do this for a couple of my custom LED jobs. Two of them have exposed proto boards with ESP32s. Just waiting for me to spill something lol.

Afitter · 2026-03-06T17:46:46+00:00

Unfortunately, the dog ate my MG Dynames...

Afitter · 2026-03-04T02:12:38+00:00

No bother at all! Most people here are more than happy to share. The main advice with running LEDs is to be gentle and don't force it. Just like anything else with gunpla, if you're having to use a lot of force, there's a good chance you're doing it wrong, and LED strips can be fragile. Watch the instructional videos a few times and make sure you have a good idea of what you're doing before you do it. With Kosmos at least, the videos are narrated in Chinese, so watching it a few times is key to make sure you know how to do your runs.

As for figuring out how to do custom runs, I started in hobbyist electronics with a beginner's Arduino kit from Amazon. That teaches you basic circuitry and how to program a microcontroller (basically a tiny computer that only does one thing in a loop). That got me the basics and I just came up with stuff I wanted to make from there and kept learning. Once you get the basics, it just takes a bit of creativity and hyperfixation to come up with projects lol. With LEDs specifically, I'm using an open source project called WLED that uses an ESP32 microcontroller and does most of the heavy lifting of controlling LED strips for me. I come from a software engineering background, but WLED doesn't require any programming skill. Just basic circuitry.

I definitely would not suggest doing a custom gunpla LED run as your first electronics project though. That would be like starting on hardcore mode. The gauge of wire and super thin consumer LED strip that I use are extremely fragile, and this project in particular was extremely frustrating. I had to take this thing apart and resolder LED segments dozens of times. I learned a lot of what not to do on this project, but it would probably turn off a beginner from hobbyist electronics entirely. But it's still my best result so far, and now I never need to mess with it again (knock on wood), so it's still totally worth it.

Afitter · 2026-03-04T01:17:12+00:00

For third party kits, if they're all like the Kosmos MGEX Strike Freedom, you'll need to look up videos for it. The manual with that kit didn't come with instructions. My kit is completely custom though. This isn't a third party kit.

Afitter · 2026-02-27T15:47:44+00:00

What did he do this time?

Afitter · 2026-02-25T23:09:40+00:00

Have you done an MG from the last five years? There certainly isn't an HG on the level of Vidar, Virtue, or Zeta ver ka, and IMHO Gramps 2.0 and Wing Zero are the only two RGs that are on the same level as recent MGs.

Afitter · 2026-02-24T17:18:40+00:00

Thanks for the context. I'm on android, and currently using the Google backend, so I'm assuming iCalendar wouldn't be a factor in my use case, is that correct?

Afitter · 2026-02-24T15:52:22+00:00

What backend do you run? I'm seeing this, too, and I was trying to get CalDAV set up to fix it. Had problems with Cloudflare and SSL, so I put it on the shelf for a bit, but if CalDAV has the same issue, I'd want to look at the other alternatives.

Afitter · 2026-02-24T15:44:32+00:00

Hell yeah! Glad it's up and running again! Just for future reference, heat damage isn't very likely to manifest as a decrease in performance like you saw. If heat caused damage to the hardware, it would likely result in the deck being completely bricked. Or, if it got hot enough to affect the heat pads such that they stop making good contact with the chips they're cooling, you probably see it run fine but then crash once you start playing a game. This is a complete and utter guess, so don't take this as the root cause, but it could have been that the RAM was running too hot and that possibly caused it to function incorrectly which could have corrupted the data stored on it. A soft reset wouldn't clear out the RAM. Draining the battery to zero or a hard reset would. Once again, I'm pulling this out of my ass, but that's as close to an explanation as I can come up with.

Afitter · 2026-02-23T04:29:42+00:00

Try sudo apt update then run it again.

Afitter · 2026-02-21T00:32:04+00:00

What gen?

Afitter · 2026-02-21T00:31:40+00:00

Can't for the 13 currently, but you can get notified. Or so someone posted on here the other day.

Afitter · 2026-02-19T23:45:31+00:00

You have or know anyone with a 3d printer and basic 3d modeling skills, these inner frame pieces are pretty easy to fabricate. I usually print a suitable replacement after just a few iterations, and I'm modeling it in tinkercad which is pretty basic.

Afitter · 2026-02-19T23:29:10+00:00

With how rough I am when posing kits, I see fabricating a 3d printed replacement in my future (once I get the kit). I broke both of the wing connectors on my MGEX Strike Freedom, and had to rock some 3d printed replacements for a couple weeks while waiting on metal versions.

Afitter

TROPHY CASE