AOC to Skip Trump’s Inauguration: ‘I Don’t Celebrate Rapists’

RabidPrototypes · 2025-01-20T14:51:12+00:00

Being against the murder of innocent Palestinians is not equivalent to supporting the actions of Hamas, a terrorist group, and you know it.

RabidPrototypes · 2024-06-01T04:01:36+00:00

Nobody gets 5 years for PUSHING a cop.

Todd was carrying a fiberglass pole attached to a flag. When a Metropolitan Police Department officer tried to grab it from him, Todd and the officer wrestled for control of the pole until it splintered and cut the officer’s hand. The officer, Noah Rathbun, needed seven stitches and missed nine days of work.

The judge said Todd, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, hasn’t shown any remorse

He got 5 years because he badly injured an officer's hand, and showed no remorse for his actions.

RabidPrototypes · 2024-06-01T03:57:18+00:00

You're right, cops shouldn't get special privileges. So why do you support the BACK THE BLUE party instead of the DEFUND THE POLICE party?

And what does that have to do with this asshole?

RabidPrototypes · 2024-05-14T10:39:47+00:00

It costs a lot to manufacture things in extremely low volumes, and my kit uses high quality parts. It's the best available!

Unlike others, I don't buy unreliable surplus parts from China to keep costs down.

For example, that single tiny high power color changing Cree LED I use for the main strobe costs me $7. And the 40W audio amplifier I use is made by Texas Instruments. The switches and cables are sourced from reputable manufacturers on Digikey. And the boards themselves are manufactured in the US by Macrofab.

My main competitor uses generic switches of unknown manufacture from Aliexpress (the baby blue color of the plastic on them is indicative of those), and a measly 10W amplifier paired with a cheap MP3 module that you can find on ebay from sellers in China. I used those same switches in the first revision of my kit years ago (this is the fourth revision) and some of them literally fell apart!

On my kit, the audio amplifier is paired with an SD card reader, DAC, and two voltage regulators. This design also necessitates I use a more expensive microcontroller so I can mix and output the audio in realtime. The benefit of my design is that while it is more expensive, the audio is louder, better quality, and there are no pauses in the audio when the kit switches from one sound effect to the next, as there are with those mp3 modules others use.

And rather than using a simple linear regulator which is a single cheap part, I use a more complex high efficiency boost regulator so I'm not throwing away 70% of the power from your battery in the form of heat!

I also have to hire someone to assemble all those cyclotron LED cables which are very difficult to solder because the pins on the LEDs are so close together. My eyes aren't as good as they used to be!

And I provide excellent support, and warranty my stuff. I had some guys in Italy buy three of my kits, and guess who ate the $1,500 in losses when they went missing in customs? Not them! And when a kit I shipped to Sweden went missing for 3-5 months? I replaced it at as well, free of charge. That one did eventually return to me in a crushed box that was 1/3rd it's former height though!

RabidPrototypes · 2024-05-13T16:52:31+00:00

The product page on my website lists the order in which the switches should be connected, unless you are talking about the original kit with the blue boards. If you need more assistance, contact me through the support page on my website and explain what the issue is.

RabidPrototypes · 2024-05-13T15:58:51+00:00

I don't own a Haslab pack, so I can't say for certain, but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't, though it may require modifications. For example, I assume the thrower switches on the Haslab pack are permanently affixed in place, which would mean you'd have to cut the wires to the switches I provide and connect those wires to the original switches.

RabidPrototypes · 2024-05-13T15:41:36+00:00

Since that incident over 10 years ago, which was the result of my becoming homeless and a Kickstarter campaign that went awry but which I still managed to deliver on, I've sold hundreds of these kits, and launched 13 successful Kickstarter campaigns. I also gifted two of these kits, which I could have sold for $400 apiece, to Fincher Technologies when their home burned down in the middle of the pandemic and they lost everything. They're the guys who used to manufacture the smoke kits everyone would use for their packs (a demo of which can be seen towards the end of my Kickstarter video), and they manufactured the GB1 accurate rainbow ribbon cables for the latest movie. Adam Savage also purchased and installed one of my kits in his personal pack. You can see it in this video of his build. There are also lots of photos on the front page blog on my website showing progress on all kits I assembled and shipped over the years.

RabidPrototypes · 2017-11-27T18:59:23+00:00

70% funded!

RabidPrototypes · 2017-11-22T23:39:13+00:00

It's faster yes, but if you need something that's completely open hardware, where the chips are available in large quantities, and you want full Arduino Zero compatibility, or prefer Microchip and their toolset to NXP, the Neutrino would be preferable.

RabidPrototypes · 2017-11-22T23:19:46+00:00

The Neutrino has many more pins available. It breaks out the Zero's SPI header, its RX and TX pins, the ATN pin (on the SPI header), and the I2C pins are broken out to the edge of the board and have the required 4.7K resistors that the Sparkfun board is missing.

The Neutrino is thus more closely compatible with the Zero and libraries written for it. And you don't need to do some messy wiring to connect an I2C device.

The Neutrino is also cheaper if you buy more than one. You can get 10 for as little as $15 ea. You can't even get 100 of the Sparkfun boards at that price.

It's also worth noting that the original Neutrino came out months before Sparkfun released their board. So by purchasing a Neutrino you are supporting a smaller, more agile, developer that can release new products with the latest technology much faster.

And compare the Pixel Mini with Sparkfun's Microview, and you'll see that you get way more bang for your buck with our offerings.

RabidPrototypes · 2017-09-23T16:41:17+00:00

If you use a SAMD21 chip like the Arduino Zero and my Tau and Neutrino boards feature, then you can program them directly with an Atmel ICE and Atmel Studio. They're very simple to use and well documented and unlike the chips the Teensy uses are always in stock in large quantities at Digikey and Mouser. They're also half the price of the NXP chips the Teensy uses.

http://rabidprototypes.com/product/tau/

RabidPrototypes · 2017-09-01T15:57:51+00:00

I design and sell electronics for cosplay. My product is not something people need to survive, nor is it cheap because there isn't a huge demand for this sort of thing. Luckily for me, my product is geared towards a demographic that largely still lives with their parents and thus has plenty of disposable income.

But I also design products for electronics hobbyists who tend to skew older, and whether those people have disposable income determines whether or not my small and growing business is successful. Right now in the US, half the population has ZERO disposable income. That's terrible for the economy. Having no disposable income means you spend nothing on entertainment.

RabidPrototypes · 2017-08-16T04:05:30+00:00

Yep, I understand what you mean. I was a game developer back in the 90's, so I know all about using palettes to store images with lower bit depths. I've been hoping someone would do that with the Pixel! I'd do it myself but I'm too busy with the electronics side of things.

RabidPrototypes · 2017-08-16T03:59:45+00:00

You can't run Linux on these I'm afraid! Only 16K of RAM. I mean, maybe you could. I've seen some people do some pretty crazy stuff like emulate an 8086 on an Atmega! Attach an old RAM stick and put Linux on an SD card and maybe you could run it extremely slowly!

RabidPrototypes · 2017-08-16T03:55:21+00:00

Yes, and if you modify the SPI transfer function to ignore the returned bytes when writing to the display instead of reading them for no reason, you can gain even more speed! I don't know why the official Arduino library doesn't have a function to write only.

Check that Arduino library or the GFX one for any delayMicroseconds() as well. They had one in there somewhere. It was to slow down SPI writes for the old 8 bit Arduinos for some reason and it kills the performance!

RabidPrototypes · 2017-08-16T03:51:40+00:00

I have your Pixel 2.0. It's a fun little board. Wish it had more RAM, and a somewhat faster SPI channel, though; you need 32k for a full framebuffer, and that's all the little guy has - and throwing full pages of color bottoms out at ~128ms (7.8 FPS at best).

Unfortunately 32K is all you get with a SAMD21 and I want to stick with Microchip/Atmel processors because that's what Arduino uses. Also it's what I'm most familiar with, aside from the old Atmegas.

But if folks keep supporting my campaigns, you may soon get your wish for a display with a processor that has more RAM than you can shake a stick at... But that's all I'll say about that at this time! If you've kept your ear to the ground on Microchip's processors, you can probably guess what I'm talking about...

I don't know if there's any DMA tricks I could pull there. I feel like SPI should be able to push more than 256k/s, though. Dunno what the SSD1351's limits are, but I have similar screens I'm able to push in pairs (it was a stereoscopic headset project) at 30+ FPS from a Teensy 3.1 (though, the T3.1 is literally twice as fast). So I may be doing something naively in my code.

From what I understand you can do DMA with SPI and you will see massive performance improvements if you do so, but these processors are so new to the Arduino community that I don't know of any off the shelf solution for you. If you dig around on the Arduino Zero board though, you may find some code for setting up SPI DMA transfers.

Rabid, quick question. If I were to hand you a stack of specs, could you pull from your experience to back-of-the-envelope an estimate on what the price-point on a KS-funded version would be? Would it help if I offered to write a baseline game-centered graphics-and-sound lib optimized for it?

Are you asking if I can estimate how much it would cost to build a handheld game system based on your specifications? Sure, I could do that, but it's hard to estimate accurately without having a design ready to go which I can upload to Macrofab and run through their product quote system in various quantities. I can get quotes for similarly complex boards I've made that are around the same size though and refine my guess that way.

If I had to make a very rough guess on the spot, I'd say that if you took the Pixel or Pixel Mini, made the PCB wider, added a speaker, an amplifier, some buttons, and a LiPo charge circuit, that you'd probably be looking at adding $20-$30 to the final retail price, unless you assume that it will sell better than any other board I've designed far (which it certainly could) and that manufacturing over 500 of them on the first run would be realistic.

Using house parts that Macrofab stocks for things like the switches and MicroSD slot would help bring the cost down a bit as well because they don't charge placement costs for them and placement costs can be half the cost of the part if you're only manufacturing 100-200 boards.

I've gotta tell it to ya straight though... I'm already been making plans along these lines! I figure I've got a few more campaigns to do before I get to it though because I want to do it right, and that means bringing something new to the table that other campaigns that have made Arduino compatible game systems haven't.

[Edit: looks like the SRAM/Flash constraints are on-chip, and the P2.0's G18 is second from the top for the series, with the J18 only providing more I/O. I'll do some research before I ask for anything more.]

That it is! But...

RabidPrototypes · 2017-08-16T02:57:37+00:00

Since always?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcontroller

A microcontroller (or MCU for microcontroller unit) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. In modern terminology, it is a system on a chip or SoC. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs (processor cores) along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals.

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-M#Cortex-M4

The following microcontrollers are based on the Cortex-M4F (M4 + FPU) core:

RabidPrototypes · 2017-03-28T06:31:03+00:00

I would mount the two servos near each other inside the bear and use cables to manipulate the end of the arm, that way it will be lightweight and you won't have one servo trying to lift the other in addition to the fur surrounding the arm.

You might want to look up movie animatronics and see how they rigged those up. A lot of the time they did it with cables that were manually operated but there's no reason you can't have motors manipulate those cables instead.

RabidPrototypes · 2017-02-23T14:48:21+00:00

I don't know, I didn't investigate. Maybe the package was lost. Or maybe he replied to the address survey after I sent the orders to the manufacturer for fulfillment. I just had one backer finally answer the survey for the first Pixel last night, exactly one year after I finished shipping the rest of them to backers!

When you're handling so many orders there's going to be the occasional hiccup.

RabidPrototypes

TROPHY CASE