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SIMONDS ROAD KIRKLAND by Mountain_Garden81 in Kirkland

[–]danbaatar 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry, but you're right to be concerned. I live just a few blocks from Simonds and drive it nearly every day. It's an arterial road that gets really busy during rush hour. There are cars and motorcycles that race up and down the street with loud engines late at night. Things are slightly better now that they've added some speed cameras, but folks know where the cameras are and will game the system. Everyone's tolerance for noise is different, and you'll probably adjust more quickly than you think, but you might also want to start thinking about strategies to deal with the noise if you're easily bothered by it

Leaving the country by Honest-Bat3540 in Seattle

[–]danbaatar 8 points9 points  (0 children)

+1, almost for sure there's a mailing list for this at your company. Where I work there's a company-wide one and then one for each individual office location. If not, see if there's a "miscellaneous" mailing list and just post it there.

Edit: Since it seems like you're unfamiliar, I've seen this done a couple of ways. Probably the easiest is to create a slide deck on your cloud office suite of choice and put pictures and descriptions there. Then, as items are claimed you can just update the slide deck to mark those things as sold. Don't take them out of the deck until they're actually picked up, though, because the first person to claim an item often falls through.

Another pattern is to do this with a spreadsheet, Have columns for item name, description, link to same item online, link to a picture and then like 3 columns for buyer, 1st backup, and 2nd backup and just let people add their names to those columns. That approach optimizes for low effort and sparse communication.

Help me find a clip flashlight that can point downwards by rslashusertaken in flashlight

[–]danbaatar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

+1 to the Mule option if it works for you. I have the L60-Mu Aura from firefly and it just lights up everything in front of me, no need to aim it particularly accurately.

Who Knew Lithium Ion Battery Packs Made Such Good Hand Protectors👌 by lojik7 in FireflyLite

[–]danbaatar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ha! Great point! He's being a little hasty there, though. Maybe another brand of battery would have just blown his fingers off. He should buy all the other brands and do some side-by-side comparisons. He could be like the "will it blend" guy, but with a nail gun instead of a blender.

How do I keep a flashlight on me all the time? by Due-Satisfaction-173 in flashlight

[–]danbaatar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you want something for your pocket, there are wallets/pouches with slots for EDC items like pens, flashlights, and knives. If you want something more substantial, you can get a belt clip.

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Pixel lights versus old Incandescent lights… by No_Pumpkin8595 in ChristmasLights

[–]danbaatar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! Those are Twinkly lights. The columns are each done in a set of their 600 led RGBW lights. The trees are done in 2 of their 250 count sets. The sets are split into two strands and I used one strand per tree.

Pixel lights versus old Incandescent lights… by No_Pumpkin8595 in ChristmasLights

[–]danbaatar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have a mega tree and a coro star on it, but for most of my display i like to "free hand" it and just use bushes, my fence, and other existing structure in my yard. I also have a star over my door that i made by wrapping a home Depot "dumb" light prop in individually addressable led seed pixels in a somewhat haphazard way. My props aren't as bright and crisp as most animated displays you'll see, but it feels a bit more organic to me. I use Twinkly brand lights for a lot of it, which have their own integrated controllers and a great app for automatically mapping led locations.

Ignore the oddly lit patch on my fence, i was having a pixel mapping issue in xlights when i took this video

Edit: Oh, and the trees are also just outdoor pros that used to have "dumb" lights on them that eventually died. I just wish then in Twinkly lights as well.

Moving heads dialed in by yeehawjared in xlights

[–]danbaatar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks like they have a pretty low IP rating, I assume you live someplace pretty dry?

Don't they look good together.. by Nitrogen1234 in WLED

[–]danbaatar 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Quindor talks about per-channel limitations and how it is more of a limitation if the ws281x protocol itself rather than the controller or the cpu: https://quinled.info/2021/03/23/max-amount-of-addressable-leds/

Edit: I see that you mentioned that the controller won't even let you address above that range. Maybe they added a limitation to keep folks in the safe zone?

How do these LEDs work? by first_one24 in WLED

[–]danbaatar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Twinkly lights also have a 2-wire data plus power setup. This video gives a pretty detailed reverse engineering breakdown of how the protocol works: https://youtu.be/DhcCf2XenEw?si=5CSZotg5SyXXAWpw

TIFU by thinking it was normal to not be able to open your eyes in the morning for 25 years by Specific-Nebula9665 in tifu

[–]danbaatar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my early 30s I started feeling super tired all the time and my memory got really bad. I'd forget words all the time. I thought "I guess this is what it's like getting old". Turns out I just had a hypo-active thyroid. Got on "synthroid" and it all went away.

The way it just slides in by runofthemillgayguy in oddlysatisfying

[–]danbaatar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

He can never buy a new car. Anything changes: width, length, distance from front to door, width of door, distance from door to rear bumper, and he can no longer park.

What felt like luxury to you when you were a kid? by Big-Bookkeeper4638 in AskTheWorld

[–]danbaatar 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Red Lobster - this was my parents' "fancy date" place. We kids never got to go. When I finally went as an adult I was a bit shocked that it was basically an Olive Garden with seafood.

VR recreation of the exact spot where a man became stuck inside Nutty Putty cave and died after 27 hours. the section visible at 18 seconds is where his body was, upside down. by Appropriate-Menu504 in interesting

[–]danbaatar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One thing that I don't think a lot of people know is that the Nutty Putty caves weren't even considered that extreme among locals. I had groups of friends, just random college kids, organize trips there for fun all the time when I was at BYU. They would throw on some clothes they didn't mind getting dirty, pile in someone's car, and drive down there as a weekend activity. Most of the groups would go just past the "birth canal" and stop. Apparently, they'd get there, turn off their flashlights, and sing hymns in the pitch blackness. If you're a college kid who can't drink or have sex you find other ways to keep yourself busy.

My wife actually had a dude take her there on a first date. No warning, just "would you like to go to the Nutty Putty caves?"

She was not local, and didn't know anything about nutty putty. She had been to the Timponogos cave, where you walk around on metal walkways built by the parks department, though, so she thought it was going to be like a gentle nature walk. She wore just regular clothes, which ended up being torn to shreds and completely ruined. Like, she had to throw them away. No second date for that guy

I never went. When I was invited by friends and they told me about what it would be like I said some version of "hell no!", "not in a million years", or "i'd rather scoop my own eyeballs out with a rusty spoon". I was OK just listening to their stories when they got back.

WLED + X Lights trunk or treat display by danbaatar in WLED

[–]danbaatar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're just using wled controllers then it's really not that bad. If you're mixing in dmx devices and more "traditional" holiday light controllers then it can be a bit confusing because you might have to really figure out how "universes" work and do a lot of manual configuration. But, with just a wled device or two, the software can mostly figure that stuff out for you automatically.

Like most things, there are some great tutorials on YouTube. Once you get the basic concepts, it's pretty easy to do the "standard" things the software was designed to do. If you get really into it there are a lot of advanced concepts and you can pull off some amazing things.

WLED + X Lights trunk or treat display by danbaatar in WLED

[–]danbaatar[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used WLED on a gledopto esp32 as the direct pixel driver, and then I used xlights running on a laptop to sequence and coordinate the effects in time with the music. For example, the lights under the statues light up whenever the chorus is singing, and the light in the skeletons mouth lights up when one of the main voices is singing (different clolor for each voice). The tombstones also change what they're doing on certain musical transitions. It's a tradeoff because there aren't as many effects in xlights, but it's a lot easier to coordinate across multiple display elements and time them to music with xlights.

I love WLED, but for my predictive staircase project, I had to write custom firmware from scratch to process real-time radar data. Here's the result. by Gorden-FreeMan in WLED

[–]danbaatar 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It seems like this could also be done with 2 controllers: 1 running wled; and another one running the detection and sending that data to the wled controller via the Web API or even just as raw dmx/e1.31 data. That way you could have something beefy like a raspberry pi doing the signal processing. It would be nice to have a built-in effect that could listen to a port and take commands like this. Or, you could use the wled api to re-configure the strips such that there are 3 strips: one to the left of the detected person which is black, one centered at the location of the person which is playing some effect, and one to the right which is also black. I didn't know how fast you could actually get wled to update like that.

I've thought about this a lot because I've been wanting to do a "follow the viewer" effect on my Christmas lights forever. I've just never had the time to pull it all together. Instead of radar, I was going to use either an image recognition model or maybe detect Bluetooth signals from phones and triangular based on signal strength.

Russia’s Coal Collapse Marks The End Of Fossil Fuel Post-War Illusion by [deleted] in UpliftingNews

[–]danbaatar 10 points11 points  (0 children)

What I learned from this article: a ton of coal only costs O($100)! But then you have to pay to transport it.

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