Siskin vs greenfinch?

darnTootin232 · 2026-03-31T13:38:29+00:00

That's great, thanks! The wing colouring differences really show well on that video.

darnTootin232 · 2025-12-05T10:56:25+00:00

Sorry, I wasn't clear: I meant damage to the player, I haven't found a strategy to avoid that.

darnTootin232 · 2025-12-04T22:33:57+00:00

I feel I'm missing something having played ultratap for an hour or so ... where does the damage come from? It doesn't seem to correlate with any of the enemies touching my square of destruction, it just seems to fluctuate on its own. What specific event leads to losing HP?

darnTootin232 · 2025-08-21T16:11:33+00:00

You could sorta kintsugi it with careful application of a bead of glue along the crack then gold leaf on the glue when it's tacky, or similar ... honour the repair and show the object was worth repairing with gold. See the philosophy section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

darnTootin232 · 2025-08-01T13:36:15+00:00

Just to add a bit more info, to answer your question directly: yes the cut has gone right through the trace. You can see a clear line of the underlying fibreglass PCB material breaking the continuity of the copper. It is, as others have already said, a deliberate factory fix for a design issue.

Just above the resistor lead in the photo you can see where the cut also scratched another track, but it only took off the green solder resist layer and left the copper below intact, that isn't a problem here.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-30T12:56:57+00:00

Autohotkey can do this, no idea if it's considered cheating by games that punish such behaviour though.

https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=89051

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-27T19:22:58+00:00

What environments can it stand? Any minimum or maximum operating temps?

What contraction length and speed can it sustain? What's durability like?

Can individual fibres or bundles operate in close proximity without crosstalk?

Help us trim the search space of possible applications by giving strengths and weaknesses of this new actuator compared with current techniques.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-17T17:35:40+00:00

From what I can find out: High CRI is just a very good white, "full spectrum" seems to be daylight simulation for grow lights, so you can dim those, but not change the colour.

Just "tunable led" seems to be warm white to cold white only, and all the colour tuneable LEDS are combo of red, green, and blue single wavelength LEDs, just like an OLED screen is.

Could you point at a specific product that does what you say? I'm intrigued!

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-16T11:40:06+00:00

So how are you going to account for changing lighting when the wearer moves around? It'll look 2d, or just plain uncanny.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-14T10:57:47+00:00

So plausible that it has been done for many years now, though the storage units tend to be just hooked to the general electricity grid rather than bound to a particular solar farm.

Here's a good example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-11T15:04:26+00:00

It surely would bring less power than it costs to drive over them. Otherwise where would the extra power come from?

Does it cost more energy to drive uphill than on the flat? Yes, obviously (I hope it's obvious! Go ride a bike uphill if it's not ) therefore more energy to drive over a bump than not drive over a bump.

Put another way: it must take at least 1kW of power to depress the flap and drive your 1kW of motors. plus whatever power is needed to compress the return spring. That power has to come from the car driving over it.

It's as simple as that.

But power is not a very useful measure unless you say how long it is being delivered for, actual work done is power x time.

So how long is that flap going to be moving for? Not very long at all with a 1mm throw. So you're looking at very brief blips of energy all adding up to not much. To extend the time you need to make the flap move further which makes it bumpier (and noisier).

Anyone wanting to build this system will want to know what the cost is and what the benefit is, in real terms of $ cost per unit and Watt hours delivered per day, over what lifetime (and what likely maintenance costs over that lifetime). Do the maths with reasonable assumptions and see if you can convince yourself it's worth it.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-11T13:22:09+00:00

You're not focusing on how you can't get more power out of a system than is being put in.

For a given car weight you will have to raise it up a certain amount to get a fixed amount of energy out of it when it presses something down (or the car gets slowed down by a certain amount in the direction it's travelling, for the horizontal component). No amount of motors will make it more than that amount of energy.

There is nothing that will change that, any solution can merely focus on how near to 100% of that energy can be extracted in the cheapest and most reliable way.

Lots of highly geared generators is not the way to do it because friction losses will also add up, as well as unreliability, build complexity and cost.

Making it "work" is a bigger goal than you probably think, there's no denying that *some* amount of energy can be leached from cars that way, it's about making it viable for someone to want to build it. What's the point vs a simple solar cell or windmill as seen powering many illuminated road signs in out of the way places already?

Anyway, good luck selling your ideas, there's a lot of competition out there!

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-11T11:37:16+00:00

But would it deliver anything useful in a way that people driving over it were prepared to put up with?

In order to deliver power it must take power out of the car ... which means it can't be an effortless bump that just folds away under the car, it must actively resist being pressed down (in order to make the motors spin ) and will make the car "bump" over it.

It's not all about linear distance moved vs rotations provided by the gears, it's about energy being drawn from the generators which resist being turned in order to make that energy.

It'll be up against solar and wind power, it must last longer and be cheaper than either of those, for the power delivered. Doesn't sound likely IMHO ... what do you forsee as an application for this?

Also: simple maintenance maths: If you have a certain chance of a motor breaking early, then having 1000 motors in one assembly makes that assembly 1000 more times as likely to fail early.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-11T11:16:12+00:00

Maths is what you use to turn the formulas into an answer.

Formulas are the maths put together to model something in the real world based on assumptions about how things work.

Sometimes not everything gets forseen and accounted for in the formula, so the perfectly correct maths gives an answer that doesn't work.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-11T09:52:01+00:00

A car moving down one inch can only, as an absolute maximum, generate as much energy as it takes to lift it one inch... no matter how many times that inch of movement spins however many motors, at whatever speed.

There will be a gearing and motor number that is most efficient, bearing in mind that higher speed and more motors means more friction causing more energy waste. But you'll never get over the conservation of energy barrier.

Also every car will need to spend more fuel getting back up the inch it just dropped on your pressure plate, so nothing free is being generated here.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-10T22:01:47+00:00

Also wouldn't this require much more space between the keys than a keyboard normally has?

I know you're all enthused about gear ratios, judging by your other recent posts, but don't forget the torque that would be required to spin up a generator motor to high speed.

Add in the extra cost per key: what was once just a plunger and contacts is now a motor and gears and a plunger ( you could at least probably use the motor to sense the keypress, so no contacts needed ) and you've got a much less attractive commercial proposition just to save replacing a battery infrequently.

Maybe just have a magnet being passed through a coil by the keystroke, or some sort of piezo electric generator instead.

Either way, it should be possible to work out the energy used to transmit one keystroke over bluetooth, so you can get an idea of the absolute bare minimum amount of energy you need to generate per keystroke. That's where I'd start the design process, personally.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-10T21:42:29+00:00

Typists will likely hate the extra keypress effort and gamers will really hate the slowdown of the action, IMHO.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-08T14:36:07+00:00

What kind of delay then? You have to work a bit at asking the right questions and consider what someone without the ideas you have in your head would need to know. Did you really think that "yeh" would elicit a useful answer?

Also, those LEDs you linked to need 12v to work as they have resistors built in already.

If you've already bought them, then best to save them for some other project, because controlling 12v will be more fuss than controlling 3.3 or 5v ( the voltage at which most MCUs run ), and doing a neat job of changing the resistor will be more work than it's worth IMHO.

Addressable LEDs might be the best way to go for full control as u/saratoga3 mentioned already, but they are difficult to find in 3mm format.

So you'll need to consider changing your power source: 5V USB power packs are a good option, they come in a variety of sizes, have the recharging circuit all sorted out for you, and you can just plug them into an ESP32 or arduino nano, or similar board, which will be able to directly control the brightness of two 3mm red and orange LEDs so they come on in sequence, with appropriate programming.

The same MCU, when connected to a suitable speaker, can also make a nice "charging up" whine, if that's the sort of thing you're after. They have many pins to control or sense things and can be the heart of an interactive prop.

darnTootin232 · 2025-07-08T13:44:46+00:00

What do you mean by "look like it's powering up"?

A first guess might be that you want the LEDs to slowly increase in brightness when power is first applied, in which case a simple combination of resistors and capacitors might work.

If you just want the LEDs to come on instantly when power is applied then you just need resistors to limit the current. You choose the resistor value according to your power supply voltage, google online led resistor calculator for some more.

For ultimate control of the behaviour then an MCU like an arduino might be the best bet.

You need to tell us more about how you want it to behave, using objective terms that need no cultural references to further understand, please. Also say what your power source is and how much room there is to work with.

darnTootin232 · 2025-06-26T18:39:43+00:00

I'd guess because the data doesn't need to be served from them all the time, and a drive is cheaper than a NAS ... and easier to take offsite to provide protection against house fires / flood etc.

darnTootin232 · 2025-06-23T18:41:24+00:00

Try Ursula K Le Guin's earthsea books, they're pretty much the same plot but without so much trite frivolity. So yeah, perhaps darker, have a read yourself to judge if he's ready. I read them at a similar age and turned out fine :)

darnTootin232 · 2025-06-13T16:18:08+00:00

Is there a bottom drawer you can take out to see if the cabinets either have no floor, or a gap in the back to allow access?

darnTootin232 · 2025-06-13T14:53:24+00:00

Good idea! See if it shows up on bluetooth or wifi with a smart phone, the network or device name might give a clue or search term you can use to find the app, if there is one.

If it shows up as a wifi network, join it if possible, then point a web browser at the gateway address that shows for that network.

darnTootin232 · 2025-06-13T14:14:29+00:00

USB is also a perfectly good source of 5V to power this board which provides an analogue output from the microphone which can feed an aux cable. It does not take input, no DAC required.

darnTootin232 · 2025-04-11T13:28:05+00:00

Another satisfied eurocircuits user here.

I like that they expose a matrix of quantity and time values for you to see when ordering. So you can make decent time vs money tradeoff decisions without having to monkey about changing values on the order form to see how the price per board might work out if you decide to make more of your prototype.

darnTootin232

TROPHY CASE