Author Archives: Tyler Bletsch
A new crappy robot emerges
The Pandaphone
I was looking for a gift for my friend’s son, who’s about a year old. I realized that everything I was looking at was just various enclosures with chips that made sound and light…that’s the kind of crap I can do!
So I built a theremin-type thing. It plays notes based on how close you are to its ‘eyes’, which are an ultrasonic distance sensor, and the nose is a small speaker.
Video:
Build log after the break.
I’m building a desk
Because of how badly laid out I found my room is in the last post, I’ve been designing a new desk in SketchUp. After a million iterations, here’s my design:
Using SketchUp for this has been awesome…it’s really opened up a new world of creativity for me. For more design and build info, read on.
SketchUp
I’m learning SketchUp, and I just realized something…my room has an absolutely terrible layout.
Floppy Music Thing
I made one of those floppy drive music things that I keep seeing online.
It’s mostly standard based on existing info, but I did made two somewhat interesting changes. Read on for details.
How to cut an onion without tears
KSP: Asteroid
GOT AN ASTEROID, BITCHES!!!
Rescued from burning up in my atmosphere, now it’s in safe, stable circular orbit around Kerbin.
Kerbal Space Program – Science Checklist
UPDATE: I just uploaded Revision 2. See bottom of post for changes.
I decided it’s time to get serious about my pretend space exploration (Kerbal Space Program). I wanted a way to keep track of the various science experiments I’d done, and the built-in interface is so-so about tracking that in one easy to read place.
So I spent today building a script to generate a giant Kerbal Science Checklist!
I basically scraped a lot of rules from the Kerbal Space Program wiki and coded them into a bunch of data structures in Python, then had the script iterate them to generate a giant HTML document. I wanted to print mine, so I tweaked the output HTML to pagebreak cleanly, and turned it into a PDF. I also found that it copy pasted into Excel without too much trouble.
The science points shown indicate the base value for returning the results safely to Kerbin (as opposed to transmitting them), and they don’t include the subsequent value of repeating the experiment. They’re probably not perfect…I didn’t test the math very much.
Updated 29 June 2014 — changes in revision 2:
- I noticed that the HTML download didn’t have the images — fixed.
- I’ve been told that you can splash down on Eve, Laythe, and even some non-water biomes of Kerbin. I’ve added “Splashed” rows for Eve and Laythe. I didn’t add a separate “Splashed” section for Kerbin, since it would be very long, and few people probably care about splashing down in a puddle in the badlands.
- I removed the invalid “Surface” row for Kerbol (the sun).
- Fixed seismic scans in water — they’re invalid.
Download revision 2 here:
Enjoy!
KSP: Motorin’
I’m getting better at this game.
(Though this particular rover sort of exploded when I took a hill too fast and I tried to compensate…with rockets.)