OK, I’m an old PC hoarder. Nothing like breathing new life into old hardware by taking someone’s cast off PC/Laptop and swapping in a solid state drive or some version of Linux. But at some point it’s got to go off to it’s final destination. And what if you are a large corporation that swaps out computers by the thousands? Now I am finding out what comes next.

I recently started volunteering on a regular basis at the Shore Foundation (https://www.theshorefoundation.com/), which takes computers going out of service at corporations and refurbishes them to pass on to small non-profits in our area. Any equipment not suitable for reuse is carefully dissembled and passed on for resource extraction and recycling by local partners Sunnking and Li-Cycle.

Basically, my home hoarding behavior has been enabled on an industrial scale.

I was going for “The Thinker” pose in this shot, but it turned out more like “Please adopt our computers and give them a good home” 🙂

The Raspberry Pi Pico is an impressive new microcontroller board for the education market that I think will largely replace the Arduino. It’s cheap (starting at $4), easy to connect to (shows up as a usb drive), and easy to start with (download the current version of Thonny and you are ready to go). Its far more powerful than the Arduino and introduces people to Python rather than a version of C (although it can be programmed in C). And it came out of the gate with a solid introductory book suitable for all ages. Unlike the ESP8266/32 based boards the Pico does not have networking on board. However the convenience, utility, and support for learners with the Pico blows those boards away.  Plus it has a few trick features of its own.

I am currently assembling a number of Pico based kits to teach from at the Rochester Makerspace.

A number of sources have sprung up for making biodegradable plastic from non-fossil fuel materials. One of the more interesting ones is Materiom. I’ve started experimenting with some of these recipes.

The key ingredients in most of these are corn starch, agar agar (a seaweed extract), and sometimes gelatin (from animal parts). Glycerin (aka glycerol, glycerine) is often used as a plasticizer–adding more makes a more flexible plastic. It can come from a variety of sources. All of these things are basically edible and can be manipulated in the kitchen so making plastic with them at home is appealing (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Starting with Materiom’s very flexible and translucent simmered agar recipe. I’ve been cooking up some variations.

My observations so far:

• Agar is awesome. It dries very tough and is easy to vary the flexibility by varying the amount of glycerin used. It is highly water resistant while still being biodegradable–an hour submerged in cold water barely affects it. But it will degrade pretty quickly in boiling water. Unfortunately…
• Ager is prohibitively expensive to use in quantity–roughly $40 a pound in pound/kilo quantities.
• Corn starch is cheap at about $2 a pound but degrades quickly in cold water. It also swells during cooking into a thick goo that is pretty much impossible to pour. Too bad because its great for machining after fully dried.
• Gelatin is basically dissolved cow bones and pig skin and I’m just not interested 🙂
• Many recipes include the use of vinegar as a weak acid. But vinegar stinks! Don’t use it unless you want to be repelled by your final product. Use a little citric acid or even salt instead.  They will provide the free ions to give the reaction a kick without the smell.
• Since all of these recipes use water the results will shrink, sometimes dramatically,  as they dry out. This makes them hard to cast or mold.

At the moment I am working with a 90% corn starch (for low cost) and 10% agar (for water resistance) mix, with as little water as possible and a pinch of citric acid. A bit of stirring and a quick trip to the microwave and the result is a puck of plastic that looks like it could actually be useful for something at a reasonable cost. I will post more if I figure out something that is more useful than an excuse for playing in the kitchen.

When desktop editing of digital video became accessible 20 years ago I started playing around with it. After a couple of years I started making short dramatic movies on video and showing them in local film festivals. I did everything behind the camera on these–writing, casting, directing, lighting, editing, etc. Occasionally I had some help with the sound. I liked the lighting and directing the actors the best. It was a lot of fun involving people with community theater experience (and the occasional family member) and showing each one to a live audience a few times. I consider them my student films, except I never graduated 🙂

They live on at Vimeo in (not so) glorious standard definition if you want to check them out.

For the past couple of years I have been making some short 3D and VR game scenes. I put together a short compilation of clips to have a document of this work before moving on to new adventures.

So there is somewhat of a tradition of repurposing old portable computers into “cyberdecks” with modern guts. Sounds like fun but I have a practical use for something like this that needs a bigger foundation than the usual C64 or TRS-80.

I have some Raspberry Pi projects coming up and I always find a pain to go hunt down a power supply, a reasonably sized monitor, keyboard, mouse, and connectivity to work with a Pi. So my interpretation of the cyberdeck needs to be big enough to be usable as a Pi programmer with all that stuff included and room to store the Pi as well.

So the time came to put on my tie and suspenders and get all 80’s business dude to buy one of these things off ebay:

It weighs about 10lbs, features a blue text screen on a slightly lighter blue background, and runs everything, including two 3.5″ floppy drives off a tiny lead acid battery.

The one I got arrived in complete but pleasantly worn condition. My favorite part is the faint outlines of a “Buffalo Public Schools” sticker on the lid. And that the graphics and ribbed features reminded me of something from Silent Running. Just look at all those pins on the ports! USB saved us from a lot.

This is a peek at the original insides. A lot of discrete components everywhere and one little 7 mhz 8 bit processor in there somewhere. What a deal for $1700 in 1987 money.

It supposedly worked but I didn’t bother to turn it on before I had it gutted and started mocking up parts. My plan was to keep the external appearance and keyboard and get rid of everything else so I could fit it out with modern tech and storage.

I’m close to being finished with this project and I will do a more complete write-up. The biggest challenge has been the case material. It’s a thick, brittle plastic with conductive silver paint on the inside and a glued conductive foil on the outside with gray paint on top that just wants to jump off. What a nightmare to work with!

After putting it off for three years I finally finished a new toy for MakerX 2020. The first installment in what would become the Device from Another Planet is in a post here and the followup with details on the completed project can be found on this page.

MakerX The Columbus Maker Expo will happen February 29th from 10am to 4pm in the Lausche building  of the Ohio Expo Center.

I am thrilled that this event has grown and matured each year and especially that we will be able to make it free for this first time. More details at

www.makerx.org

MakerX is a festival of creating with technology that I am proud to have led the development of over the past three years. It brings together makers and inventors of all ages and capabilities as peers to share the work they do with the public for a day. This year we are expecting more than 70 exhibitors and about 1500 people in attendance.

Here is design/prototype challenge I presented to a recent pop-up makerspace. I have been working on my own solution (which I have no intention to develop commercially so I will provide full details  after more testing) but I am interested in other ideas.

“Helping hands” or “third hands” are tools designed to aid in electronics soldering but are also used in jewelry-making and other projects using small parts.

The traditional helping hands tool sells for $5-$10 and is almost universally used.

Limitations:

1. Only two hands when you often need 3 or more.
2. The serrated teeth on the clips cut through insulation on wires (potentially causing shorts) and are not gentle on other parts.
3. The wing nuts easily loosen.
4. The joint system does not provide enough flexibility.
5. The magnifying glass is not really useful and gets in the way.
6. The base is too small and the tool falls over easily.

Basically, they suck, but everyone still buys them.

Current alternatives use goose neck or machine coolant hoses to provide more flexibility and have 4 or 5 hands on a larger, more stable base.

Limitations:

1. These alternatives sell for $25-$40.
2. They still use clips with serrated teeth that cut through wiring. Some have plastic covers on the clips that promptly melt and then wear through.
3. More flexibility but can’t bend in a tight radius.
4. They are overly large for many projects and get in the way of soldering irons, etc.

Project Challenge

Design, prototype, and build an alternative to the traditional tool that:

1. Has smooth jaws on the clips.
2. Has at least three hands.
3. Is maximally adjustable.
4. Is stable but as small and unobtrusive as possible.
5. Can be made for less than $5 in materials in small batches.
6. Is easy to manufacture.

Please send links to better alternatives to me at bill@tinkerfarm.net and I will add them to this post.

Unity and Unreal Engine dominate the marketplace for people getting started in game and VR development. So the perennial question is which one should I learn? Having spent some time in both, I will share my views.

I am by no means a professional game developer. After over a year learning Unity and making some small 3D/AR/VR experiences in it, I mentored a group of college students in a studio course on it. Seeing their struggles with it, I spent a couple of months learning Unreal  and making one 3D experience it.

The short version is that in my opinion (as of fall 2019)   Unreal is better overall as a more focused and higher quality product but Unity is probably the best place to start given its deep and broad support for new users–but with serious qualifications.

Unity’s biggest strength is the breadth of support for new and varied users. There are a vast array of online tutorials for Unity (although most of them are now out of date). The official tutorials and sample projects form a large collection and recently have been greatly enhanced with beginner material for users as young as middle school.  Unity supports 2D games which Unreal really doesn’t and I have found that many newbies want to start in 2D. Unreal has a limited selection of high quality official tutorials for new users.

The interfaces have some surface similarity but are quite different beyond first impressions. By comparison Unreal is simple, logical, and uncluttered. Once you have familiarized yourself with it, things are were you expect them to be and many features you have to set up in Unity just work out of the box in Unreal (such as editing in VR). Unreal content looks much better out of the box without the need to wade into tweaking advanced shaders and HDR pipelines. Unity has many, many windows, menus and layers and they keep changing with new versions or with new assets that bring their own menu additions with them. A big part of the learning struggle with Unity is discovering which feature is accessed through which menu. Frankly it’s a big cluttered mess compared to Unreal.

The two take different approaches to scripting. Unity is more conventional with text scripts done in C#. Visual Studio is now the primary IDE for editing scripts. This makes grabbing and sharing code with other people extremely easy. Unreal starts you off in visual scripting with Blueprints. Unreal expects professional teams to prototype in Blueprints and then tweak in C++ but here I am just focusing on learners and hobbyists. I am not a particular fan of visual scripting approaches but they do work better for some people. Blueprints offer a visualization of script logic flow which is much more helpful for debugging that warnings in a text console. But Blueprints are very hard to share and you are lucky if someone posted a screen capture of their Blueprint when looking for help online. I have found that I could get my own scripts working faster in Blueprints/Unreal but had substantially less recourse for outside help if I could not solve my own problems.

There is a huge difference in access to assets for a project. The Unity Asset Store is vast and has a large collection of free and low cost assets. as well as high quality and expensive ones However many of these are constantly going obsolete since Unity is pretty ruthless about breaking old content with new versions of the software. For example, I was bedeviled by a simple collection of “free rocks” trying to keep a Unity project alive through several minor version upgrades (which are frequent).  Coming from the Unity Asset Store the content in Unreal Marketplace initially seems shockingly small and expensive. However the free collections are very high quality, very complete, and they just work when you drop them into you project (in my very limited experience with Unreal). Unreal also makes a selection of paid asset free each month so it is possible to amass quite a library over time without spending much.

Overall, Unreal is a more focused and higher quality product for creating basic 3D & VR work. It even has autosave (which Unity doesn’t) and I have yet to have it crash (which Unity does). Pause to think about that–no autosave and random crashes. Yes you can lose a lot of work if you are not careful in Unity.

If you know you want to develop something similar to what you see in the Unreal Marketplace (i.e. realistic looking 3D & VR content) then go for Unreal and save yourself a lot of chaos by trying to learn Unity. Yet for the newbie who just wants to explore the greatest range of options Unity is much more broadly supported (if more unevenly) and can produce a wider variety of content. Just manually save your work frequently and realize you will be led down a lot of dead-ends.

At this point I could go either way in future personal projects and teaching. For teaching beginners  I would probably go with Unity mostly due to their new beginner content & projects.