Episode 34 Transcript - Pinball Wizard
Paul
Welcome to The Bootloader. I'm Paul Cutler.
Tod
And I'm Tod Kurt. The show works like this. In each episode, we bring three things we're excited to share, chatting about each one for about five minutes. For detailed show notes and transcripts, visit thebootloader.net. Paul, what's your first one for us?
Paul
First up is RV Circuit Studio, which is a new CircuitPython IDE that just released its 1.0 version. I've been following development the last few months and haven't brought it up until now, because, because it required you to be running Python in a virtual environment and then running and building it from there. But with the 1.0 release, there are install packages for Mac, Windows, and Linux. So it has everything you would expect in a modern IDE, and then even more. On the left side of the window, there's a window pane for the File Explorer to choose which file to edit. To the right of that filling the window is the code editor like you'd expect, and below that is a pane to choose from the REPL, a serial plotter, and a camera. Along the top are icons for open save, a debugger, and more. And the first thing I might recommend, though, is making the text size bigger in the code editor. It defaults to a 10-point font, which to my old eyes was kind of small. Yep, same. When you first plug a board in, it will prompt you to download the latest version of CircuitPython if your board is running an older version and take you to that board's download page, which is a really nice touch. It also has a library manager. You download the bundle once, and it's cached on your computer. RV Circuit Studio will show you which libraries you have installed, which have updates available, and also the ability to browse the bundle to install a specific library. I tried the debugger on my Mac Mini. It would pause for a good second or two when starting, but then it lets you step through your code line by line. There's a button to reformat your code in black, but it requires you to manually pip install black on your system first. The REPL on the bottom of the screen is just what you would expect, and you can interact with the REPL. The serial plotters included and works just like the one in Mo did. I hooked up a barometric sensor and was plotting the results in no time. The last tab on the bottom is a camera feature. I couldn't get it to work and now I'm curious what it does. It recognizes both my webcam and my iPhone but doesn't start when I try it. I'm hoping to have Armstrong on the CircuitPython show in the near future, the developer who created RV Circuit Studio, and I'll make sure to ask him about it. The last feature that I really like is on the left-hand side, there's a window pane under File Explorer that has a ton of code snippets. There are examples including debouncing, timers, neopixels, PWM, waveforms, and more. Another reason to be thankful to Adafruit for licensing so much code under the MIT license so it can be included in a project like this. I think the snippets are great and help beginners with concrete examples that can compare against or even build off of. The only question I have is that due to AI, Armstrong Subero is not. taking pull requests. And I wonder if you can build a community around something like this without being 100% completely open. It could be possible, but it's challenging in today's day and age. Lastly, I also think it's pretty cool to see that RV Circuit Studio is written in Python. I'd like to see more desktop apps in Python. You know, congrats to Armstrong on the 1.0 launch. And if you're looking for a moor replacement, check this out. It's a pretty full feature just kind of coming out of the gate.
Tod
But because it is written in Python, it doesn't hook into the standard file, like the file edit view window menu items that you might expect. It's got its own little icons inside of the window. Just something to be aware of. I really like the circuit snippets. If you've been a fan of my CircuitPython tricks page, which is basically that, this is like another way of doing the similar thing where you can just like click a single button and get a key Bouncer or how to read an i2c device. And so it's super great for that. And it's like already a syntax check. So you don't have to worry about copy and paste problems by copying off of my web page or whatever. But yeah, it seems pretty great. I like the fact that it's got a plotter. The plotter seems pretty good. I might be able to not even update my serial plotster program that I wrote that we talked about a couple episodes ago.
Paul
Shortest lifespan for an app yet.
Tod
Yeah, well, you know.
Paul
What's your first one for us?
Tod
All right. So I'm going to talk about the curse of being a production maker with Tindie and Lectronz. and now small run.net. So I have a little Tindie store that sells fun PCBs for learning cap touch sensors, playing with MIDI, or even make your own synthesizers. I loved Tindie. It was owned by Hackaday and run by people who understood the needs of the small production maker. Etsy for Lectronzics is how I described it to my more normy friends. It was great. But over the years, it languished. And then suddenly last April, it just went offline for several weeks with no communication. When it came back, we learned that it was sold to an, unknown entity and disbursement payouts were disabled. There are two other markets for makers out there. One's called Lectronzs with a Z.com and now smallrun.net. Over the last couple of days, I've been chatting with Aaron, the person running smallrun. Dot net, and I must say it's looking pretty great. The Tindie outage in sale was a real wake-up call for a lot of us. Many larger makers ran their entire operation from Tindie. The outage cost them thousands of dollars in business. No payouts meant they had maybe tens of thousands of dollars. locked up as unusable, maybe never retrievable. Tindie now apparently has a manual disbursement if you email them, but I've still got several hundred dollars locked up in Tindie and in the vein hope that things will return to normal. But, you know, it's been a couple of months now. I'm not that hopeful. I'm not sure Tindie can recover the lost trust or even if they want to, you know, maybe it's sort of this sort of a grab and go sort of thing. So like a month or so ago, I did start moving some of my stuff to Lectronzs, but it's a site run from some unknown entity in Greece, and it caters to EU customers. It seems like it's a well-run site. It's been around for several years, but after Tindie, I wasn't all that jazz to put in a lot of effort into it. So things are there, but no one's ordered from it yet, and I've not advertised it at all. And then I learned about Small Run from you, Paul. This is like maybe a week ago. I poked around, made an account. An interesting aspect of Small Run is its build blog pages that you can create and link to your products. It's a sort of built-in blogging system, sort of like Hackaday I.O. but more product focus because you can like feature your products. This could be a great way to talk about updates or new releases that you might have and then have them featured on the Small Run homepage where all the build logs are shown. But one of the most interesting differences to me with Small Run is that it has hooks into a shipping label generator. So it will generate real time shipping quotes for customers and then labels for you. So you don't have to make shipping profiles for every product in every country hoping that you get it right. I suspect many sellers lose money on shipping because they get their shipping profiles wrong. I know I've done that a little bit because I made my shipping profiles like three or four years ago and things have gotten more expensive. And so I'm losing like 50 cents or so I think on every shipment I do. And so what's funny is that I'd made this account and then a few days after that I was contacted by Small Run on Blue Sky saying, hey, you want to like check out this thing called Small Run? And from that, I chatted with the owner, Aaron, and we chatted for a good long while. I mentioned already had an account. I then joined the Smarron Discord, which is pretty good. In the Seller channel, there are other sellers discussing the various ins and outs of selling and, like, maybe some new features that they wanted, but no real issues with Smarron itself, which was nice. I did mention to Aaron that there's a few small changes that I would like to see as a seller, and he added them as site-wide features within a day. It was just, it's like, what? Those features, like one of those features was the ability to change your story URL because I had messed up when I was setting up my site. And then another was to add a small handling charge to shipping quotes to cover the cost of boxes, labels, tape, things like that. Because the real-time shipping quote is just what UPS will charge, not like what it costs you to put it in a box. So I've been starting to move my products over to just a small run. I think in earnest this week and then next week, hopefully I'll have that. them all there. It has a Tindie importer, which is nice. It doesn't get all the info from Tindie, like say product dimensions, I noticed, but it's a great start. So look for all the links to my products to change to Small Run links in the near future. Nice. And if you're a seller on Tindie, give Small Run to try. It's easy to put a few products in as a test. It hooks up to Stripe or PayPal for payouts. And the cool thing about the way they've got it hooked up with Stripe, and maybe for PayPal, I don't know, but for Stripe, you get the money immediately because it like they're just acting as a sort of pipe through from the buyer to you. It doesn't sit in a disbursement pool the way it does with Tindie. So there's no like, am I going to get my money? Your money happens as soon as the as soon as the customer buys the product.
Paul
Yeah, it's too bad that Tindie ended the way that it did. It was something, it was sketchy all the way around. They should have just, they should have announced that it was being sold. And I understand they don't want to create a panic among all the sellers and everyone pull their funds out. So they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. But I think it's awesome that Aaron at Small Run reached out to you. You made a couple suggestions and bam, they were in a day later. That is just mind-blowing.
Tod
Yeah, yeah. And he's been doing that for some of the other comments on the Discord. And people are like, hey, can it do this? And as I've been looking back and reading the past Discord. And so I think he launched it at the end of May and it's the beginning of July. So he's only been around for about a month and a half or so. But he's already added a bunch of features just in that time from the launch time. So way to go, Aaron. This is great. So, Paul, what's your next one for this time?
Paul
You know, it's no secret that both you and I are fans of Bamboo Labs printers. I covered them in one of our first episodes, and Tod bought a printer earlier this year. As great as their hardware is, they're closed source, and they've been building their walled garden even higher, which doesn't make everyone super happy. That's where BamBuddy comes in. It's a self-hosted software solution for managing your bamboo printer on your own, totally bypassing Bamboo Labs cloud control. You can install it locally on Windows, and Docker is recommended for MacOS or Linux. You can also run it headless on a Raspberry Pi or a Synology NAS, which is how I'm planning to install it in the near future. You can run it headless because it all happens in your browser. There's no app and not even a slicer needed. It has that built in. The list of features it has is impressive. Just a few. It has tail scale built in. If you haven't heard of tail scale, it's a VPN-like solution that makes it super easy to connect to your computers from anywhere. By using tail scale, Bambuddy can do a virtual printer proxy mode allowing you to print from anywhere without having to set up port forwarding. It has an integrated slicer like I just mentioned. You can still use Orca Slicer or Bamboo Slicer, but you don't have to. It has a one-click slice button built in. And then there are the print management features, of which there are a ton. There's automatic archiving, duplicate detection, add a photo to document the print results or failures with notes. There's 3D visualization tools that use 3.js to let you inspect the models before sending it to your printer. And there's real-time monitoring using WebSockets, so you don't even have to refresh the page to see error messages or notifications. The real-time monitoring also includes a ton of stats about your printer, such as the nozzleware, filament consumption, and cost-eastern. analysis, a multi-printer dashboard for print farms, and a bunch more features. You can schedule prints, manage the queue, or even stagger a batch start. And then lastly, you can stay informed about your prints and receive notifications via WhatsApp, telegram, email, Discord, home assistant, and more. The list of features is crazy and it all runs in your browser. I know Docker can be a little intimidating when you first start using it, but I think I'm going to give this a try and install it in a Docker container on my Synology Now. check out their website. It's got a ton of info to get you started. Great docs, a demo, and even more.
Tod
Yeah, this looks pretty great. Like, one thing to know is I think you do have to put your printer into developer mode, which means I think it takes it out of the ability to use bamboo handy and like the normal sort of tools that bamboo uses. But it sounds like this thing incorporates and you can use it from your phone, all the features of bamboo handy plus more so you could do all the stuff that you normally want to do. and like yeah Docker is pretty easy you know it's much easier than the normal way of like oh install all these prerequisites on your Linux computer with APT or whatever yeah I should have mentioned the developer mode thing you're absolutely right that's a good call out I'm so glad to see stuff like this just because yeah I'm currently in sort of the love affair of like oh I can use bamboo handy and just go click click click and I can print something from my phone you know so like at some point that's gonna wear out I'm gonna be like I'm so frustrated. I'm locked in. I give him myself in like another month, maybe.
Paul
And now you have options, which is pretty awesome.
Tod
I have options.
Paul
What's your next one for us?
Tod
Do you remember the Space Cadet pinball game on Windows 95? Oh, yeah. It was the best part of Windows 95 to me. YouTuber CNC Dan is creating a physical version of the Space Cadet pinball game in a series of videos. And he's doing it all with 3D printed parts and easily acquired standard hardware. and he's making the plans available to everyone. No special pinball-only parts, just regular solenoids, transistors, optosensors, neopixels, the standard maker parts. But because Space Cadet Pinball was designed as a video game first, he's having some interesting engineering challenges mapping the table to reality. For instance, on the left side of the game, if you recall, there's this raised section with mini pop bumpers. But mini pop bumpers don't exist. So he's having to design those from scratch. and because that thing on the left side kind of like is above where the ball also travels underneath, he's having to figure out how to make these mini popmuppers very thin. So there's space for the ball underneath. But he's also designing 3D printable versions of the other common pinball mechanisms like flippers, spinners, knockdown targets, you know, so on. For a penball nut like me, seeing these mechanisms work is a lot of fun, like seeing them actual as things that he's printed and built on little test jigs. But it's also neat seeing how they have to be modified for both 3D printing, because there's design challenges of making a 3D print work like a metal piece or whatever. And also to fit the not quite real constraints of the SpaceCadet pinball table. Like I think he's building it at some slightly smaller scale and using a slightly smaller steel ball instead of a normal size like a 75 millimeter or whatever the standard size of a pinball is. As someone who struggled to do anything useful with solenoids, seeing these old pinball style making is, is adapted and re-engineered for modern use with 3D printed and it's got me interested in doing solenoid stuff again. So you might see a solenoid project in the future for me. So far, he's uploaded two 18-minute videos showing his progress. Each one is a lot of fun. He's not just showing the successes, but also when things don't quite work. It's looking like it's going to be a great build. There are links in the show notes for the two videos, but there's also links to a simulator if you want to play SpaceCredit pinball in your browser. And if you're really interested in SpaceCat at Pinball, there is a GitHub that has a decompilation of the source code, the original source code, from which there are many, many simulators for other platforms that have been made. So if you want to play SpaceCat at Pinball on your N64 or something, I think you can.
Paul
Nice. I think it's great when makers share a video and show what went wrong, along with what went right. It just reinforces. to normal makers that this is part of the process. You're not going to get it right the first time every time. So I just love that about the videos. Yep. All right. So what's your last one? After covering paracord and accordion in the last couple episodes, I've been wanting to capture all of my music listening to ListenBrainz now. I just think it's neat having a record of what I've listened to throughout the day and might play with some visualization with it down the road. But for now, I just need to capture my vinyl record listens. I updated my song matrix project that has a mic plugged into a Raspberry Pi and listens to background music and submits that to ListenBrainz. But I actually came across a better solution called Listening Post for MacOS, which coincidentally just launched a few weeks ago as I was getting into all this. It's a MacOS app that sits in your menu bar and once a minute takes a short sample with your Mac's mic and submits it to Shazam. Once the song is identified, it uploads it to ListenBrainz or Last FM or a couple different other providers. It's just under $20 US and it works flawlessly. If you're listening to music in the background, I definitely recommend this one. I then also created a couple of my own apps. First up, I made a small widget that sits in an eye frame that you can embed on any website. It just shows the last song you played, whom it was by, and the artwork. It's all hosted on GitHub pages so you don't even have to host it on a server. I also made an auto poster. After some trial and error and realizing that Listen to Brains only does a data dump twice a month, this aggregates your listens for the month and shows your top five artists that you listen to. And lastly, just because I like to overshare, if you use Blue Sky, I have an app that's self-hosted that automatically updates your Blue Sky profile with the last song you've listened to. So it's been real fun playing around with ListenBrainz. And don't worry, I don't think you will have to listen to me talking about this for at least a little while.
Tod
I love that you're cranking out these ListenBrainz apps. That's awesome.
Paul
Inspiration struck.
Tod
And they all just live on GitHub.io. They don't need any special installation or whatever. Yep. That was the goal.
Paul
What's your last one for us?
Tod
All right. So are you feeling bummed like I am? You can't build a gaming PC because of stupid component price spikes. Frustrated by the Steam Valvement. machine console has also increased in price. Want to finally get something useful out of the cryptocurrency fat a few years ago? If you don't mind doing some work, you can turn a $200 chunk of crypto e-waste into a respectable steam machine thanks to the BC250. Chris Persen, writing on the Aftermath.site is essentially a cut-down PS5. in a server card format. They were used to mine Bitcoin but are now no longer useful for that. Like the PS5, they are full of fast GPUs, and more importantly, they have 16 gigabytes of fast RAM soldered down in a way that makes it not easy to salvage. Thus, you can find them on eBay for about 100 bucks or around 200 bucks with an attached SSD. Chris's article goes into good detail about the difficulties of turning a server card into a desktop computer. There's challenges of cooling it and powering it, and getting Linux on it. Thankfully, there's a vibrant community of hackers with the power supply info, cooler designs, 3D printable cases, and detailed Linux instructions to help you out. The BC250 is well supported in Fedora and Bazite, that gaming-focused Linux distro we've mentioned on a previous episode. And it runs Steam great. And what about gaming performance? Hey, it's on par or better with the Steam machine at 1080P for most games. And then, then you realize that BC250 only has 24 GPU cores compared to the 36 and the PS5. But wait, actually it has 40 GPU cores on the board, but those unused cores are turned off and locked. This is usually done for many purposes so potentially failed chips can still be used. But the community has found out how to unlock these cores, qualify them to see if they're still good, and if they are, let you use them. You can easily get a 25% performance improvement just by writing a shell script. That's insane. Some people get lucky and get all 40 GPU cores qualified and usable. And this is before overclocking, which the BC250 is good on, going above its standard 1,500 megahertz to up to 2,300 megahertz. So I'm very tempted by the BC250. I'm also in the queue for a steam machine, and it's going to be a tough call when I finally have to put down money for it. I might end up going the BC250 e-waste machine instead. So is there anything else you have to add to it other than an SSD?
Paul
Is that the full cost all in is 200 bucks?
Tod
Pretty much. You have to buy the power supply and some fans. And so like, you know, maybe an extra $100 for all those things. I think for some ease of use, sorry, Chris's article goes into this. There's a little PCB to make like powering it on and off easier. Like it gives you a power button or something. But yeah, it seems like it's a pretty dang useful, useful little gadget. And no one wants it anymore.
Paul
And I'll fight anyone who says that 1080P isn't good enough that you need 1440. Trust me, when you're running 60 frames a second, you can't tell the difference between 1080P, 1440, or 1920. You really can't. So for that, the cost for performance is right on with this thing.
Tod
Yeah, no, it's so good. And I just love that it's like crypto e-waste. It's like, oh, finally we're getting something out of these stupid people. Yes.
Paul
Well, that's our show. For detailed show notes and transcripts, or if you want to order a free sticker, or want to follow us on Blue Sky or Mastodon, visit the bootloader.net. Until next time, stay positive.