This category contains experiments and tests, which for me usually means messing around and playing with a particular concept, technology, device or whatever. May or may not contain actual “lab” tests.
Like a year ago I made myself a nice little desk clock that has worked fine since then. But recently I revisited the project to do certain improvements. For starters I wanted a smaller board so I could fit it inside an enclosure. I also wanted to power the clock from a rechargeable 18650 battery and add […]
I love DIY/soldering kits, and thanks to online marketplaces like eBay I’ve been able to purchase and assemble a number of them for the past few months. One of the last ones I got was a very basic but useful function/signal generator, whose only problem was that it required a power supply with +12V/+5V/-12V rails (it also arrived already assembled despite being […]
In my neverending quest of improving my homemade PCBs, I discovered that adding a soldermask to my boards is actually not a hard task, thanks to a relatively simple process that involves UV-curable paint. Now, while using the sunlight as a UV source should work just fine, I decided that it was time to build a proper UV […]
So a time ago I purchased a cheap USB Logic Analyzer from eBay that works great with a PC, and it’s been really helpful to debug several projects to date. It uses the Logic software from Saleae as hinted by the label on it, although I am not sure if the device is supposed to be a cheap knockoff […]
So recently I had to design a relatively convoluted system with a database that communicates with a hardware controller board and a RFID reader. Among other things, the system has to respond to several commands issued from a web frontend over HTTP, and report the status of each sub-system, sensor, etc hopefully in JSON or similar web-friendly format. For […]
Cutting PCBs down to size for each project has always been a problem for me. I don’t have a bench saw, so I’ve been doing this by hand until now. Despite the number of boards I’ve made, I still lack the dexterity to do perfectly straight cuts with a regular hacksaw, and my success with other manual methods has […]
A while ago -and after a couple of trips to our local “flea market”- I managed to get my hands on a fully working vintage Atari 800XL. It took some tests and soldering work, but I ended up with a fully working 800XL with a XC12 cassette deck (I even got a defective cassette deck that it’s mostly […]
You may remember the small soldering fume extractor I designed a while ago. It has worked really well since I built it, and it’s made my soldering work a much more pleasant experience. However, during the time I’ve been using it, I’ve discovered a small aspect that could definitely be improved. Because of the way it […]
Continuing from my previous post on randomness, I’d like to talk about non-uniform distributions, which certainly don’t get all the love they deserve. When people talk or think about randomness in games, they commonly think about fair distributions. And I know we spent a lot of time in Part 1 actually trying to achieve perfect uniformity because it brings […]
DISCLAIMER: This is a rather long post on the topic of random numbers, so …uh, sorry for that. I want to talk about a couple of interesting things related to randomness and its many nuisances especially when applied to games. But before we get to that I guess I’ll introduce the basic notions for those of you who are not […]
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