I had experimented with MR on Pico 4 but the resolution, image stitching, and controller tracking were not ideal. Since my code-free tool kit doesn’t support Meta 3 MR yet, I am going back to native OVR development for this experiment.
Even me can tell it was out of tune. The first prototype was based on a scale found on the internet. I decided to made one myself. I found out there are tuning apps available on my android phone. After testing a few free ones, I eventually found Tuner – Pitched!, it was free and didn’t have the complicated free trail model. I tasted it with a piano first, the app worked very well. My scale turned out to be very different than the one I used in the first prototype, and it sounds so much better! Maybe the scale I found on the internet was made for a different Otamatone model?
Okay, now I got the basic down, kinda, I am going to challenge myself with Le Festin from Pixar’s “Ratatouille”. The Cola Original Taste cover was super inspiring and made an impression of the song on me. Here is 10 hours of it.
“Since TMRCies were known for their creativity and ingenuity Digital was kind enough to donate to TMRC the first PDP 11 to appear at MIT; this made the Club the first MIT student group to ever have a computer! Soon TMRCies combined the operation of WECo’s donations and Digital’s PDP 11 to create cab assignment and switching though the computer. The computer also allowed the implementation of ‘phone operation’ – that is, switches could be thrown via the telephone system within the club room! (This phone system, to be named MaRoto, was also a TMRC customized item.)”
“Here’s what I found: the building was hastily-constructed of plywood. It leaked. It had bad acoustics and was poorly lit, inadequately ventilated, very confusing to navigate (even for people who had been working there for years) and was scorching in the summer and freezing in the winter.”
Occupants of Building 20 in 1963 (from Staff Telephone Directory, compiled by MIT Institute Archives) Army, Military Science Campus Patrol (20C-128) Data Processing (20C-220) Ice Research Lab (20E-206) Industrial Hygiene Lab (20B-245) Lab for Nuclear Science, linear accelerator (20D-014) MIT Press (20B-120) Model Railroad Club TMRC (20E-214) Occupational Medical Services (20B-238) Physics Labs Research Corporation (20B-111) Research Lab of Electronics
PDP-1 attached to a model railroad after its retirement to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1968.
“The PDP-1 that originally went to Bolt, Beranek & Newman to be used in a more formal environment than at MIT was eventually retired to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1968 during my own tenure there and was connected to a model railroad. It still had SpaceWar! as the primary program. (J.A.N. Lee, ibidem, p. 272)”
Posted by the user NoLand Notably, the MIT wasn’t the only university which featured a model railroad, which also leads to a few confusions. E.g, in this context, we have to point out a couple of photos that are frequently distributed with the tag line “The PDP-1 at the Tech Model Railroad Club.”
Here’s one of them and even the CHM has it under the title “History – PDP-1 at the Tech Model Railroad Club” in its catalog.
There are some details that don’t add up. Notably, the PDP-1 was never at the TMRC and there wasn’t even a possible time window for this to happen. As it turns out, this is at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1968, and the person seen operating the PDP-1, which was indeed used to control the layout seen in the foreground, was J.A.N. Lee, Head of the then new CS program. The machine seen in the picture, is the PDP-1B production prototype that was originally installed at BBN in 1960 and was once used for Ed Fredkin’s pioneering timesharing system.
(Marginally interesting is that, while the machine had originally a detached operator’s console, this was now mounted to what looks like the integrated paper tape reader found on the production models, which it seems to have acquired over the years and which promotes a somewhat deplorable impression regarding the state of the computer, as if dismantled half-ways. BTW, the PDP-1 is the white (or rather cream colored) cabinets seen in the background of the photo. What’s balancing on the combined paper tape reader and console assembly may be a paper tape punch, as indicated by the rails around what looks like a slot seen at its top. The tape punch is the vertical slot seen at the right of the top front panel of the production models. — And, yes, as the machine retired to UMas, it was found to still have a copy of Space War in its non-volatile core memory.)
And, to close the circle, the image first publicly appeared (with a correct tag line) in a review of Steven Levy’s “Hackers”, the very book that popolarized the notion of the TMRC. This review was written by the same J.A.N. Lee, we see in the photo, and is found on page 271 of the Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 7, no. 3, July, 1985 (J.A.N. Lee, “Reviews: Levy, Steven. Hackers”, pp. 270-272).
When I was reading Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai (DRAGON QUEST –ダイの大冒険–) as a kid, I had always fascinated by all the magic artifacts in the story. The magic bullet gun (魔弾銃) was my all-time favorite.
The gun belongs to Maam (マァム), one of the main protagonists in the story. It takes form of a gold-colored large-caliber single-shot pistol. There are a total of 8-10 bullets depends which version it is. For each bullet, a sacred stone that accumulates magical power is embedded at the tip, and by touching it and chanting a spell, it becomes charged with magic. The charged bullet can be loaded into the pistol from the the back by opening the tail cover, one bullet at a time.
After the defeat of Flazzard (フレイザード) on the island of Bulge, large firepower was needed to save Princess Leona (レオナ姫) who was frozen in ice by a forbidden spell. Because of this, Dai (ダイ) charged the bullet through his dragon emblem (竜の紋章), and although he was able to shoot it and melt the ice, due to the recoil from using a bullet with more power than the allowable amount. The gun barrel breaks in half. Badak (バダック), the self-proclaimed “King of Inventions,” tried to repair it, but it was broken beyond repair. Badak said, “Avan (アバン), who created this gun, was a genius.”. The Magic Bullet Gun was no more which is a pity.
There are 2 major gun visuals. The biggest difference is the design of the trigger area and handle. Little torn here, because I like both designs. I am going to focus on Gun Visual No. 2 for this round because I had boxed out a prototype a while ago.
V3V3
This is designed specifically to with M5Stack system. I did hack it a little so I can use the B port for both a limit switch unit (SKU: U145) and a Neopixel ring. I used a RFID 2 unit to detect the bullet. In my first iteration, I had put the unit flat on the button of the bullet chamber. It doesn’t detect the RFID tag at all. Now I have it stand vertically and it works beautifully.
I don’t have solution for sound effects to be built into the gun, but I am going to try the thing I learned from the Chiba Hogwarts — send sound to a Bluetooth speaker. Take advantage of M5Stack’s built-in Bluetooth and connect it to a Unity app that plays the sound effect.
Assembly
[Sound Testing Video]
千葉ホグワーツのハリーティッカー
The next thing I want to improve is the battery life. M5stack Fire comes with a 500 mAh battery bottom and it doesn’t last long. I am planning to create a type C port at the handle and attach one of those mini 5000 mAh power bank. That will provide about 10 times more battery life that what I have now.
Not all pins on the Leonardo and Micro support change interrupts, so only the following can be used for RX: 8, 9, 10, 11, 14 (MISO), 15 (SCK), 16 (MOSI).
“… addForce apply the force at the center of mass.” “simply cheat and do both a AddForce and Addtorque, then you have simple control over your inputs without having the headache of doing proper physics computation for achieving your controls.” “the other option is to use “atPosition” property, this will in effect apply a self force but not from the center of mass and thus imply a torque” http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Rigidbody.AddForceAtPosition.html
