Notices by James Brown (ancientjames@mastodon.social), page 3

I really need to get a hobby where missing my framerate target doesn't make me physically nauseous.

I've implemented parts of a content pipeline for rendering a scene on the PC and streaming it to this display, but writing video streaming code is so much less fun than playing with voxels that it may take a while to finish.
Here, I've stored the animation uncompressed on the display itself, and am updating it as fast as the Pi's SD card can handle. (Not very fast.)

I am having so much fun with this thing.

Help me Obi-Wan Clownobi

My target for this display is 600 rpm - lower than that and it's too flickery; higher than that and I can't refresh fast enough to get 400 voxels around the circumference without dropping to 1 bpc. I'm nudging 400 rpm here, and it's still pretty unfilmable and absolutely terrifying to be close to. I have to decide whether the overall approach is worthwhile enough to start spending money on aluminium and polycarbonate.

The other problem I have is that to sell the 3D effect I need to move the camera around a lot, so I'm going to have to put some effort into building a studio backdrop.

Slightly higher rpm, slightly longer shutter.

I had a panel left over, and I thought I should have another stab at an oscillating display. I wanted to give it an undulating motion and came up with what seemed like a nice linkage, but the end result looks like it was designed by Trevithick.

Latest flickery mess

Incidentally, those models are from Cheello's voxel Doom: https://www.moddb.com/mods/doom-voxel-project/addons/voxel-doom - It's a lovely mod, and makes Doom feel more like my memories of playing it than the real thing does.

Guess I’m doing a cone next.

Shiny! (Maybe too shiny. )

It's a nice fluid motion on the panel, but overall it doesn't bring me joy.

I rewired the back of the panel to tidy up all the loose flappy cables. It now manages 600 rpm, which is not too flickery.

There must be at least 6D here.

I don't know if this is a known technique, but I've developed the habit of printing screw holes too small, and then heating the screw to cut the thread without splitting the print.

(Sadly I haven't developed the habit of checking my hands aren't obscuring the camera on the first take.)

New display, new panels. I'm driving these ones using DPI on a Raspberry Pi, which is a handy way of wiggling 24 GPIO lines with precise timing and no CPU involvement.

The results I was getting with the new display were so much better than the original that I went back for another pass at it. Turns out there were a couple of stupid bugs limiting the refresh rate. The colour depth is now vastly improved.

I had the opportunity to give some live demos of this thing recently. It went over well, but the noise was a real killer.
I've reworked it to use a belt drive instead of the horrible 3D printed gear - before, it screamed; now it whirrs.

If you squizz your eyes at this, you can see the 3D.

If you have difficulty converging it, it helps to make the image really small and gradually enlarge it once your eyes have locked on.