bekopharm

joined 1 year ago
 

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/24694356

This video is how I gutted my already modified old Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS joystick of my ViperPit and made it work again with the help of an Arduino Pro Micro. This flight stick (and also the other peripherals) do belong in a museum but where’s the fun in that? I modified it and now it’s a generic USB joystick that works on any recent system. I focus mostly on the 5x5 button matrix since this is the hardest part to understand. In the end are a few minutes of playing X4 Foundations with it to give it a good test run. Now it just needs some oil for the creaking 😅

https://makertube.net/w/qrqqZLr2QvJFjCwyNzzAmp / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYiPFDpHwmc

 

This video is how I gutted my already modified old Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS joystick of my ViperPit and made it work again with the help of an Arduino Pro Micro. This flight stick (and also the other peripherals) do belong in a museum but where’s the fun in that? I modified it and now it’s a generic USB joystick that works on any recent system. I focus mostly on the 5x5 button matrix since this is the hardest part to understand. In the end are a few minutes of playing X4 Foundations with it to give it a good test run. Now it just needs some oil for the creaking 😅

https://makertube.net/w/qrqqZLr2QvJFjCwyNzzAmp / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYiPFDpHwmc

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What are your experience?

My last "real" Windows experience was with WinXP and every time I have to touch Windows at the PC of a customer, which happens sometimes when the stars align, I feel like the first human that ever walked the earth.

I have no idea how people get any work done on a system that is constantly nagging for attention, popups, restrictive Enterprise environment and non descriptive error messages. Nothing in this world seems to make sense or is presented in a unified way. Every dialogue or sub system seems to be it's own isle stemming from another decade of tech. The experience for someone who is simply not used to Windows any more due to missing exposure is horrible.

Heck a Mac feels alien to me too but in the end that's still a system I could deal with given some time.

Mebbe I'm spoiled by stuff like systemd, PipeWire, Wayland, btrfs and all that candy we get nowadays on a Linux desktop. I'm not even talking about privacy or FOSS principles at this point. Just the fact that the system doesn't get in my face with ads or AI or "very important reboots" seems to be a revelation in 2024.

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

for some reason they wanted me to have slack

I get similar requirements from school and kindergarten nowadays. They want me to install weird apps for communications. Last school had an online portal on the web and mail. That was a no brainer but these apps?

Hello Waydroid.

Not gonna taint my own phone with this stuff. That includes WhatsApp.

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 2 weeks ago

pvt NoPhone

Love this bit. Gonna steal it :D

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 2 weeks ago

Either this or there are defined "core hours" where everyone must be available.

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 weeks ago

Accidental UI design - as usual 🤣

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 3 weeks ago

We used to pipe all sorts of 💩 to /dev/dsp just to know how it would sound 🤓

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 24 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Jul 91? Now I feel old.

 

I made a snap purchase. Kinda a shame that the seller gave up this hobby. Sold everything for an apple and an egg. It's a ViperPit loosely based on a F-16 with a wild mix of panels and hardware. Nothing of this is functional though. Yet.

Winter may come! I wonder if I can convert it into a VF-0 (or mount my VF-1 panel on the frame) 🤔

Man… the feel of those lovely switches and dials alone ❤️

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 1 month ago

Thanks to GitHub this wonderful article, that made me opt for another domain for my recent project a year ago, is now… drumroll under an .io domain too: https://tamouse.github.io/blog/politics/2019/10/02/why-is-the-io-domain-problematic.html

Irony much.

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 1 month ago

The situation is really bad for consumers. Even with a Pi-Hole and a dumb TV and something like a Fire TV stick (they tend to send lots of telemetry too and apps like Toggo will nag you to oblivion to consent to data mining - if an app asks at all that is).

I'm slowly building up a Jellyfin library and yeah I jumped the hoops to find a non-smart TV. Wrote about it at https://beko.famkos.net/2022/11/27/on-non-smart-tvs/ and settled with a https://www.homex.eu/u55nt1000.html that ticked all my boxes:

☑ ~~cheap~~ affordable ☑ 4k (UHD) ☑ ~~dumb~~ non-Smart ☑ HDMI ☑ 55″

No idea about it's tuner though[1] alas it's not really any longer available in any market space today and I hope it will not die on us any time soon or the quest to find a new one starts again 🤓

[1] We've a decent external receiver that does all the work and HDMI juggling but even that thing is on the WiFi for software updates and in-house streaming but from what I can tell it behaves at least, which is probably just because it's old by now.

[–] bekopharm@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 1 month ago

Nö. Das war pervers teuer. Und das noch von nem Laden, der nur Zeug verkauft, was sonst keiner wollte xD

 

Random trivia; VR is so 90s 🤪 - this is a photo of an offer for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VFX1_Headgear for ~500USD in 1997. Apparently it was compatible with games like Mech Warrior 2 and did already feature stuff like head tracking for compatible games.

 

This works way better than I expected. This is a static image test for a HUD on my home cockpit using a dead cheap beamsplitter made of plexiglass and a smartphone.

This works by placing a smartphone (or really any kind of fitting display) below it. The beansplitting characteristic allows some of the light to pass through and will mirror whatever is on the phone display below it. The image is inverted though so a HUD mode requires an already mirrored display mode. There are apps for this but since I use HTML for all my GUI stuff I can probably just use CSS for this task. Most of the work was finding out how to get Firefox to do fullscreen (which can be requested via JS from a user interaction - so it has to be some sort of clickable element) and get it to keep the display always on.

A more advanced build would use a beamsplitter glass. This thing here is "designed" for cars and is according to the review a really bad product because it doesn't work well with day light or likes to slide around. All problems my desk does not have, of course, so I got this on a whim to see how it would look and I'm mind-blown with the result already 🤓 What do you think?

Originally noted at https://beko.famkos.net/2024/09/06/15629330/

 

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21415025

It has been a while that I tried Star Citizen. With the new Neuralnet Tracker plugin (AI haha) for OpenTrack we get head tracking without annoying IR LEDs or reflecting stripes just by reading the webcam video feed. This is apparently fast enough to try head tracking without a dedicated head tracker nowadays. And all that on a Linux PC. Took some fiddling but the concept still works. What a time to be alive.

Demo: https://makertube.net/w/groS1wpAhP8XYE75vJwX32

HowTo: https://simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/

 

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@fk_tech shoved my nose on Monocoque today, which appears to become an alternative to Simhub: Cross Platform device manager for driving and flight simulators, for use with common simulator software titles. It supports e.g. bass shakers, tachometers, simlights, simwind through USB and Arduino serial.

And it works on Linux PC: https://github.com/Spacefreak18/monocoque

See a demo on https://www.youtube.com/live/GVghB4aMEmY by @fk_tech

I also jumped into their Matrix room (#simracer:matrix.org) and they seem like a friendly bunch too.

Mebbe worth to keep on the radar.

Edith says: Shorter videos to get the gist:

 

Found this on my daily YT journey for home cockpits and I can get behind that channel slogan :D

Pretty wild how much know-how is laid out there. Extra kudos for using FreeCad instead of Fusion360.

 

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/18462516

I implemented a proof of concept to add the FaceTrackNoIR (or OpenTrack) protocol into FreeSpace 2 Open on Linux PC. Apparently only TrackIR and FreeTrack (both Windows only) are supported so far. Still needs some fine tuning but I'm really happy with that single day coding frenzy considering that I didn't touch C++ in years.

I never did create a merge request so far. I'm still going to but it's really low priority for me rn :-/

This is a demo of the implementation with Diaspora: Shattered Armistice, a BSG mod for FreeSpace 2 Open. It's also on YT should you fancy that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRB8lRV1m54

 

Back in 2023 I started a new game in #Satisfactory where I did set out (on a whim) to build the #BattlestarGalactica – and fair warning: I never finished it. I found some measurements of this iconic ship from the #BSG verse online, which is apparently something like 1.44km x 551m and converted this to 179.6 x 68.9 Satisfactory Foundations (look Mom, a game made me do MATHS again).

Finding a spot with enough space was a task on it’s own and I settled for the West Coast in the end. This is so close to the edge that the game starts to kill the player because the map ends there. This is also a Vanilla game with no mods.

After laying a square for the proportion and being somewhat satisfied (haha) with that I started refining the outlines. This took ages and some mad image editing skills to scale photos with correct proportions and overlaying them with a grid in the Gimp editor. Ah well not really but you get the idea.

The goal was to build a mega factory inside the hull working with the given layout. Vehicles and trains would pick up all required resources and bring them in via the fighter decks. I kinda imagined what could have happened if the Galactica crashed on a planet after her last journey. Using the powerful engines to power machines that would aid in starting with a settlement program or something like that, while the former ship itself would get decommissioned and transformed piece for piece.

I am rather happy with the result, even without ever completing this. My gaming focus shifted a lot and with the announcement that no further early access updates would happen I kinda lost interest in the project. I am not expecting to complete it once the release drops. That’s okay though. I am still looking forward to said release.

I mean after ~850 of casual hours I kinda have seen it all. Best early access ever – and yes all on a Linux PC – as usual for me 🤘I’m very curious what else the devs will come up with for this title. Anyway, here are the rest of the 16 screenshots. This shows more of the inner ship including the various power plants and reactors.

Thank you Coffee Stain Studios for making such an entertaining game. I enjoyed every hour of it and despite this being basically an endless grind game it never felt like grinding at all. Heck, thinking of all the possible ways to transport, collect and divide stuff is endless fun for me ❤️

Mebbe something for https://lemmy.world/c/bsg too 🤔

Originally posted at: https://beko.famkos.net/2024/06/27/and-they-had-a-plan/

 

I had the chance to play Flight Of Nova (https://flight-of-nova.com/) for the first time today. This was on my wishlist for quite some time now. Dived in blind and had no idea what to expect. 3 tutorial missions later: Oh boy… this is hard. I can see myself sinking many hours in this.

Anyway, as usual, my focus is on interfacing with my home cockpit (or simpit) and while there is no ship telemetry [yet?] I was able to get it running just fine via Proton and with my DIY headtracker using OpenTrack. Hats off, seldom that I see a game that detects my joystick just fine, has great ingame calibration, offers me a windowed mode and a bunch of ultra width resolutions without having to resort to hacking config files or use gamescope to resize it ❤️

Head tracking is, as usual, TrackIR only so far (I guess the native Linux PC version does not have UDP in place here but I couldn’t check due Steam refusing to download another version today). Anyway, you can see me fooling around with the buttons and do an A+ crash landing in the end – sunny side up 😆 Not too shabby considering that this was my 3rd landing at all.

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