New and Exciting

dougw said:

Are you into VR?

Yeah, I bought a HTC Vive, original, back when bitcoin originally boomed some years ago, and this year since everyone's picking up the Quest 3 I was able to afford a Vive Wireless Adapter second hand, so now I also enjoy VR wireless! (except for a battery bank). It's required a little bit of modification because the adapter overheats! It seems intel and htc originally designed it only to handle the throughput of the original Vive, but with technology moving along as it is, the battery can run it for longer and it can push a higher resolution, so to handle it, it gets very, very hot. 80degC+ and it shuts off. With a bit of 3D printing and an active fan, 30-50degC. It's pretty good, I always preferred the tracking of the Vive ecosystem. I managed to get the Valve Index hand controllers too, which have full hand and digit tracking. I've tried tinkering with the leap motion for hand tracking, but the 'drivers' to get it to work aren't fully there, and most VR interfaces expect you to have buttons on the controllers, where as you don't for your hands.

dougw said:

Are you into computers?

I picked up a couple of Pi 5's, I intend on using the PCIe output to then use a PCIe to PCI adapter and either plug in an old PCI graphics card, maybe a Voodoo 1 for laughs, or a PCI soundcard which no longer has supported drivers on Windows, such as an old Soundblaster Live 5.1 which has a pretty good sound chip on. Something to play with. And the additional one will likely upgrade my PiHole come proxy and DNS server.

dougw said:

Are you into AI?

I went all in and bought a GeForce 4080 with the ethereum I mined on my 3080, then sold off the 3080 and found that hey, I can run stable diffusion pretty well on it! I've also tried to run my own LLM locally, which kinda works, but doesn't entirely in a way that's like OpenAI's ChatGPT, the guides that are available out there kinda suck and it's confusing. I'd frankly like to train my own dataset to use in stable diffusion or an LLM a like but again, there's no real decent tutorials on making the training sets, which is annoying, I'd like to create art from my own styles like some music videos do.

dougw said:

Are you into communications technology?

I ashamedly have a stockpile of SDR like tech that I haven't picked up yet, I have a HAM Radio shield for an Arduino, a HackRF, and a ChipWhisperer, along with some RTL-SDRs that I'd like to make antenna for to receive satellite signals, it's a mixture of not quite having the energy to work with them and not having my HAM Radio license yet, getting it has been quite awkward.

dougw said:

Are you into gaming technology?

I've been having fun with the Steam Deck. I've been learning and having a bit of a hard time reverse engineering the BIOS for it, which is on a winbond flash chip, and decompiling and rebuilding its UEFI BIOS, to mixed success. It's annoying because the BIOS is a proprietary InsydeH2O BIOS and the open source UEFI Tools software doesn't quite support it because it's "too new". Valve Software removed functionality from the BIOS, such as being able to set RAM timings and the GPU and CPU clock frequencies with hidden form browsers that were unlocked, but have now removed from recent BIOS versions, and I'm trying to work out how to put them back in. It's very much a dark black box, and people who have worked out how to work with it gatekeep the information. It's also been fun to benchmark it and analyse its thermals, because it's an 'embedded system' kinda like working with the Pi, it has a very fixed scope for optimisation and getting the most out of it.

dougw said:

Re you into retro electronics?

I recently repaired my Vinyl record player, though I still need to determine why it has intermittent interference that seems to be on every revolution of the turntable. I did at least manage to remove a lot of the noise being produced to have a cleaner signal, and record from it into Audacity using a mixture of USB soundcards, but having to use a battery powered laptop to prevent some kind of ground loop interference. I'm a stickler for audio.

dougw said:

What is on your wish list?

I'd like a decent oscilloscope, along with a small training course on how to use *that oscilloscope*. I want to be able to observe and reverse engineering communications protocols, or be able to replicate them / emulate them on microcontrollers, I'm thinking handshakes that some games consoles do for their games controllers.

dougw said:

What courses do you need to take?

HAM Radio courses, I would probably benefit from some kind of electronics course, but also programming assembly to be able to better decode and understand BIOS/firmware hex dumps.

I am curious if VR headsets cause you any discomfort - like dizziness?

Only in certain circumstances, such as:

- The refresh rate is lower than 90hz

- The frame rate is lower than 90fps

- I'm dehydrated

- The rendering suddenly stops and the rendered frames freeze, it is very disorientating

When the frame timings are a mess, and the refresh rate and render rate isn't 90hz and 90fps, then sometimes when I remove the headset I have an after-effect of motion sickness where I have a dull headache and I feel nauseous, which lasts with me for a while.

Typically though I'm perfectly fine and I can use it for hours on end.

Only in certain circumstances, such as:

- The refresh rate is lower than 90hz

- The frame rate is lower than 90fps

- I'm dehydrated

- The rendering suddenly stops and the rendered frames freeze, it is very disorientating

When the frame timings are a mess, and the refresh rate and render rate isn't 90hz and 90fps, then sometimes when I remove the headset I have an after-effect of motion sickness where I have a dull headache and I feel nauseous, which lasts with me for a while.

Typically though I'm perfectly fine and I can use it for hours on end.