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I'm surprised that such a simple and limited chip has two analog I/O pins. Usually you only get digital on something like this.
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Aug 16, 2018 01:58
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That said, I've tried playing games in this stripe (SpaceChem, Human Resource Machine, etc.) and have invariably found that I, personally, would rather write actual programs than toy programs. I program to get poo poo done, so having to operate under artificial constraints is more annoying than interesting.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:53
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So what does that email conversation say? I'm not about to try to re-type the characters into Google Translate. I'm guessing it involves Joe getting raked over the coals for playing solitaire at work?
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Aug 16, 2018 22:39
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This is the kind of thing where I'd usually look into using memory chips. Like, you could represent the DRINK animation as 100, 010, 001, 010, 100, etc. Feed that to a digital I/O splitter and you're done...except that without an MC in the circuit there's no clock, so your animation would be crazy fast. Also the memory chip stores an irritating 14 values, while our animation sequence has a period of 4 values, so there's two values you'd have to skip somehow. Hell, the period of the entire pattern (click + drink) is 10. You could allocate 1 digit to the click animations with a NOT gate to cycle them, one digit for drink-0, and one digit for drink-2. But you'd need some fairly complex conditionals to convert everything.
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Aug 19, 2018 18:06
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Pierzak posted:Next stop: design a murderbot. acquired is a simple input that indicates the presence of a target. scream is a standard input that measures volume of screaming detected. stab is a standard output that controls stabbing depth of an attached knife.
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Aug 23, 2018 18:51
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It bugs me that you can use nops to precisely align instruction execution timing across two different chips. That doesn't feel very realistic to me.
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Aug 24, 2018 19:18
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You can optimize for different things. A category that's all about minimizing power requirements, one that's about passing more complex test scenarios, one that's for minimizing component counts, etc.
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Aug 24, 2018 20:17
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mercenarynuker posted:I know everyone is posting streamlined elegant solution ideas, but could we see some kind of burly, over-engineered, trashy solution to one of these as well? That's pretty much what the first solutions in each update have been. Maybe not as wasteful as I think you're imagining, but a straightforward, unoptimized approach to the problem.
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Aug 24, 2018 23:14
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GuavaMoment posted:Technical question here - how come your pngs have jpg artifacts? How are you capturing these images? There's an issue somewhere in here we can fix. I just zoomed way in on that screenshot and I don't see any ringing or fuzz -- or at any rate, no fuzz that wasn't introduced by the screen magnification. The screenshots look fine to me. 
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Sep 1, 2018 21:25
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Y'know what I want? A machine that will deliver a to-order sandwich made with bread that was specially baked just for that sandwich. It'd be a combination breadmaker and sandwich assembly bot. The only problem is that I've yet to find a bread machine that can turn out really high-quality bread.
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Sep 6, 2018 20:59
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Computer viking posted:The DOS days were somewhat similar, though: instead of writing a value directly to e.g. an LCD, you had a range of memory addresses that belonged to the graphics adapter, and could write values there to put text on the screen. The closest you can get on a modern system is probably on Linux (or a BSD), where you can print text to a console by having the appropriate values in your registers and prodding the kernel - or you can link your assembly with libc, and call on its functions to do it for you. (I honestly have no idea how you print to a windows terminal.) I hear that Racing the Beam is a good book to read if you want to know more about how old videogames got developed. ManxomeBromide's LP of Solaris also touches on the difficulties in getting things done on limited hardware. There's a lot of very careful cycle counting (like the tick counting in Shenzen I/O) involved if you want to do e.g. complex sprites on the Atari, because you have to drop new data into the right memory address on exactly the right cycle if you want the result to look visually correct.
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Sep 11, 2018 17:25
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Guys, you're missing the more obvious (and way cooler) explanation: they're building a spaceship! Aquaponics are clearly necessary for long-term survival in space, and so is EMP resistance if your device goes on the other side of the radiation shield.
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Sep 28, 2018 14:58
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megane posted:Where does Jie get all these parts? Does he just have boxes of obscure niche microelectronica in his office? I assume part of his job is sourcing suppliers. There's got to be massive web compilations of various chips different manufacturers make.
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Oct 2, 2018 20:42
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sincx posted:Why would robot cars not need yellow lights? You could set up the robo-cars so they don't start accelerating until a set amount of time after the light turns green, which gives opposing traffic a chance to clear the intersection. Hell, you could do that with human intersections, but it'd create too much of a gray area for people to be assholes in. If a robot's an rear end in a top hat, it's because you coded it that way and it's your own fault. Ratoslov posted:What kind of nutbar makes hexagonal intersections? Either you want to cut up more-than-four-entry intersections into 4-way intersections or smaller, or you build a roundabout. Hexagonal intersections only make sense if you're deeply invested in the automotive glass industry and trying to drum up business. Alternative interpretation: 3D intersections! Add a vertical passage running through the intersection and now it's six-way. I stand by my earlier spaceship claim. 
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Oct 21, 2018 05:13
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We can't discount the possibility that he's lying, but in the past our circuits have been part of a larger product still developed by our company. Like, someone had to design the buttons and casing for the sandwich machine, the LED layout for the vape, the speaker for the haunted plush, etc. ...we haven't heard from Joe in a bit, have we? 
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Oct 22, 2018 15:42
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I guess a submerged city also has room for six-way intersections. Maybe site it near a volcanic vent for geothermal energy? Still going to be hellaciously expensive, but maybe not as expensive as a spaceship would be.
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Nov 10, 2018 23:20
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Wow, things are getting complex. That's a pretty tough problem considering the constraints you're operating under. I seem to recall hearing of devices that can generate electrical power from impacts, which leads me to wonder if you could install some kind of micro-generator that kicks in when the wearer puts their foot down, and use that to run the chip / power the LEDs. The scale of power generated vs. what you need is sadly probably not a good match though. 
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Nov 30, 2018 23:01
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Carbon dioxide posted:In the long term this would probably even out, so it really doesn't matter which design you use (except for chip efficiency but that's probably much less of a factor than the robot's whole energy usage). And the design requirements just say Since the harvester can move in both the X and Y axes simultaneously, diagonal moves should be made whenever possible to take the shortest path. Both the red and blue design do this, just in a different order. My reading of the requirements is that the "whenever possible" is an immediate requirement. In other words, if from where I am I can take a diagonal movement that takes me closer to my destination both in X and Y, then I must take that diagonal movement.
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Apr 24, 2019 16:09
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AceOfFlames posted:I am an engineer and yet I never had any desire or inclination to pursue any "personal" project (i.e. something I am not paid to do). Am I in the wrong business? There are people who will say that you can't be a good engineer unless you're doing it in your spare time as well as at work. Those people have unrealistic expectations. One of the most critical aspects of engineering (or of any job, really) is maintaining your own mental health. You can't do a good job if you're burnt out or tired. And different people relax in different ways; relatively few will relax by working on personal projects.
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Apr 30, 2019 23:07
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AceOfFlames posted:I have no personal life either. I arrive at home utterly drained and do nothing. And yet I am definitely not as productive as my peers. I find myself procrastinating endlessly. I concur with RedMagus; this (work avoidance, exhaustion, no personal life) sounds like burnout. You might want to ask for advice in the Oldie Programming Thread.
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May 1, 2019 15:59
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Back on-topic: what I find strange about this whole thing is that you're still using MC chips for everything. They made sense back at the old company, where you were making cheap, mass-market products that had to keep the per-unit cost as low as possible. But surely when you're working with more specialized and one-off devices like a kelp picker or sushi robot, it makes sense to use a more generalized, flexible, and easier-to-program set of chips?
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May 2, 2019 01:17
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Yeah, I'm fine with a mind-machine interface that goes from mind to machine, with the only feedback being through conventional senses. That's a fairly straightforward variation on, say, a keyboard or a mouse. It's when the machine starts twiddling your neurons directly that I get worried. I don't trust software to not be exploited, and if you thought advertisements and malware were bad when all they could do is show you things and steal the data you'd recorded, imagine what they're like when they can make you experience anything and steal your thoughts.
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May 27, 2019 16:52
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Quackles posted:Overall, this project was kind of weird. It wasn't hard in the end - it was only difficult when I was trying to be clever about it. Once I just bit the bullet and hardcoded the patterns, it became really straightforward. This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way several times early in my career. I kept thinking "I write software, the computer does the drudge work for me" and would spend hours automating a task that would've taken me five minutes to do by hand the one time that it was required. Sometimes it really is better to do the work for the computer (or the MC, in your case), instead of the other way around.
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Jun 10, 2019 15:49
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This was a great LP, thank you very much for writing it!
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Jun 30, 2019 22:30
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Carbon dioxide posted:Thing is, I'm the kind of programmer who is more interested in the overall architecture (and in this case, the storyline) than in the nitty-gritty details, unless I have to write them myself. My issue is always that if I'm going to program, I'd much rather accomplish something significant than obsess over micro-optimizations. If someone came up with a game that was about coming up with good high-level designs, I would fully expect that the system they come up with for laying out those designs and then measuring their quality would be immediately co-opted by real companies for real work.
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Jul 1, 2019 14:45
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