pixel cat coffee break.

While I'm at it, why not a spreadsheet-based sprite editor (that also generates a PICO8 Education Edition URL from the data), using conditional formatting to color cells by the PICO8 palette?

(this will make zero sense to anyone who doesn't use PICO8) Here's a weird hack-- I figured out a way to write tiny #PICO8 animations and games on my phone (if bored waiting in line, on the train, etc) , by creating a spreadsheet-as-light-IDE that translates the code into a PICO8 Edu Edition URL as I type.

An hour or so with #PICO8 on a winter afternoon.

I do think it’s worth playing the original (and its DLC) first though, for story reasons and callbacks even if it’s not necessary for the puzzles. What a delightfully bizarre collection of episodes.

I’m really enjoying the adventure / deduction game “Rise of the Golden Idol”, the sequel to one I played a few years ago when checking out modern takes on point and click adventure games. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2716400/The_Rise_of_the_Golden_Idol/

Yeah, I'm playing Balatro, scores are getting out of control.

@krystman -|>:(-

Early video game IP licensing… pull the plunger and try to get the longest centipede of magnetic balls to join…

I’d said “good enough” for my little keychain embedded dice roller back in May, but then I found the time to do a cleaner package with buttons…

Seen in a 1982 programming guide:

I partly bought a 3D Printer to make cases for little electronics side projects… but then I clearly had to do a new electronics side project to make a humidity logger for my 3D Printer filament storage…

@krystman This 240x135 SPI TFT https://www.adafruit.com/product/4383 though I bought it already integrated into the “ESP32 Reverse TFT Feather”, just minor resoldering. I think I’m hitting the limit of how fast I can update the display buffer w/ Python’s vectorio, I’d need to go lower-level or more clever to animate polygons faster, but clearly I need to do some experiments!

Packaged ('good enough for now') my little Feather-based handheld die roller.

(I haven't been using Mastodon as much these days, but occasionally check it to see other people's projects)

Heat Death of the Internet. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this only-slightly-exaggerated description of what life on the internet is like in early-mid-2024. https://www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-of-the-internet/

And in other hardware project news, I just received a custom-fabricated ASIC in which I designed a ~200 logic gate circuit a year ago (a spin on the Game of Life applied to a 7-segment display), and it works!

(this was one of the 250 tiny designs in #TinyTapeout https://tinytapeout.com/ combined into this custom chip fabrication run to amortize cost, each of which fit within a ~0.15 x 0.17mm subset of the chip)

Thanks for organizing, @matthewvenn

And in case the video clip in the previous post isn't working, a quick photo. Now I'm working on power draw testing and entering low-power deep sleep mode between rolls...

A board game I bought was missing a special die, so clearly the solution was to prototype a little battery-powered die roller (just a few-hour project building on the @adafruit "ESP32 Reverse TFT Feather")

Well that was mind-bending -- just finished a one-week software workshop where I wrote a compiler from scratch.

That is, something that parses text, transforms it into a data structure representing the logic of the program (abstract syntax tree), and then through ~15 successive transformation steps (each written as its own small Python program) gradually converts it into assembly language.

The things I do for fun... but seriously, I learned a lot and it was like solving a complex 3D puzzle.

@PlumpCat Oh great, thank you— I only checked adafruit’s direct stock and did a quick web search before posting this, but didn’t check distributors.