Active Projects
Apothecary Tome
This is one of my active projects on a private repo. I will add pictures in due course, need to take good ones first
This is my apothecary tome, for the Profound Decisions LARP: Empire. It contains the following items inside a 3d printed case.
- Waveshare 2.7" e-paper disply with 4 buttons
- Waveshare RP2040-PiZero
- Some random Raspberry Pi LiPo power board
- Floral storage boxby loadinglevelone on
I took the design for the floral storage box and designed a whole new internal box that supports the e-ink screen buttons, has heatserts to hold down the RP2040-PiZero and PETG front covers for the electronics and a storage space below for cards.
The internal box was printed in bone white PETG, with my own ridge design, and thick .32mm layers to give a worn page look. The outside cover is printed in a marble PLA.
Now, this is where things get technical, and, in my opinion, interesting. Waveshare had not produced a driver for their 4 button e-ink display when used with their own RP2040-PiZero device. There were C and Python drivers for other devices, such as the full Raspberry Pi, including fast and partial refresh, as well as some ESP boards, and a few others. So, I started writing a Rust driver, based on the C driver.
Not too difficult since it's just pushing data to registers across a bus, passing the right keys and buffer for 4 LUT (4 shade greyscale) and a fast refresh 1 LUT for text rendering and scroll. I got a prototype up and running, but it wasn't quite right, took more experimentation and trial and error.
What does it do so far? There's a top level 4 LUT image gallery, hardcoded into the Rust binary at compile time. A few pretty pictures but not the images from the PD wiki, wrong aspect ratio most of the time. Pressing any button brings up the list of all potions in Empire, but only what is publicly available. My known potions have a [K] indicator, which I can go in and see the ingredients, and the mechanical/RP effects as well as the lore.
A long press on the second button down, takes me into a potion identifier tree, so that I can use the tome, and look at the IC description, and dial down to what the potion in question is.
There is one more feature that I am working on, but it won't properly be ready for E4, not the way I want anyways. Right now, I control Empire.145multimedia.co.uk which is discussed next. Essentially, I take the ingredient prices for the event, do some interesting maths, and come up with a price to sell my potions for. Usually I will be undercutting the Apothecary Guild while still making enough profit to make me happy.
At least that's the theory. I have been building my herb stockpile over several events, but have yet to actually sell many potions. Not to worry, I have a Grand Plan™
empire.145multimedia.co.uk is a React/TypeScript frontend, Rust backend and a MongoDB database. It is both a learning platform as well as an apothecary tool, primarily for me. I can input the event prices, what potions I know, and what the costs of the ingredients are. It then does multivariate analysis for a few scenarios, like what the most profitable potions I can make are, and what potions to make, maximizing for spread of different potions, or using the most of my stock.
It also calculates the prices I should be charging, cutting close to my replenish costs plus a service fee, lower than what the Apothecary guild charges for the same. There are additional pages for entering and tracking the prices for each event. I still need to get hold of the backlog of Thrifty Squid in order to populate the whole history. There are, lastly graphs that track price fluctuations as well as the min/max of each component for all time.
This project lives on a local Kubernetes cluster, and the long term plan, which should work, is to have a Raspberry Pi with me that I can boot up, hit a wifi access point on my phone, update the prices, and then flash the RP2040-PiZero in my apothecary tome, with that day's prices for all the potions I can make.
If I am feeling adventurous, maybe for next year, I will be able to manage all this on the tome without needing to tether to the Pi, but I don't have the time for that right now.
Performance apothecary
I have seen several apothecaries wandering around Anvil with a tray of potions, hawking their wares. That is not for me. I used to be the Wandering Samosa, but between battles, and minor mobility issues, I can wander no more. I will still have my samosas, but I will be mostly staying put in my tent but if you want to buy a potion, I won't just take your rings and give you a lammy/card. I will make it right in front of you, keeping some of my secrets. (as long as I have it in stock of course, rather than running off to GOD and back)
However for E1, I will have a proper show for you. A crown, to come and see the Mysteries of the Apothecary. A demonstration for a small group, showing the wonders of how the Caza Dí Pérez Apothecary prepares their potions and what gives them a special kick. I have most of the components I need to start building the impactful presentation, but it most certainly won't be ready for E4.
Dead Projects
This is a list of my dead projects. I am moving to a new repository, so they may be blank if you have a peek, but I will be uploading them.
Cyberduck
This is my own implementation of a
Cyberdeck. The goal is to create a portable device that can
access the internet. Except my use case was suposed to be offline, command line only interface. I started with a
Raspberry pi, Ansible, a few other tools, but the original has suffered serious bit rot. This is something that
I actually want to recreate, so I'll update the new repo as I bring it back to life.
MQTT Blinds
This is a mix of software,
hardware, and 3d printed parts. I mothballed it when I switched to
IKEA FYRTUR blinds. I have moved house since even this change to a proprietary solution. It was all in the
interest of home automation, using Home Assistant installed in a
vm on a home server. This was a fun project, learning the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol and learning that
the S in IoT stands for security. And yes, there is no S.
ArduAssist
This is a project for a minimal
PID gyroscope assistance for radio controlled airplanes. It's super jittery and I crashed the plane it was supposed
to go in. I still have the pieces. This is part of one of my long term, dream projects. I want to make my own Radio
Controlled plane, including a controlled camera.
The idea was to get the plane up high, turn on the gyro stabilisation, aim a camera down and capture video. But nowadays anyone can do that with a cheap drone and get better footage than I could. I currently have a drone that I am using to do basically the same thing.
NB 21 X Rapidstrike
This is a software and hardware modification for an old
NERF Rapidstrike. I was working on the software and hardware with a screen, burst fire, all the goodies.
Never got it past a prototype board before the kids decided they didn't want to do NERF anymore. I like the idea of
bringing it back now, but I need to find a newer blaster that can take upgraded motors, or go whole hog and retrofit
a 3D printed blaster.
Some of my other projects are for 3d printed things and I will showcase those.