Today I learned how to make PCBs. I didn’t invent anything here, this is all pretty well known by the PCB-making community, but it’s not well-known to me. So I taught myself a bit!

The first part was the design an electronic circuit. I decided I was short on time, so I grabbed an existing schematic.

Next, I downloaded KiCAD, and recreated the circuit there. I found this video tutorial very helpful to learn kicad.

Next, I made the actual PCB layout.

To my surprise, after a little jiggling I got it down to a one-layer design.

That means home-printing would be much easier. No having to line up the two sides carefully.

I printed out the image on paper (backwards) on my toner printer, and taped it to the copper-clad PCBs.

First, I tried laminating it. Almost no ink transferred, and the paper came off easily. Then I tried ironing it, but the paper stick to the iron and not to the PCB. The tape melted on the iron. For both, I dunked them in water after, which is supposed to help loosen the paper.

Next, I tried the standard advice–sand the PCBs (I used 320 grit) and use glossy paper. This time, both pieces of paper stuck very well. I was wary about the iron coming off again, so I just left it on place on the highest heat–this worked fine for adhesion, but I had to iron out wrinkles at the end. The laminated piece had lose edges, while the ironed piece was on there totally flat.

I tried peeling off the laminated paper–oops! It peeled back and most of the ink stayed on the paper. I think if I took it off more carefully, it would have worked.

I picked at the ironed paper a bit, but it didn’t budge. I let it sit in dish soap for a while so the paper would fall apart. The first hour didn’t do anything.

Meanwhile, I made an order at PCBWay. It’s still under review.

Edit: after some advice from a friend, I peeled off this paper more aggressively, and scrubbed it off. The ink was fine. It doesn’t look great, but I think this is mostly the wrinkles during transfer. It’s a little blurry, I’ll have to do a third attempt before I try etching.

For today’s hack-a-day, I meant to clone the Hillsfar lockpicking minigame. Instead, I spent all day just extracting the sprites. But I had a nice chill time, so it was great.

Edit: See the updated post for the finished game.

Here’s the original minigame:

Here’s my spritesheet:

I made it by splitting up screenshots:

Today I got a variety of modern A.I. tools to work in a python library. This one is mostly install instructions, but it was useful for me, at least.

I took a day off after.

My conclusions were:

• Speech synthesis runs at 400x realtime on CPU.
• Speech recognition runs at 0.4x realtime on CPU, 60x realtime on GPU.
• Generating chat at 0.05x – 0.5x realtime (3-30 wpm) on GPU.

I didn’t get image generation working on my allotted time.

My friend Kragen and I wrote a little bytebeat synth tool. You can mess around and have fun. Demo here, code is on github.

A simple screensaver made in my raytracer. Code is on github.

I made a small game called Doodlemoji Alchemy, together with my friend Jennifer, as part of Hack-A-Day.

You can play it here.

You combine elements to make something new. Sometimes you get an old element:

Sometimes you discover a new one!

Today’s update is a short one. I ported my raytracer from day 02, to the Nvidia GPU: ha3k-06-raytracer

The visuals are pretty much the same. Incidentally I discovered the striations on the ground disappear if we increase the floating point precision.

Render on the GPU is 30x faster (0.05 fps -> 3 fps). That’s still not very fast.

I didn’t get video working yesterday, or anything else visually new. I will call this one a failure overall, because I have nothing interesting to show off. I learned stuff and made progress though, so it’s not so bad.

Here’s a working video!

Today I wrote a simple raytracer. A raytracer is a very simple way to draw excellent graphics. For each pixel, it follows an imaginary “line” out from the viewer through that pixel into the computer world. Then it colors the pixel based on what the line hits. Unfortunately, it also takes a lot of computing power.

Mine is based on the explanation (and code) from “Ray Tracing in One Weekend“, and the code from “My Very First Raytracer“.

The motivation for this project was to learn how to make things run faster on a graphics card. I quickly realized (before I wrote a line of code) that I’d need the basic raytracer to be its own project. Having it run faster will have to be a job for another day!

Today I chose to write a web version of a word game my family has loved for a long time, but which is sadly out of print.

It is meant to be played multi-player, but you’re welcome to try it out single-player online. Have fun!

Source code here

I made an animated HTML + CSS cheatsheet. This took me about three days. It is not really intended for beginners. It contains stuff I frequently forget myself.