Retro Challenge 2015/7: Post-Mortem and project notes...

Current Project State

For this Summer's Retro Challenge (2015/7), I worked on a small widget that lets you use an Amiga mouse, Atari ST mouse or Atari-style Joystick.  I was successful in building it and having it be manually configurable.  There's a shell based interface that you can use to select which input device and output style is used.

All of the code for this project as well as further and future documentation is available at the project's github repository.

There are a bunch of things that I did complete during the "challenge"...

• Arduino Leonardo based firmware with simple direct connection to a single D9 male connector
• Two versions of the hardware, one quick and dirty, the other optimized for the parts I had.
• Designed to use minimal external parts - just the Arduino board and a D9.
• Serial interface shell to configure which device it is
• Amiga Mouse (fully tested)
• Atari ST Mouse (fully tested)
• Atari Digital Joystick (fully tested)
• Serial interface to select which output the joystick provides
• Mouse movements
• WASD keypress input
• Arrow Key keypress input
• HJKL keypress input
• etc.  (support for MAME, Stella, Vice, etc)
• "Explorer" to experiment with input device auto detection algorithm (which does work)
• Amiga 500 keyboard input header (incomplete)
• Amiga 500 to Amiga 1000 keyboard adapter (to RJ-22 4P4C telephone handset jack)
• Documented Amiga keyboard adaption 
• Documented Amiga - Atari ST mouse differences
• Documented other D9 joystick pinouts (and how they relate, etc)

There are two features that I did not complete before the end of the month...

First of all, I was unable to get the keyboard support working before the end of the month. I was having a hard time with it only to realize it was a power issue.  The keyboard was consuming more power than my widget could provide.  It will require a secondary power supply to give enough oomph to get it working.  I also was unable to read from it once I hacked in some power.

Secondly, I had designed an algorithm to autodetect between the three different supported input devices, but I was not able to integrate the code in before the end of the month.  At some point I'll mix it in, and it will switch the kind of device it will be based on analysis of the signals (and signal pairs) of data coming in when it detects "motion".

Next Steps

At this point, I'd like to take the codebase as it exists now, and change the program flow to do the auto-detection of the device type, and then do the "appropriate" thing with it.  "out of the box" it will just "do the right thing" when devices are plugged in. Namely:

• Amiga mouse becomes USB HID Mouse
• Atari ST mouse becomes USB HID Mouse
• Atari Digital Joystick gets configured to send STELLA keypresses (arrow keys, etc)

I will implement this at some point, perhaps during the next Retro Challenge.

Animatronic Avian: Sizing up a skull

I was realizing for a while that I could easily determine the size of the bird I need to make for the "animatronic avian" project.  There are photos of José the Macaw, alongside of a "reference human".  This reference human is a known 5' 10" tall.  Let's call him "Uncle Walt".

Based on a few photos, and general human proportions, we can estimate heights of various unknowns here... (These are all estimations so I'm sure they're off by a little bit, but that's ok for this project.)

Uncle walt is 5'10" tall, or 70".  The average human being is 7.5-8 heads tall.  Therefore, his head is approximately 8 3/4" tall.  Yes. Walt Disney's head was 8 3/4" tall.

I found an image with Walt and José the macaw, where Walt's head is 100 pixels tall.  To be fair, it could have been the "barker bird" rather than José. Anyway, in the same image, José is 135 pixels tall.  Some simple fractional math from here (which I won't do here since I don't want to spend 30 minutes figuring out how get Blogger to display math stuff) yields that the bird is 11.8" tall from bottom of feet to top of head.  Since this is all estimations, I would say that the bird is between 11 3/4" - 12" tall with feathers and fuzz and such.

Now that I have the proportions, and the sizing for this documented, I can proceed to learning how to use the laser cutter at Interlock and design an internal structure a la boat ribs and stringers.  I made a boat using this technique back in high school out of balsa wood and MonoKote that worked out well. This time, i'll use some 1/8" wood of some kind instead.  I also plan on doing 3d printing for the beak, at least for a form to use for vacuum forming, or perhaps as-is.  I haven't figure that all out yet.