Attempting to continue to fill the blog: Projects, Haptics, condo’s, Voice Lessons, and gamer mental health
Projects
I’m finally revisiting working on my haptic compass design. I’ve changed microcontrollers, AGAIN.
This time I switched to the Adafruit bluefruit nrf52840 sense. This manages to combine a microcontroller with Bluetooth support and floating point calculation with a full AHRS ready set of sensors and a battery management portion, ticking off all the boxes I originally wanted for the project.
Also, while this board is out of stock, nrf52840’s are a dime a dozen. Also my previous IMU board, the BNO055, was out of stock and had been for a while. That said, I just looked and not only is it in stock, but it’s $10 cheaper than the standalone board of the sensors on the feather.
The reason I chose my previous sensor board was because it already had an ASIC on it to do all the quaternion calculations and just spit them out, but I found out that arduino already has an AHRS library that works with these sensors out of the box to spit out quaternions, as well as store calibration settings on the EEPROM.
I could just use my BNO055 board and an nrf52840 board but then I’d still have to get a battery management board. IDK, maybe I’ll work with both and make the code modular enough to work with whatever’s available. The Feather Sense was $40 and out of stock. the Feather Bluefruit LE is $25 w/ charging circuit. A LSM6DS+LIS3M 9dof feather wing is $20, or the BNO055 9dof is $30. While the BNO055 is the better board, I don’t know that I need that much accuracy.
Anyway, the goal of the project is a haptic compass using 4, up to 8, standard cell phone haptic motors and the IMU to vibrate north on an arm band. A ‘stretch goal’ is to also be able to link with a cellphone and allow GPS targeting to also vibrate at a different pulse towards a destination.
Condo’s
I’ve been condo hunting in southern California, and that’s as terrible as it might sound. How anyone affords any kind of property down here is beyond me. People selling repossessed trash filled crack houses for over a quarter million dollars. Finally found a place that’s literally just a ‘converted’ apartment for almost half a million dollars. Absolute madness, but at least if I get this place I’ll basically be paying rent to myself with the possibility of getting a return on investment, as opposed to paying actual rent in an apartment.
Vocals!
I’m on month 3 or 4 of vocal lessons, and while my vocal placement is already naturally really good, I’m finally learning music theory and proper ear training. IT’S FUCKING HARD! but also really fun. I’ve tried to do this on my own for years but youtube tutorials just never seemed to help. They could only answer the questions I knew to ask. So I’m legitimately excited for that.
I’ve got “Alfred’s Essentials of Music Theory Complete” and just got the CDs to go with it(which I’m promptly ripping and finding somewhere online to host), and I also just got “Easy Songs for the Beginning Baritone/Bass” and am in the very very early days of sight reading.
Gamer Mental Health
Negative self-talk in voice chat.
I can’t be the only person, but there are literally zero google hits. I have really bad negative self talk in video game voice chat. No one wants to listen to me berate myself all the time but I can’t seem to find a way to be constructive. Anyone else?
End
I’m trying to get back in the habit of blogging, or maybe developing the habit because I don’t know if I ever had it. I had a livejournal, but that just seems to be a historical archive of my poor mental health in my 20’s.