MICO - TV head

Im. So. Done. i woke up today and worked on the. damn thing. But its all over now. everything is okay. the storm has passed. its smooth sailing from here.

halfway through coding did i realize…. i have not tested my code on the actual hardware ONCE. THE WHOLE TIME, i had been using an emulator for the rpi-rgb-led-matrix library.

what a lesson to learn. 5 hours in and the code doesnt work on the rpi! shocker! did you know the pynputs library is lying to you? did you know it doesn’t work on a headless environment? i had to rewrite lots code, bodge things together very quickly until something worked.

other than that, i made a few README.mds, getting things ready for shipping, edit my CAD file, hand-sawed a few too many parts to fit, erase any mention of a BMS in the repo because the only one I had puffed up in smoke. but now things are ready to ship. i’m so happy

lots of off camera mining…. gluing cable management e.t.c., lots of agony as well

but things are so closed to finished, im so glad

Finished the final assembly!!! Finished software!!! Finished BOM!!!! All thats left is the README as well as a working demo!!!!!!!!!!! Omg

started doing the firmware!!!! to be honest its just some light python running on the rpi so does that really count as firmware?

i think with how little time there is left for stardance, ill just settle for some minimum viable ship that i can settle with, then ill just ship the project by this point. im so tired

ive had a convention so i needed to finish this in time, haven’t had the time to write any devlog at all

in the end i couldnt make it in time but hey, ive assembled mostly everything, things are working, i have some vibecoded placeholder code that ill replace with my own code soon enough, and some art i drew myself

turns out…. its too front heavy, unbearably so.
im too burnt out to work on this for now, ill probably move on to something else in the meantime

Its all polishing……. Its ALL polishing…….. Always refining and tweaking and adjusting

My timeline has 122 features and at this point its such a jumbled mess that if I adjust anything at least 30 other things will break in propagation
I hate parametric CAD, but whatever this is is almost ready to print. Finally

spent 30 minutes just fumbling with onshape’s draft tool. just to make. cat ears. thats all </3

this is actually starting to come together now, spent a good part of the evening just trying out random ideas on onshape and seeing what sticks, turns out the best way to work is not to overthink too much

next i will probably need to set up the github page, write a readme.md and all

created a mount that holds the actual display to the damn bezel, though the sketch looks kind of cursed (address me, the cloud of mirror constraints says)

i find that I get distracted on small details instead of drawing the rest of the owl. (/ref) case in point, much of the hour I spent making on this was spent arguing things like: do I design the fillets straight into the sketch or just apply it after extruding? so I think it’s best if I give myself a roadmap I need to follow.

1. decide how I want it to look, and decide quickly, so that I’ll have time to work on the technical details later.
2. the technical details :) how will I assemble different parts together? how do I plan to actually see out of this mess?
3. software. well here, I’m not too sure yet. I’ll figure something out.

here’s to future me! maybe next devlog i’ll add some design flare to make it look less like a box of plastic and more like my lovingly personalized box of plastic.

Spent a few hours fighting onshape, trying my best to turn the ideas I have in my head into exact dimensions and constraints and 2d sketches. CAD is SO tedious, I swear. But at least I ended up with what I wanted, a roughly TV shaped helmet sized to fit my own head.

Well, after two hours I have something that looks a little bland :/ The design I had been hoping for was something more inspired with Nintendo’s FAMICOM. But I think I’m getting ahead of myself?