I thought a quick little project this weekend would be to set up a little Bluetooth audio receiver on a Raspberry Pi.
I’m now onto my third Raspberry Pi having found out that both the 0W and 3 have issues with running Bluetooth at the same time as Wi-fi. So now I’m trying with a 4.
Maybe once I’ve got it configured and working reliably I can go back to the 0W.
I got irked with RPi after they happily employed a former policeman and covert surveillance enthusiast and couldn’t see why anyone would have a problem with that. So I looked into tiny fanless PCs instead.
The Atom x5-Z8350 box (4 cores at 1.44GHz) uses less power than the Pi3 it replaced, performs better, and can run the same mainline Debian x86_64 as all my other machines.
Ah yeah, I did see that.
I already need a spreadsheet to keep a track of all my Pis, not sure I really ought to be adding more SBCs to that list. 
Ooh, need to track down something like this. RPi are too expensive when you can track down the actual model you need
Been a while but finally got the first batch of components (for the inner rings) soldered and working.
Using an Arduino for the moment as it simplifies the power and comms for testing.
I didn’t progress much further with this, namely due to the realisation I’d be limited to fairly low quality Bluetooth codecs.
I shelled out for a neat little Bluetooth receiver. Slight problem being that the English manual doesn’t read very well and doesn’t seem to mention most of the features.
Going to do my best to figure them out and leave them in a review.
The results of a short soldering session where I added the remainder of the chips and a quarter of the LEDs.
All seems to be working nicely so onto the last 90 LEDs.
And that’s the vast majority of the soldering done:
Leaving power and comms at 5V (Arduino) for the time being. I do have the option for 3V3 comms (RPi) if I need it, but it’s more soldering.
I’ve noticed a lot less instability with this version. That’s either down to the extra capacitors or the fact that it’s not a rat’s nest of wiring.
I forget what this device is supposed to do?
I believe it is supposed to keep me distracted for minutes, perhaps even hours, while I stare mindlessly at it.
It’s a glorified LED matrix, except rather than being square, it’s circular.
It’ll predominantly be a clock but also a vehicle for pretty circular patterns.
Or if you want the in-universe (Battlestar Galactica) explanation, it’s an FTL Jump Countdown clock. Pesky Cylons.
You may or may not be pleased to know I’ve spent the afternoon writing animations.
Occasionally one of them won’t do what I expect but it’s equally lovely so I get a bonus animation.
I really need to figure out how to record them with fixed exposure, otherwise it feels a bit too much like a rave.
Obviously, a software emulator. 
This one feels a bit Flux Capacitor-y for some reason.
Larson scanners (or fish?):
Finally stopped messing around with animations and assembled the thing:
('scuse the low quality video)
You may have said somewhere and I missed it, in which case I apologise - how do you spread the light from each LED into those block shapes?
It’s a combination of the frame which makes a light-pipe for each LED and a diffuser (currently a piece of printer-paper) that sits in front of the black acrylic.
I’ve had my current phone for 5 years and I’ve never seen this notification before:
Admittedly I’ve only lately been using the non-default Bluetooth codec. Not sure why it’s taken a week or so to appear. Seems like you can’t dismiss it or even silence it like other Android notifications.
ADB to the rescue.
I recently bought up a bundle of Merchants Cove stuff because it was a great price and it got me some of the expansions that I was missing. Unfortunately, one of the expansions was missing 3 tokens – the Dragon Rancher’s “poop” tokens. The publisher offered to send me replacements, which is all good. While I was waiting for the seller to get back to me, I decided to do a little craft project with the pictures of the tokens that were provided by one of the designers on BGG.
I took the pictures provided by the co-designer and loaded them into Inkscape. Then I traced the outline of the token with a path, used a copy of that path to crop the image and left the other copy of the path in the file for later. I lined up the tokens and used a color dropper tool to create a full-bleed area around the token. I printed onto a bit of glossy vinyl sticker sheet scrap (was about half a page left… printer didn’t seem to mind too much about the paper running shorter than expected)
Then, I took the crop path and loaded that into (the awful) Cricut software and lined up the page on the cutting mat. This was made surprisingly easy by a) having done some note-taking on the cutting offset of the Cricut and b) using a alignment line on the printout to get it lined up on the cutting mat (cutting mat has a 1" grid; I printed a line at x=25.4mm and another at y=25.4mm)
Then I cut some 3/8" discs from a 1 1/2" poplar dowel on my bandsaw, and sanded them smooth. Then I traced the (not round) outline of the stickers onto the discs, and used a combination of power sanding, hand sanding and hand filing to put some matching contours in the discs. I applied the stickers and then sprayed (and sprayed (and sprayed (and sprayed))) top and bottom and all around with Mod Podge acrylic sealer.
I was immediately happy with the 3 smaller tokens, but I could never get the colors to pop quite as well on the largest token; I ended up basically ruining it by trying to get better acrylic coverage on it; I think I as able to mostly salvage it, but it’s definitely the worst of the tokens.
I would like to try again, but only if I can find some better art assets than trying to use the pictures/scans of the produced tokens.
