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Plots

I’m plotting again after an August hiatus. The new Gondola Plotter is super quiet, so nice! I’ve made a few refinements to the software stack of course… The usual.

I found a bunch of really cool engravings in some very old books I found in the abandoned house. These books are worthy of some discussion on their own much like the old vinyls, but this isn’t the time.

I got ChatGPT to make me a few SVG handling tools that are really incredibly well done and will help me shed some of the apps I was using. With SVGs there really is not a single app that does all the things, so I drag a collection around just to use 1 or 2 of their function. AI is helping me write scripts to explore algorithms and replace more trivial functionality from apps.

Case in point: this super cool recursive inset fill algorithm to turn fills into something a plotter can do.

I’ve been wanting to write this one for a while, but I knew it’d take me a good few days to nail it. That got turned into 30 minutes with AI. Jaw dropping. I love the effect as it echoes a lot of bored fillings of shapes I’d do as a kid getting bored in class. The cookstove above is filled with it, but it’s far too dense at this size and so it really looks like a actual fill rather than a particular effect.

A lot of my tooling these days is Python which has good libraries for handling SVGs. I used to dislike Python for their dumb purist move from 2.7 to 3 which wasted everyone’s time, and because they had managed to reimplement library hell. But I have to say venv is a successful redress to the later.

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Looks Like the Temp Sensor

also got EMP’d. That’s kind of crazy to think about. I suppose this isn’t the most reliable electronics but it kind of gets you thinking about what else could be affected. Or what we could lose with a closer strike.

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Thunder & Solar Monitoring

I lost a voltage sensor the exact minute thunder struck very close to the house, Nicole happened to be filming because it was an impressive mix of rain, hail & thunder. Does thunder create some sort of EMP? Could be a coincidence but the timing is really suspicious. Sorry I mean sus.

dead sensor :\

Oh, well I’ll just buy a replacement.

And fuck, I forgot we screw over allies and suck up to dictators now. Phidgets come from Canada, I never found any comparable alternatives in the realm of current sensing that goes beyond small hobbyist projects. And I don’t really want to relearn/recode a whole new deal anyway. I just want replacement parts.

Extensive searching pointed to robotshop.com having Phidgets parts in stock. So I grabbed spares for everything to get a few thunderstrikes ahead and buy me a few years. For the top 3 parts, I grabbed everything they are left.

The battery voltage sensor is actually important these days as automation uses it to make decisions on which circuits to turn on/off. So for a few days until I got the part, I moved the panels’ voltage sensor to the battery. Sensing the panels is informational and has no real consequence on function. With anything solar, I have appreciated having spares at hand so it was time to spend some money and make that true for the monitoring side of things which we became more dependent on over time.