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+ <item>
+ <title>Pipboy Prop Custom Apps</title>
+ <description>There's an official Fallout TV show prop. It's hackable.</description>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
+ <link>https://athene.gay/projects/pipboy.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/projects/pipboy.html</guid>
+ </item>
<item>
<title>Fallout New Vegas, 15 Years On</title>
<description>Let it never be said I can't admit where I was wrong.</description>
<link>https://athene.gay/diversions/musicivemade.html</link>
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/diversions/musicivemade.html</guid>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>The Return of the KFC Double Down</title>
- <description>OK this is a silly post but my friends asked me for a full
- review of the new kfc zinger double down. So here it is.</description>
- <pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
- <link>https://athene.gay/entries/thereturnofthekfcdoubledown.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/entries/thereturnofthekfcdoubledown.html</guid>
- </item>
<item>
<title>The Life and Death(ish) of Hentai Games</title>
<description>Once upon a time, I was a horny teenage boy. Now, I'm a horny adult woman.</description>
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/entries/srb2.html</guid>
</item>
<item>
- <title>Youbeat</title>
- <description>A while ago, I wanted to adapt arcade game Jubeat for home play,
- using a device called a launchpad.</description>
- <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
- <link>https://athene.gay/projects/youbeat.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/projects/youbeat.html</guid>
+ <title>The Return of the KFC Double Down</title>
+ <description>OK this is a silly post but my friends asked me for a full
+ review of the new kfc zinger double down. So here it is.</description>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
+ <link>https://athene.gay/entries/thereturnofthekfcdoubledown.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/entries/thereturnofthekfcdoubledown.html</guid>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <title>It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game...</title>
+ <description>... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10.</description>
+ <pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
+ <link>https://athene.gay/entries/danddgames.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/entries/danddgames.html</guid>
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<title>Athene.Gay</title>
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/projects/thiswebsite.html</guid>
</item>
<item>
- <title>FFXIV Plugins</title>
- <description>I currently maintain two silly little plugins for Final Fantasy
- XIV.</description>
+ <title>Youbeat</title>
+ <description>A while ago, I wanted to adapt arcade game Jubeat for home play,
+ using a device called a launchpad.</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
- <link>https://athene.gay/projects/dalamudplugins.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/projects/dalamudplugins.html</guid>
+ <link>https://athene.gay/projects/youbeat.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/projects/youbeat.html</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title>Miku Expo</title>
<guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/entries/miku.html</guid>
</item>
<item>
- <title>It's 2025 and I am playing a D&D Game...</title>
- <description>... and it's not Baldurs Gate 3; it is, however, equally 7/10.</description>
- <pubDate>Sat, 01 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
- <link>https://athene.gay/entries/danddgames.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/entries/danddgames.html</guid>
+ <title>FFXIV Plugins</title>
+ <description>I currently maintain two silly little plugins for Final Fantasy
+ XIV.</description>
+ <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
+ <link>https://athene.gay/projects/dalamudplugins.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">https://athene.gay/projects/dalamudplugins.html</guid>
</item>
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<title>Bringing Static Websites Back</title>
--- /dev/null
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html>
+ <head>
+ <meta charset="UTF-8" />
+ <title>Pipboy Prop Custom Apps</title>
+ <meta property="og:title" content="Pipboy Prop Custom Apps" />
+ <meta name="twitter:title" content="Pipboy Prop Custom Apps" />
+ <meta
+ name="description"
+ content="There's an official Fallout TV show prop. It's hackable."
+ />
+ <meta
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+ content="There's an official Fallout TV show prop. It's hackable."
+ />
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+ />
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+ <div class="main">
+ <div class="entry">
+ <a href="../index.html">Home</a>
+ <div class="title-block">
+ <a
+ class="blog-title"
+ target="_blank"
+ href="https://github.com/gnargle/pipboy-apps"
+ >
+ <h3>Pipboy Prop Custom Apps</h3>
+ </a>
+ <h3 class="datestamp">2025</h3>
+ </div>
+ <div class="content">
+ <p>There's an official Fallout TV show prop. It's hackable.</p>
+ <p>
+ OK, we're doing something a little different with this one. But
+ first the preamble.
+ </p>
+ <div class="title-block">
+ <h3 class="blog-title">The Preamble</h3>
+ <h3 class="datestamp">19/03/2025</h3>
+ </div>
+ <p>
+ So I haven't cosplayed properly in a while. I did it prettyu
+ regularly in 2023, but 2024 was a nadir for me menty h and
+ cosplay, with its ill-fitting, itchy fabrics that are not
+ designed with trans people in mind, was not gonna help that. I
+ didn't go to many cons, those I did I avoided being in cosplay,
+ yadda yadda.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Thing is, is I do actually really like cosplay, when I'm of the
+ frame of mind to do it. I like prop work. I like wearing the
+ clothes Cat has designed for me. It's fun when it's not autistic
+ agony.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ You may have noticed I've got mad into Fallout of late. See the
+ previous entry on this blog. I've loved Fallout for a long time
+ but never really considered cosplay for it, not really sure why.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ But this dive back into the series coincided well with me
+ wanting to get back into cosplay proper. And because I want to
+ do it properly, I've gone a bit all out.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ I've ordered a reaaaalllly nice vault 33 suit, with backpack.
+ I'm gonna dye my hair instead of wearing a wig, which is the
+ worst thing sensory-wise for me in cosplay.
+ </p>
+ <p>And, I made a Pip-Boy! Look at it here, it's pretty great!</p>
+ <a href="../img/projects/pipboy-homemade.jpg">
+ <img
+ class="blog-img-lrg"
+ src="../img/projects/pipboy-homemade.jpg"
+ alt="A photo of the home-made pip-boy in question. It looks pretty accurate but it is very very large."
+ />
+ </a>
+ <p>It's also <i>absolutely fucking massive.</i></p>
+ <p>
+ Wearing it is deeply uncomfortable and my arms get tired after
+ mere minutes, let alone the hours of continuous wear a con would
+ require. It's impractical.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ There is, however, a solution. Bethesda and 'The Wand Company'
+ produce a screen-accurate version of the tv series hero prop,
+ which normally wouldn't particularly interest me, as often
+ screen-accurate props are just display pieces and are
+ non-functional.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Props I use for cosplay need to have flare. I use LEDs to make
+ them nicer, or in the case of my own homebrew pipboy, I was
+ using a phone with an android app that mimics the Fallout 3
+ pip-boy interface, fully interactable. That's cool! And it's a
+ showcase!
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ But luckily this prop also actually works. It features a lot of
+ animations from the tv show, but more to the point, all the
+ dials on it function and are used to interact with it. It's
+ really excellent.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ It's expensive, though, and that alone wouldn't have been enough
+ to sway me. That is, until I did a little bit of digging and
+ discovered that
+ <a
+ href="https://log.robco-industries.org/documentation/pipboy-3000/"
+ >the firmware is customisable, supporting custom applications
+ out of the box.</a
+ >
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ That's basically a red rag to a bull for me. I
+ <i>love</i> writing software for esoteric things. I mean. Look
+ at the projects on this website. Two of them use a midi device
+ and one of them is a plugin for a videogame. I've also written
+ plenty of software for and interfacing with embedded hardware.
+ This is simply made for me!
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ But if you click through the link at the top there, you'll
+ notice that there's basically nothing in the repository right
+ now. That's because, dear reader, we're gonna be exploring this
+ hardware TOGETHER. IN REAL TIME.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ There's a sequence at the start of the social network where zuck
+ liveblogs him making facesmash. A lot of what he writes is
+ despicable, and the concept of facesmash is awful, but I dfo
+ love the idea of liveblogging a project. It's not something I
+ have really done before. So we're gonna do it with this one.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ It's a good candidate. There's some documentation at the above
+ link, but not a lot, and there's lots left to explore in terms
+ of how the system works. The author of the above linked article
+ makes an assumption, for example - that the graphics context
+ should be one bit per pixel - but I don't think that's actually
+ the case. There are different tones in the monochrome screen,
+ and it doesn't look like they're made using dithering. So how
+ are they done? That's jsut one of many questions we will explore
+ together.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ My ultimate aim here is to put something like the in-game stats
+ screen together. When I was setting up my homemade pip-boy, I
+ put some funny and personaly jokes into what stats and perks I
+ picked - being able to replicate them here would be really nice.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ There's a long walk between here and there, though, so strap in.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ However, let's get one thing straight here - I'm not a teenager
+ in a university dorm running on monster energy and rage. I'm a
+ 31 year old woman with a full-time job and a bedtime.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ So the 'liveblog' will not be me hacking away at this until 4AM,
+ oh no no. I will be working on this off and on over the next few
+ weeks most likely, and keeping this post updated as I go.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ I am sure you will agree that this is a much healthier choice.
+ </p>
+ <div class="title-block">
+ <h3 class="blog-title">Beginnings</h3>
+ <h3 class="datestamp">19/03/2025</h3>
+ </div>
+ <p>
+ OK, so, the device itself. This is a boutique prop with
+ functionality that, while not an afterthought, is certainly not
+ economically worthy of any kind of custom silicon. This is a
+ collector's item, there's only a few thousand of them made, best
+ to use something off the shelf.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ And, indeed, it does! An STM32 to be exact, an absolute
+ <i>classic</i> bit of IC hardware. The STM32 series are ARM
+ microcontrollers, architecturally similar to the hardware in
+ your common or garden smartphone. ARM is wonderful because it's
+ somehow managed to succeed in all 3 corners of the 'you can only
+ have two' triangle: it's [relatively] quick, it's cheap, and
+ it's Good. It also sips power relative to bigger, more
+ traditional chips, but that's true of any microcontroller,
+ really, so shouldn't really be counted as a strength here.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ I was a smidge surprised to see an ARM chip in this - if this
+ were a homebrew project you'd expect probably an arduino, an
+ RP2040 or maybe a teensy - but this thing does have some
+ relatively complex graphics to drive.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ I imagine the main reason this was chosen, however, was hardware
+ video decoding capability. Most (maybe all?) of the show-derived
+ animations are video files on-disk that are just decoded and
+ straight to the graphics context. You can argue this is cheating
+ if you want but to me it reeks of sensible design. Instead of
+ requiring the programmers to design and animate elegantly in a
+ very inelegant context (we'll get to that, believe me), you get
+ the raw files made for the show, re-encode them, and plonk them
+ on. Easy!
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Additionally, the raw power the STM32 chip here has allows for a
+ less conventional (but friendlier-ish) development context. This
+ chip uses
+ <a href="https://www.espruino.com/">Espruino</a>.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Espruino is javascript for microcontrollers. Some of you may
+ have just hissed, and you'd be right to. Javascript is, pretty
+ infamously, horrible. It's heavy and unwieldy, it's untyped,
+ it's messy, it's functional-but-not-quite. If you want an
+ example of how not to design a programming language, you need
+ look no further than javascript. Yet because it runs in-browser,
+ it is the most common language in the world. Go figure.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Some of the words in that paragraph may have you convinced that
+ javascript is a bad fit for the lean, high-performance world of
+ microcontrollers, and really, you'd be right. But that hasn't
+ stopped the most insane people alive, javascript monodevelopers,
+ from crowbarring it into them anyway. And so: Espruino.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Cards on table, I've never used Espruino before today. I've
+ touched basically every other microcontroller going, and
+ everything else uses C++. I'm not a great C++ programmer, but I
+ can get by.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Comparative to my javascript, I might as well be the Bach of
+ C++. I do not like promises, I think throwing all your code to
+ 'some indeterminate point in the future' is a horrendous choice,
+ but it's what we have to work with here, so we go with it.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ The thing is though, in this case, this is actually a fairly
+ massive strength. Because Espruino is a JS interpreter, it will
+ run any valid JS you throw at it. This means you can actually
+ program it interactively from a serial connection, which is
+ pretty snazzy. Here's me throwing some debug code at it purely
+ from the terminal and seeing it display the results in real
+ time.
+ </p>
+ <a href="../img/projects/pipboy2.jpg">
+ <img
+ class="blog-img-lrg"
+ src="../img/projects/pipboy2.jpg"
+ alt="A photo of the prop pip-boy displaying the word 'TEST' on its screen."
+ />
+ </a>
+ <p>
+ It <i>also</i> means we can dump the firmware with one line from
+ the terminal and, instead of being binary and unreadable, it's
+ in regular-ass javascript. Holy shit!
+ </p>
+ <a href="../img/projects/pipboyfirmwarescreenshot.png">
+ <img
+ class="blog-img"
+ src="../img/projects/pipboyfirmwarescreenshot.png"
+ alt="A screenshot of some of the pip-boy firmware's built in function names."
+ />
+ </a>
+ <p>
+ As mentioned, the guy in the link above has already done this to
+ some extent, but I want to dig through a bit further and
+ understand a bit more what's going on. There's some very
+ interesting functions here that I wanna figure out.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ For legal reasons, I can't share this firmware wholesale in the
+ repo, so you won't be able to see precisely what I'm talking
+ about. As we go, however, I'll screenshot various parts of the
+ code so you, reader, have context. Like the above!
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Anyway, I think that's where I'm leaving it for tonight. It's
+ 11pm, after all. More tomorrow.
+ </p>
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ </div>
+ <iframe class="embed-links" src="../shared/links.html"> </iframe>
+ <iframe class="embed-footer" src="../shared/footer.html"> </iframe>
+ </div>
+ </body>
+</html>
projects / gnargle.github.io.git / commitdiff
