`@ozoned` interviewed me on my home cockpit on a live stream via his #Owncast instance at https://stream.ozoned.net/. This is a more condensed version of the stream that is still just 1h shy. We’re going over almost every feature of my Primary Buffer Panel and I explain how everything works. I also decided to add various photos, slideshows or video snippets during the talk only sections so things don’t get too boring. Sometimes that even complements the talks 😄
Ever wondered how to start your own DIY #homeCockpit / #SimPit on? It’s easy. Just watch this stream 🤓
So I started taking a closer look at the various panels I got with the old #ViperPit, which is a challenge in itself, since not everything has a handy badge telling me what it is. It’s also not like I’d have a clue in the first place. Figured out that this one apparently belonged into a #Panavia#Tornado but I don’t know the exact model yet. It was installed in the rear cockpit on the left side of the front panel and operated by the Weapon Systems Officer and is apparently no longer in use since ~1990. It’s safe to assume that this thing did see action and was closer to space than anything else I own.
Side view of the buttons array
Next was finding out how this thing is wired to see if I can convert it into a button box for PC gaming. The segment displays look pretty straight forward and I’ll definitely need some multiplexers to drive them but that has a low priority. The switches can easily be checked with a meter but thanks to @kranfahrer@mastodontech.de I was able to track down some wiring diagrams as well. Turns out these are not also very old but apparently rather pricey too? Someone mentioned an eBay offer for whopping 300 USD for a single button – which is insane to me 🤯
Backside of the Tornado WCP showing beautiful cable lacing.
Speaking of wiring: The backplate may be missing but some of the original cable management is still in place. This is where we can see the rather beautiful cable lacing, which is used in avionics for bundling together wires with waxed nylon or linen cord in an environment with lots of shaking and vibrations. No I didn’t know this before and would probably have ignored it but A Hornet’s Nest just released a video about Cockpit Cable Management where he talks in detail about this technique. Great channel!
The lamp used in one of the buttons is not even LED yet
Another question was for what voltage the lamps are designed for. Each button comes with at least one lamp. This is a rather old fashioned and not a LED yet (and in fact LED replacements are rather expensive even). This specific one is the model OL387 rated for 28V DC and 40mA. Apparently this all is up to military spec MIL-S-22885 and bright enough to still be readable in sunlight and comes with high duty cycles before it needs replacements – so it will probably last a lifetime in my man cave 🤓
This video is how I gutted my already modified old Thrustmaster F-16 FLCS joystick of my ViperPit and made it work again with the help of an Arduino Pro Micro. This flight stick (and also the other peripherals) do belong in a museum but where’s the fun in that? I modified it and now it’s a generic USB joystick that works on any recent system. I focus mostly on the 5×5 button matrix since this is the hardest part to understand. In the end are a few minutes of playing X4 Foundations with it to give it a good test run. Now it just needs some oil for the creaking 😅
Back in 2023 I started a new game in #Satisfactory where I did set out (on a whim) to build the #BattlestarGalactica – and fair warning: I never finished it. I found some measurements of this iconic ship from the #BSG verse online, which is apparently something like 1.44km x 551m and converted this to 179.6 x 68.9 Satisfactory Foundations (look Mom, a game made me do MATHS again).
Finding a spot with enough space was a task on it’s own and I settled for the West Coast in the end. This is so close to the edge that the game starts to kill the player because the map ends there. This is also a Vanilla game with no mods.
After laying a square for the proportion and being somewhat satisfied (haha) with that I started refining the outlines. This took ages and some mad image editing skills to scale photos with correct proportions and overlaying them with a grid in the Gimp editor. Ah well not really but you get the idea.
The goal was to build a mega factory inside the hull working with the given layout. Vehicles and trains would pick up all required resources and bring them in via the fighter decks. I kinda imagined what could have happened if the Galactica crashed on a planet after her last journey. Using the powerful engines to power machines that would aid in starting with a settlement program or something like that, while the former ship itself would get decommissioned and transformed piece for piece.
I am rather happy with the result, even without ever completing this. My gaming focus shifted a lot and with the announcement that no further early access updates would happen I kinda lost interest in the project. I am not expecting to complete it once the release drops. That’s okay though. I am still looking forward to said release.
I mean after ~850 of casual hours I kinda have seen it all. Best early access ever – and yes all on a Linux PC – as usual for me 🤘I’m very curious what else the devs will come up with for this title. Anyway, here are the rest of the 16 screenshots. This shows more of the inner ship including the various power plants and reactors.
Thank you Coffee Stain Studios for making such an entertaining game. I enjoyed every hour of it and despite this being basically an endless grind game it never felt like grinding at all. Heck, thinking of all the possible ways to transport, collect and divide stuff is endless fun for me ❤️
Apparently there is _nobody_ selling a 40cm blade for the G40LM40 / 25157 40V lawnmower by #Greenworks outside of the UK – or claims a shipping time of seven months! Is this the result of Brexit?
Well fck this. I ordered a 41cm blade for the G40LM41 / G24X2LM41 model on a hunch. This one was available. Looks like the fastening bolt is the same. Could confirm this when it arrived 4 days later.
Sadly it didn’t fit (no security clearance) – which was expected, of course. The fix is rather simple though. At least when you’ve an angle grinder.
And what do you say… perfect overlap of all the bends. This will do. Attached it and went for a test run depleting a whole battery (rechargeable, I’ve 4 of the big 4Ah suckers for this one because you know… grass).
If my guess is right this may be the last blade I could obtain for this lawnmower. What a shame. It’s doing fine for years and I really like the battery version. Less noise and no fumes are always a win in my book. It won’t stay though if replacement parts become such a pain in the… neck.
I like my #Gnome desktop but some things really drive me mad. I recently switched to an AM5 board (yeah yeah first world problems) which came with an integrated #bluetooth adapter. Which sucks. Badly. Dunno if it’s the driver or interference from the board itself or due to the case shielding the signal. I don’t really care as well. It can however not be deactivated in the UEFI settings.
I’m using a BT adapter plugged in via USB for years now and moved this over to my new system. It works _excellent_ even with multiple devices. I get clear sound without crackling on my headphones, which is what I really care for to stay “in the zone” for work.
Alas Gnome does not let you choose which BT adapter is used – unlike we know this e.g. from the NetworkManager. Apparently it even defaults to the _first_ adapter it finds, which is by design the integrated one – that I do not want in my case. I can basically only tell them apart by their addresses that I can obtain via the hcitool command:
$ hcitool dev
Devices:
hci1 10:B1:DF:AA:63:50
hci0 00:1A:7D:DA:71:06
And everything mentioned there is still true and while I usually can understand Bastien’s reasoning in this case I can’t. Alas not all is lost. It’s a little tedious but the following example script was added to unbind an adapter:
#!/bin/sh
ADAPTER_TO_DISABLE=${1:-hci0}
SYSFS_PATH=/sys/class/bluetooth/$ADAPTER_TO_DISABLE
if [ ! -h $SYSFS_PATH ] ; then
echo "Could not find adapter $ADAPTER_TO_DISABLE"
echo "Usage: $0 [hciX]"
exit 1
fi
USB_DEVICE_PATH=`realpath $SYSFS_PATH/device`
USB_DEVICE=`basename $USB_DEVICE_PATH`
echo $USB_DEVICE > $SYSFS_PATH/device/driver/unbind
The adapter will be back on the next reboot so it’s a little tedious but at least I can now kill the malfunctioning one. It’s a hammer to a nail but it works. Put in a script it may be called like this:
sudo unbind-bluetooth-driver.sh hci1
Oddly enough something in the gnome-shell extension acts up now and duplicates the device list.
I can live with that though and it may even be fixed with a more recent version already. I’m still on 44.9 and somewhat behind on this currently.
Visited the abandoned silver/copper/barite mine in Hallwangen, 72280 Germany. It’s a rather interesting one as it dates back to #medieval times and is still excavated by voluntary workers. The earliest record found dates back to 12C and the upper mining gallery “Himmlisch Heer” shows markings that are the result of hand tools while the second gallery “Irmgardsglück” has holes for explosives drilled with machines powered by compressed air. That part also has wider tunnels while the upper part is mostly crawl spaces.
The mine was abandoned and reopened several times for different reasons. The last activity was in 1912 and some stuff like an old rail for push carts and parts of electric installations can still be seen to this day.
I liked especially that we were allowed to walk through the mine at our own pace. I remember a visit to another mine where we were ushered along so fast that the children had trouble keeping up. Not so in this case. Our guide was very friendly and described everything in an exciting way so the children would even pay attention 😀
Speaking of, the guide noticed my interest in the medieval part of the mine and recommended me the De Re Metallica (yes, like the band 🤘) by Georg Agricola, which is apparently a treasure drove on historic mining operations (and myths) and lucky me: A translation in English is available on Project Gutenberg (as well as the original Latin text) – figures included.
I can totally recommend a tour. We got to see a lot of interesting stuff packaged with fascinating stories and explanations. Been to some mines in my life already but seldom did I get to see so many details in such tiny tunnels. Granted, most mines were rather modern and huge drilled exclusively with modern machines.
If you visit don’t forget to greet the tunnel at the entrance with the classic “Glück auf!” shout of the local miners for safe passage and fortune.
No Man’s Sky with headtracking and HOTAS (on Linux PC)
Wondering about that button box? Didn’t use it in this demo but you can find plenty more examples on the channel and more details on my blog: https://beko.famkos.net/category/simpit/
How it’s done? NMS does support a gamepad but it also reads/maps all gamepads to a single device. It makes no difference between multiple gamepads!
This leaves me with a very limited amount of possible buttons on the HOTAS after mapping that to one virtual gamepad using MoltenGamepad (I usually split that one up into multiple gamepads for braindead games).
So for additional buttons I used AntiMicroX to map the rest as keyboard presses.
Doing so I noticed that NMS does “look-around” on the right stick and this is where OpenTrack comes into the play. It offers a joystick output (using evdev) and that is also just… a gamepad! Needs some remapping though to get pitch and jaw to the proper axis for NMS. This is done via SDL env (basically what Steam does under the hood but boy their GUI for that sucks): SDL_GAMECONTROLLERCONFIG="000022e86f70656e747261636b206800,opentrack-to-nms,rightx:a3,righty:a4,platform:Linux,crc:e822,"
And there you have it. NMS with my trusty old X52 Pro and a DIY headtracker for 5 bucks 🤓
PS: I’m aware that the recording quality sucks. This was very spontaneous with a webcam sitting on my chair. I basically just finished my happy dance that this started working properly and decided to smash that recording button. PC was not even in “gamemode”.
Originally I was going to replace a disk on my hardware controlled RAID 5. That didn’t work out well. The controller supports hot-plugging but the LED indicator stayed on faulty. To debug this I had to boot into the controller to check for the error message and lo and behold it appears my spare has an invalid block size and the controller is too dumb to format it with another, unlike e.g. sg_format.
And this should have been the end of the story until I can reformat this on another SAS capable PC. Alas grub rescue greeted me on reboot with “error: disk `lvmid/foo/bar` not found.“
and I could not persuade it to boot the LVM member. The thing is that this disk is NOT under control of the hardware RAID controller. It’s plain SATA and it’s boot order is before the RAID controller so I really did not expect any trouble here.
Turns out I was running into this rare bug https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=987008 where the words “time-bomb” and “critical” are dropped. The gist is that grub has a bug that prevents it from reading LVM meta data sometimes and this results in a broken bootloader.
This is not fixed with the usual reinstall dance from another boot-able medium. The trick is to manipulate the LVM meta data in some way, e.g. by adding another volume temporary.
This means running a vgscan after booting from another medium and *in my case executing* e.g. lvcreate -L 4M pve -n foo
The name doesn’t matter as it can be removed afterwards. Updating the initramfs should run without errors now and is a good indicator if this worked. Now it’s possible to reboot again.
The two problems have basically nothing to do with each other. It was just my lucky day to run into this sequence of chained issues during my free Saturday night 😩
Oh yeah, meanwhile the RAID recovered also. Another spare was added until I have time to take a closer look at the block size issue.
