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 😅

https://makertube.net/w/qrqqZLr2QvJFjCwyNzzAmp / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYiPFDpHwmc

Oh boy oh boy it arrived. And what a friendly seller 👌 Kinda a shame that they gave up this hobby. Sold everything for an apple and an egg. It’s a loosely based on a F-16. Nothing of this is functional though. Yet.

Winter may come!

Man… the _feel_ of those lovely switches and dials alone ❤️

I totally missed the memo but apparently there is a Linux version of for a while now: https://support.gameglass.gg/en/articles/9351904-installing-gameglass-hub-on-linux

* Ubuntu 22.04+
* Linux Mint 21.2+
* Fedora 39+

Not a fan of GameGlass (I prefer my switches and dials, as you may know) but it’s probably of interest for other builders.

It has been a while that I tried . With the new Tracker plugin (AI haha) for we get head tracking without annoying IR LEDs or reflecting stripes just by reading the webcam video feed. This is apparently fast enough to try without a dedicated nowadays. And all that on a PC. Took some fiddling but the concept still works. What a time to be alive.

Demo: https://makertube.net/w/groS1wpAhP8XYE75vJwX32

HowTo: https://simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/

AAXtoMP3[1] fails to split up AAXC files to chapters. The reason for this is due to an error in the RegEx Find command to pick up the extra cover image in better quality. Audible-cli dumped two jpg files for the cover: One 500×500 pixels ($bookname_(500).jpg) and the other 1215×1215 pixels ($bookname_(1215).jpg). The find command picks up _both_, which introduces a linebreak resulting in a stat error breaking the script. Creating the chapters comes after this step and while the resulting MP3 is fine in itself I really do prefer chapter files over one huge blob.

Since the AAXtoMP3 project is archived I can’t report any bugs to it but this is my dirty fix adding tail to the mix to only get the last result:


diff --git AAXtoMP3 AAXtoMP3
index 0a6c2e0..98a30ce 100755
--- AAXtoMP3
+++ AAXtoMP3
@@ -467,7 +467,8 @@ validate_extra_files() {

# Cover
extra_dirname="$(dirname "${extra_media_file}")"
- extra_find_command='$FIND "${extra_dirname}" -maxdepth 1 -regex ".*/${extra_title##*/}_([0-9]+)\.jpg"'
+ extra_find_command='$FIND "${extra_dirname}" -maxdepth 1 -regex ".*/${extra_title##*/}_([0-9]+)\.jpg" | tail -n1'
+
# We want the output of the find command, we will turn errexit on later
set +e errexit
extra_cover_file="$(eval ${extra_find_command})"

Happy backing up your audio books 👏

[1] The purpose of this software is to create a method for you to download and store your books just in case Audible fails for some reason.

I’m flabbergasted how good this tracker-neuralnet plugin for works. It does the with just a webcam without any clips, reflectors or LED stripes. I kinda expected this to not work really well in a dark room, that I prefer for gaming, but I was wrong. Even with a tiny light in one corner of the room only it kept tracking flawless.

…can even scratch my nose and it keeps tracking.

To get this neuralnet tracker input in the first place I had to download the ONNX runtime package onnxruntime-linux-x64-1.18.1.tgz from https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/releases/tag/v1.18.1 (My Fedora offered 1.15.1 from it’s repo but this was at the time of writing not sufficient and having it installed resulted in failure due to an API mismatch). I didn’t even install it somewhere, just unpacked it in my Downloads folder.

Back in my OpenTracks folder I run cmake the way I’ve done it before several times but this time I added the unpacked onnxruntime folder to the config.

Configure did it’s magic (note how it picked up module tracker-neuralnet once the ONNXRuntime_DIR was set) and here we are one make later. This is rather impressive 🤓

YMMV