Month: August 2012

Duck Photos #4

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We now return you to your regularly scheduled duck programming.

Choosing which photo to use for my last Duck-post was pretty tricky! I wanted to pick something with a bit of a story behind it.

This one fits the bill (hehe) but unfortunately it’s not a great photo.

This was taken on the morning of the AVCon @ OzAsia event we held last year. I had to run off-site to find a power adapter for our composite to HDMI converter. Driving out from War Memorial Drive I almost ran over this wood duck. He was visibly distressed and warking (wood ducks don’t quack, they wark) in the middle of the road and wouldn’t budge. If I had a little more time I would have probably stopped and tried to help him but perhaps it was better for both of us that I didn’t bother, I’d likely only add to his distress.

Giant NES Controller

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The other major build which I initiated, but for which my father did most of the work for. All I did was some of the measuring and soldering. He completed this in less than three weeks, when I realised that the AVCon VG budget could fit the construction costs in.

Giant NES controllers aren’t so novel and rare these days, and they’re a pretty straightforward construction (says me who palmed off the actual work to her father). Here’s a list of the sites we used to as reference:

Instructables walkthrough

Sparkfun walkthrough

Giant NES controller Coffee Table

A version based on a GameCube controller by the Mario Marathon guys.

An explanation of how the controller transmits button-press data back to the NES

Some progress photos…

Here’s the MDF box with buttons in place.

I was thinking with the tight deadline that we’d just take it to AVCon unpainted was as there would not be time for painting. However my dad likes to do things right…

Unfortunately during painting he missed putting down one strip of tape to protect the gray from being painted over with the black. Spot the error!

Here’s my dad posing with his creation.

 

Here’s a look at the underside of the D-pad, with an ingenious improvised pivot to ensure that no more than one button can be pressed down at once.

During testing, we found that hitting the D-pad in a certain way would occasionally trigger the A-button. I concluded that we were getting invalid inputs, causing the IC to output the wrong data to the NES. I placed the blame on the D-pad and we spent a good while fiddling with the pivot and the button-holes, making sure the buttons weren’t jamming.

However, it wasn’t the D-pad’s fault at all! The vibrations across the controller were enough that they were causing the A-button to bounce in place and trigger the switch underneath. We used sponge rubber underneath each button to help the buttons stay properly suspended and to improve the feel of the button response.

Finally, here are some attendees on stage at AVCon, playing Super Mario on the controller.

Balsa Wood Man

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Balsa Wood Man, Balsa Wood Man, doing the things that balsa wood can…

A little figure made from balsa wood. We were asked to make a small human model demonstrating our understanding of how a figure would appear based on eight-head high proportions. (Most people are actually less than eight heads tall but this was for convenience.)

To understand what I mean when I say “eight-heads tall”, observe how the height of the figure divides into eight equal portions, each the size of the figure’s head. Along those portions are particular landmarks, eg. the start of the torso.

Some of my classmates used modelling clays and one even made hers out of a bread and PVA mix.

Mine has rotating limbs!

USB Key of Clow

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I made these tonight. The idea came from a couple of sources…

Some time back I saw this decorated USB drive on deviantArt and thought I might try something similar at some point. However I didn’t want to make a copy – I wanted to try something different. My initial ideas were to do something based on a butterfly’s wings. I then started worrying about how to disguise the USB drive and how to get a cap on…

Eventually this thought evolved into the idea to create a piece of fan art using a USB drive, and with my mind moving to  the Clow Key I was hoping to hide the USB connector in the beak. Looking up various USB drives and the sizes available I realised perhaps it would work better to point the drive downwards and have the connector as a stand in for the key part.

Anyhow, the USB drive I’m hoping to use is this one, which conveniently is about the width of some chipboard I have lying around. To model these keys I’ve partially wrapped each piece of chipboard with some alfoil and modeled things around that. The chipboard fits quite nicely into a USB port!

Once these are cured in the oven I’ll paint them and substitute the USB drive for the chipboard.

Beef Stroganoff

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This one’s an improvised Strog recipe we cooked up on Tuesday night.

Ingredients

  • 1kg Beef, cut into strips
  • 3 very heaped tablespoons plain flour
  • 1 teaspoon(?) paprika
  • 200 grams mushrooms, sliced
  • 3 medium onions, diced
  • 2-3 cloves garlic, chopped into fine pieces
  • 300 ml sour cream
  • 1 can (400ml? I forget how big these are) tomato purée
  • 1 litre beef stock (mostly used because I needed to use it up, I normally cook with stock cubes)
  • Wine
  • Wide egg noodles (tagliatelle)
  • Oil and butter for frying

Method

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour and paprika, then use this to coat the beef strips.
  2. In a generous amount of olive oil and/or butter, cook the mushrooms and onions until soft and golden. Add the garlic.
  3. Add the beef strips and cook until sealed.
  4. Add the stock and bring to the boil, stirring. The litre I used proved to be a bit excessive and I spent some time reducing it.
  5. Add the tomato purée. Allow to simmer. We added just a little cinnamon at this point but I don’t think it really had any impact on the overall flavour.
  6. Add the sour cream and stir in thoroughly. If necessary, use corn flour to thicken the gravy.
  7. Serve with tagliatelle noodles!

Serves 8-ish

Recommendations

It seemed at first that the amount of mushroom and onion I used was going to be too much, but based on all of the other quantities used I think the dish turned out quite well. It might have been able to support up to another half kilo of meat. Finding sour cream in less than a 300ml tub was difficult and it seemed the tomato/sour cream ratio worked out quite nicely here too so I wouldn’t really think that reducing the mushroom and onion amounts would be necessary.

I’d normally use red wine in a strog but we were out of it, so I substituted white instead. Seemed to have worked ok.

Using less stock or using stock from cubes instead of from a carton would probably work better too. It’s a nice rich flavour though 😀

Creation

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This piece was the major homework assignment from my life-drawing classes last year.

 

Tetris Tangrams

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Sorry for the lateness on this one (not that anyone cares).

For AVCon this year I made a ton of cardboard Tetris pieces and puzzles to go with them. The inspiration for these puzzles comes from a game for the GameBoy called Daedalian Opus, though tangrams and the sort go back a long time. Both my housemate Alex and my mother mentioned playing with similar wooden-block puzzles as children.

Here are some photos.

The very first seven pieces.

Puzzle prototyping. Alex found a different solution from the one I’d been designing! He tried to write a program to discover all of the possible solutions but stalled.

Painted puzzle pieces, stacked and ready to go.

My workspace. Very messy!

A puzzle laid out at AVCon and solved by a clever attendee.

Breathing space

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A homework piece from life-drawing. We were asked to consider composition and the impact this has on the way an image is interpreted.