Printed cap

Not a baseball cap, a cap for my incinerator. One of those metal dustbins with a chimney in the lid.

Not going to bother with the photos. Just to say it was mostly the same measure, print, iterate process and it worked. I now have a rain cap (and just in time) for the incinerator.

I said mostly because although the phone cradle printing was without issue, this time lots went wrong.

First up was the nozzle getting blocked. Right pain, wait for the printer to cool down, remove the filament, take it all apart, replace nozzle (I did try cleaning it first, but I had lots of spares), then put it all back together again...

That did fix the clogging but then the prints themselves were misbehaving.

Ran the bed levelling process with my CR touch and ... no change!

Started tweaking the Z-Offset and slowly, very slowly things got better, but I did notice the magnetic bed had a few scratches and dents in it, so although I did print successfully I have purchased 2x new magnetic beds. They were very cheap!

Only heard wrong

Life is a series of mistakes, constant and unending string of mistakes.

Sorry, Learning opportunities .

It seems obvious now, in hindsight, but I might have made an itty bitty mistake in my last post.

I said it was good to drop PulseAudio and embrace ALSA . It did work for the soundboard application test...

Before we go on, I remember Linux sound being OSS and ALSA being the new technically advanced and troublesome replacement.

I think you know where this is going. Adding a sound to the VR Godot game did play and not out of only the Right speaker. Both speakers, only the PC speakers not the headset :(

After a lot of messing about with PipeWire utilities and creating virtual Null syncs etc etc I recompiled Godot with pulseaudio and -alsa . Now the sound in the game is spatially positioned in the headset!

Many hours were lost to all this and the previous mucking about. It is almost as if I had had a premonition about adding audio was going to be a pain in the butt!

Only heard right

The Godot work has stopped since May for various reasons, but my next big step is sound.

I created a new Godot project and just added a few buttons and wired them up to playing WAV files. Basically a simple as possible soundboard.

The sounds did play, but only out of the Right speaker. Same sounds in Mplayer worked fine.

Step 1: What had I done wrong?

• Checked the Godot AudioStreamPlayer settings, nothing.
• Checked the Godot Audio Bus settings, nothing.
• Checked the Godot Audio settings, nothing.
• Checked the Godot Audio settings advanced mode, nothing.
• Changed the import settings on my WAV files, nothing.
• Added a true stereo MP3 into the soundboard and it also only came through the right speaker!

Step 2: Where had I gone wrong?

The Linux system had no problem at all playing sounds correctly. The Godot setup in every respect appeared to be set up correctly.

wpctl status

and

pw-link -l

both showed Godot opening two channels. One for FL and one FR. Front Left and Front Right.

Step 3: What had gone wrong?

Godot was built with support for PulseAudio and ALSA. Apparently there is a small bug with Godot that causes it to allocate a none existent audio device bus for the left channel when it thinks you might be using surround.

This is not an issue for the big distros as the sound stuff is baked in, but for my Gentoo local build with conflicting audio drivers ... not so good.

Step 4: The fix (and the break)

I added -pulseaudio to the package.use and rebuilt Godot ... but forgot I was running a Linux VM in VirtualBox and brought the system/s to their knees. Which would have been bad enough, but the build failed when it could not write any cache files and the file-system became Read Only.

Luckily a reboot and fsck fixed it and even though there were quite a few and varied issues to "Y" there seem to have been no losses.

Then I was able to rebuild Godot and then finally I could hear sound in both speakers!

Step 5: Next steps

Try out AudioStreamPlayer3D in my minesweeper game...

I printed something

It's not that exciting, but I used Blender to create a Phone Cradle to ensure my phone sat correctly on my wireless charger.

I have had the charger for a couple of years and it has only failed to charge 2-3 times. But of course the day I wake up and it has not charged it is a BIGG DEAL!

The brief was very simple; orientate the phone so that it was on straight and the inductive coil was over the charging area. It is pretty lax on the exact placing, more on that later.

It was an iterative process, which 3D printing is ideal for.

• A: sizing the phone
• B: sizing the charger (has a cable on the left)
• C: thickening, was far to flimsy
• D: basic positioning
• E: penultimate design
• F: exactly the same as E: but with ever so slightly different sizing. (not shown)

I was expecting to have to try different locations and test for best charge through put, but found an image of the Pixel 7 Pro open and the exact location of the charging coil.

Works great!

Where is July?

July got cancelled.

But I found Ancient Dungeon had been updated with so many extra bits I had to spend every waking moment playing it. FYI this is a bad thing!

The developers of Unloop Unloop responded almost straight away to my review and then happily accepted my detailed technical bug report.

Got an email last week saying they have already addressed some of my concerns and hope to improve the frame-rates going forward. Which is great news because the game is good.