remotelove

Edit: Deleting this post. It's starting to get controversial, but that's OK. Not what I planned on, but whatevers.

I have been attempting to extract the firmware from an HVAC controller board using my Pickit3 and MPLAB X.

It seems that many HVAC controllers are PIC based and most are kind enough to include debug/flash pins. Grabbing the firmware images should be trivial once the correct pins are traced out. MPLAB X will see my Pickit3 and the target MCU, but it fails to pull an image that isn't all zeros. (The "bin" file is a text file with each line noting the start address, followed by 16 byte values.)

I do get an occasional "Target device ID invalid message" but that is usually due to my janky wiring to the board. Once I get that issue cleared, MPLAB will always warn that the debug bit (byte?) is set on the MCU. (That doesn't make sense as the MCU should be running standalone on the board during normal operation.)

Is there some kind of read protection that may be enabled on the PIC? Do I just need to unsolder the PIC and put it in its own dedicated circuit for pulling the firmware?

The one trick that Big Music doesn't want you to know!

I was absolutely struggling when I went to do a final mix after writing everything in stereo. For me, it was a whack-a-mole game: Fixing one problem created ten more, bass was unmanageable, highs tended to blare or everything was a midrange soup and I constantly struggled with frequency cancellation.

Above all other problems, music was not portable. It would sound great with headphones, but became a blown out mess on external speakers.

Mono. Just write everything in mono. If the track sounds good in mono, even just the slightest bit of stereo separation makes it sound awesome!

As a perk, it forced me to learn more about compression and limiting and when it is applicable. If something is inaudible in mono, it's going to sound like absolute garbage in stereo. (It also forced me into EQ'ing nearly every component of a song at first. I am not nearly as aggressive with that now, but again, it opened up new doors that I didn't realize existed.)

Why, oh why, is this technique not pushed more to hobbyists and beginners? Is there a shortcoming that I am not aware of?

Obviously, this isn't a cure-all and I kinda framed this post as a magic trick. Its one hell of a teaching tool, if nothing else.

(Wait, what? This is from 2022??? I have known about CAL for a while, but this glass stuff is new to me.)

3DPN video: https://youtu.be/pkBP_eO-Pug?si=l4__tZwrNDB4qNlU

CAL: computed axial lithography

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a new way to 3D-print glass microstructures that is faster and produces objects with higher optical quality, design flexibility and strength, according to a new study published in the April 15 issue of Science.

I am fed up with resin slicers.

Chitubox is about as stable as a drunk on a tightrope, Lychee is bad for engineering models and over-priced if you just want some basic support functions and PrusaSlicer is under-developed. All of these solutions work for different things based on the goals of the user. (For some, Lychee is an excellent value so my distaste is likely not universal.)

What really pissed me off is that support painting shouldn't be a paid feature. You hold the mouse button down and drop a support at specific distance from the last. It doesn't take massive cloud computational clusters or huge storage requirements but yet, money. Fuck. That.

I want a completely FOSS tool that is stable and includes functionality for auto-positioning models and has a full set of knobs and levers for support generation, support painting included.

So, I spent the morning getting a dev environment setup for PrusaSlicer to use as a base for resin-only tools. Over the next month or so, I'll take some time to strip out all the FDM support and get the slicer into a bare-bones state with only the existing resin features. Of course, it'll be on GitHub.

Back to the main subject. I was hoping that y'all had references in regards to anything resin printing: Support placement methods, model rotation optimization, resin strength data, FEP peel force data or anything that could be coded and implemented into a slicer. Hell, even discovering different methods for hollowing an STL would be nice.

Data and strategies for various tools would be nice to have at this point to at least start forming a roadmap for development. (One of the first goals is to integrate UVTools as a snap-in, somehow.)

FDM tools are plentiful because of wide spread adoption. Resin printers still seem niche so printer manufacturers naturally gravitate to writing their own tools for their own hardware in their race to the bottom.

With all of that said, I am actually curious if others would even want to see a project like this kicked off.

I have been using FL Studio for years. It was easy to pirate when I was younger and broke, and it's still flexible enough for anything I want to do now without hassle. (The license these days is "meh" for clips and plugins. However, I am designing and beginning to record most of my own instruments now with a core set of plugins.)

I would like to experiment with an open source DAW, but not sure which routes to take there.

Spinner shows while thumbnail is being shown after upload and thumbnail is being generated, but not when actually uploading. (I am attempting to attach gif to this post, but not sure if upload has failed, still going or just not possible.)

I am mobile while I am creating this post, so uploads are laggy anyway.

Search is fine, but there have been several cases where I have wanted to manually enter a community name and instance.

Search can be odd at times and being able to have connect at least attempt to jump to a community would be a nice to have.

Edit: I can now post and view cat pics. Yay!

Searching for "cat" or "cats" yields [email protected] with Connect, but not from web. "cat" is an invalid community.

[email protected] should be correct community and listed in search results.

I mean, I still do some stupid and brainless things but I can own that stuff without fear.

The absolute worst is only being able to half-remember most of the stupid shit I did. That stuff still kinda haunts me, but in some ways, that is a necessary evil of sobriety.

This was just a random thought that I needed to write. Maybe it gives someone else something to hope for. Maybe it reminds others of why we choose not to drink. Regardless: IWNDWYT

A few hours later, I just discovered how long this cheesy noodle trend has been going on for.

Also, this idea was already taken by a previous poster who likely started this trend quite a few days ago, I see.

My mistake!