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Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS

rocket.jonh.net

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Re: Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS

#22

Post by jacquesm »

uscjeremy wrote: post #20
jacquesm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a fantastic project! It would be interesting to do some risk assessment to see how well it stacks up against the real thing ;) I'm definitely not going to show this to my kids because I have other plans for the next three years... Edit: I love the GPS datalogger, it's like the random number generator doing '4' all the time.

I don't have numbers so I'll just say that it has only ever been disassembled slowly and according to plan!

Many happy landings to you and yours :)

Re: Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS

#23

Post by jonathankoren »

This is such a great project. When I was a kid, my dad made a “treeless treehouse” (basically an enclosed platform on some stilts) that was kitted out with various control panels made from switches and gauges harvested from cars, along with some flashing leds and buzzers.

It was great.

Re: Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS

#25

Post by elihu »

This is probably a completely unrealistic goal for a wide variety of reasons, but it would be amazing to have something like this in a public park.

I could also imagine going on tour. Like, you get permission in advance from some random park in some random city, and you just set it up with no public announcement and just see what happens. I mean, when I was a kid I'd think it was awesome if some random spaceship just suddenly was there, and then a week or so later it was gone. Even if it's clearly not a real spaceship, it'd still have been a great experience.

Re: Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS

#28

Post by debatem1 »

elihu wrote: post #25

This is probably a completely unrealistic goal for a wide variety of reasons, but it would be amazing to have something like this in a public park. I could also imagine going on tour. Like, you get permission in advance from some random park in some random city, and you just set it up with no public announcement and just see what happens. I mean, when I was a kid I'd think it was awesome if some random spaceship just…

I do public art and events all the time and that looks pretty feasible to me. At least, I'm pretty confident we could have it roam around Seattle.

Re: Show HN: Homemade rocketship treehouse – hardware to custom OS

#29

Post by Severian »

uscjeremy wrote: post #16
Severian wrote: post #12

Man I love this. As a kid my dad had a friend that had some type of old industrial control interface, in unpainted sheet metal, he had wired up that just did blinkenlights. Had a bunch of 7-segment LEDs, light-up push buttons, switches, throws, dials, meters, and a bunch of other stuff. It had that tactile goodness that a touchscreen doesn't. Basically it did nothing, but man did it inspire my imagination. I remember…

Honestly, this thing inspired my imagination more than I could have imagined. I had so much fun that I ended up building dozens more embedded systems projects, and eventually redirected my career more towards embedded systems, too. Embedded systems really let you interact with them in a tactile way, as you put it, that computer-based software does not. I found it irresistible. Jon's oldest child -- pictured on the we…

I'm sure it did! I'm glad you provided this for them.
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