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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

#31

Post by uscjeremy »

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…

We're really hoping we can find it a home in a park somewhere! Jon's youngest is getting to the age where the rocket is becoming old hat so we're trying to find a place where people can enjoy it, rather than letting it sit unused (or scrapping it, the horror!)

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

#32

Post by uscjeremy »

Raphael wrote: post #27

7-segment is a popular display format on Earth, but for an alien spaceship, consider 5x5 pixel fonts.

Hah, that would definitely be thematic!

The aesthetic we were going for was more Apollo Guidance Computer, so 7-segment LEDs were perfect. It turned out to also be a great design choice software-wise because the entire rocket originally ran on an atmega328 which had only 2k of RAM; there really wasn't much room for frame buffers. But the state of a 7 segment digit (plus one decimal point) fits perfectly into one byte, so the entire rocket, which was originally 14 8-digit rows, needed only 112 bytes of frame buffer.

By about 2012 we wanted to write more complex software, so I made new revision of the main controller that took an atmega1284, which has a lot more RAM (16K, vs 2K) and program space (128K, vs 32K).

The big retrofit in 2019 went to a 32-bit STM32 which had a hardware floating point unit, making it possible to do fancier animations. The rocket now supports the classic "snake" game.

But still just 7-seg LEDs :)

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

#34

Post by greenonions »

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…

You could probably have this travel around to children's museums and make a space themed event out of it.

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

#36

Post by krisoft »

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…

When I was a kid I loved even just watching pictures of complicated interfaces.

That is why I made a tactile "busy box" for my nephew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BGSkwGI6BI

Just a lot of fun buttons "doing nothing" as you say. :D

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

#38

Post by Brendinooo »

I'm torn between feeling like a bad parent when I see stuff like this and thinking that if I actually ever did something like this, my kids would end up ignoring it in favor of the $40 saucer swing, as was the case after my wife and I rehabbed and set up a playground set for them last summer.

Regardless, awesome work.

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

#39

Post by robbles »

krisoft wrote: post #36
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…

When I was a kid I loved even just watching pictures of complicated interfaces. That is why I made a tactile "busy box" for my nephew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BGSkwGI6BI Just a lot of fun buttons "doing nothing" as you say. :D

This is a really nice one! What did you use for the board itself? Is it 3D printed?

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

#40

Post by BoxOfVoxels »

evilstark wrote: post #35

Honestly, if that video, et. al. is 11 years old, then Eliot is old enough to participate here -- I'd love to hear HIS side of the story and I bet the HN crew could find him an engineering internship in like 30 seconds!

Eliot Here, I'd be happy to talk about the rocket and man I really could use one of those engineering internships it's been surprisingly hard to find things to apply to.
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