It Came From the Workshop

Latest Posts

  • VR’s Potential to Help Reach Lucid Dreaming

    Here’s a link to a short older piece I wrote up for Hackaday that I’d like to highlight: the road to lucid dreaming might be paved with VR.

    The short version is that VR can induce mild dissociative experiences in users. Users as a result tend to perform “reality checks”, which can be thought of as a sort of “pinching oneself to check if one is dreaming”.

    The idea is that it may be possible to use carefully crafted VR to train users to perform these “reality checks” as a second nature. That skill could be useful to realize one is in a dream state, while still inside it. Another way VR could help achieve lucid dreaming is by priming the user into the right mental state before they fall asleep. Sure, that’s a lot of ifs and maybes, but it certainly seems like the right pieces are there.

    I find the concept of using VR to help alter one’s mental state fascinating.

    Let me share an evocative story to help demonstrate the potential I think this has: it is about a user’s absurd-sounding near-death experience, which occurred in Walkabout Mini Golf, of all places.

    There is a minigolf course on high cliffs, and this user (a fellow member of a discussion board, where they shared the story) had just stepped back for some reason or other. Their foot landed on the raised edge of the carpet they were standing on, and this happened to coincide with the visual of a cliff edge right at their feet. The conclusion their brain instantly reached was “there is a cliff here and I have stepped right onto the edge”. For a split second their brain bought into it completely.

    It was enough to send their body into full-blown fight-or-flight mode, and this happened completely by accident.

    Now, I’m not necessarily advocating for a VR version of Flatliners but this story demonstrates that there’s potential to use VR in novel ways to nudge our senses and state of mind in different (constructive, or at least funny) ways, which is pretty interesting.

  • Designing a Print-Friendly Sliding Lid Closure

    A short while ago I decided to design a small container with a sliding lid that could be 3D printed easily, and would require no fiddly supports or anything.

    A dovetail design for the lid and container was something that can be printed with no supports, but I wanted a way for the lid to be held shut without making it overly tight.

    I also wanted to keep it simple, not depend too much on fiddly tolerances (there’s a very fine line between “tight enough” and “too tight”), and I wanted to keep the “easy to 3D print without supports, etc” angle. I didn’t want to add any external parts or hardware, either. This was actually quite challenging!

    I settled on what you see in the header image: a type of spring that pushes up on the lid, keeping it tight by friction, but with enough wiggle room to not be too picky.

    The leaf-spring-looking bits are printed separately and slot into the holders. I’d prefer a print-in-place solution, but this is necessary to have the parts turn out right.

    I considered just using two segments of filament, which I think has potential but I saw two problems:

    1. It increases the amount of work (I’d need to cut segments of filament to use as parts, instead of just printing the parts I need), and
    2. It would be picky about the exact length.

    While I think using bits of filament to make pseudo leaf springs has potential, I went with this solution instead.

    (The texturing on the models is from Stefan of CNC Kitchen’s fantastically-useful Bump Mesh tool.)

    I am pretty happy with this design, although I would not be surprised to discover it is something I independently (re)discovered while dealing with this problem.

    What’s useful about it?

    • The carrier prints easily on a filament-based printer without needing printer settings to be tweaked.
    • Prints without supports.
    • It isn’t picky about filament type, so it’s a good print to use up spare filament.
    • The two leaf springs aren’t under a lot of stress, so they should last.
    • While I would prefer zero assembly required, this is a reasonable compromise. (At least there is no glue, hardware, etc.)
    • The texture on the outside (a work in progress) is nice.

    What’s it actually for?

    It’s an experiment in printing a combination shipping / carrier case for Blood Spatter Tokens (which I designed, make, and sell online.)

  • Why 3D Print at an Angle?

    A recent post of mine published on Hackaday talks about the HomeRacker project, a framework for designing and printing to rack-mount anything you’d like.

    I’d like to go into a bit more detail for one aspect I couldn’t really cram into the original post: the way HomeRacker parts are designed for 3D printing, and particularly the way they are printed at an angle, like what you see below (a screenshot from the HomeRacker project video.)

    There are several advantages to printing in this way.

    Most people print a box shape flat on the bed. But there are a number of advantages to printing like what you see here:

    1. No need for supports. Printing at a 45 degree angle is something just about any printer can handle. It’s a modest degree of overhang. As you can see, no supports are needed.
    2. No supports means a smaller footprint and less material. This also means more parts fit on the bed, and parts print faster. Why faster? Less material is being used, so the printer has less to do. And no supports means there is minimal post-processing for the operator to do.
    3. It makes a stronger part. Printing at an angle that is not in the same plane as a box-like part generally means a stronger part.
    4. Printing at an angle has less of a 3D printed “look”. For one thing, the part won’t have the texture of the print bed on one side with layer lines straight up from that. As a result the part will have a more uniform appearance and finish, with the layer lines not being orthogonal to the part’s geometry. (This is even more true if combined with something like ‘fuzzy skin’)

    So consider printing your next box-ish shape (like an enclosure) at an angle. You might be surprised at what’s possible.

  • Local AI tools are getting ever better

    Local AI tools are getting ever better

    Sometimes I like to make a post (like this one) fleshing out something I wrote elsewhere with a little extra detail that didn’t fit into the original, for whatever reason.

    I recently wrote a post for Hackaday.com featuring a voice-controlled, locally-installed AI agent on a Raspberry Pi 5.

    It’s a great showcase for how much better these tools (both hardware and software) are getting. What’s available to hobbyists is so far beyond what it was ten (or even five) years ago.

    Only a couple of years ago roughly a 3 billion parameter LLM model would be considered the minimum for coherent talk, this model uses a 1.3 Billion Qwen model. That’s not even getting into the support for other functions. The “AI in a Box” project I covered is a good example of what this scene was like two years ago.

    I’d like to briefly mention that the term “agent” (when it comes to AI systems) is currently one of those terms whose meaning depends on who is speaking.

    The definition of agent seems to settling on “calling tools in a loop [to accomplish a particular task]”.

    The other meaning of agent is roughly “an AI system that can use a browser (for example) and click on stuff as if it were a person”.

    I cannot resist saying that I am personally more a fan of the latter definition (when an entity is takes action based on your instructions – for example using a browser as if it were you – it is literally acting as your agent) but the definition seems to be settling on the former.

    So just be mindful that you can run into both definitions at this time, depending on who you are speaking to.

  • Moving

    I finally got fed up enough to move my site off Google’s Blogger interface. It went from free, to a few bucks a month, and relentlessly up, up, up… Turns out that’s what I needed to flip the switch.