2.5D Printer

 

I taped a pen onto a 3D printer to draw a picture of my cat.

Watch the timelapse on YouTube.

Used a free web photo to 3D model converter, which I could then slice to produce the required G-Code.

Tristar panoramas

 Where we're going we don't need the Garden Gnome Package Viewer

A long long time ago, Tristar boats hired a man to take some 360 degree photos inside their boats and produce a panorama tour.

For some reason he chose to use the Garden Gnome Package Viewer.

This involved the potential clients having to download a 3rd party application called the Garden Gnome Package Viewer and they were left with a ton of stupid high-quality images.

The Garden Gnome Package Viewer.

Why is it called that.

Anyway so I remade it.

I ended up using an amazing tool called Panolens and using a neocities site to host it.

Along the way I also built a simple python program to allow me to click on a point on the unprocessed image and get the cartesian coordinates that Panolens takes.

Telcam

 

live on port 23

Obsessed with the idea of a terminal experience, with all its ANSI colour codes, I became determined to "transmit" video with it.

Setting up a functional telnet server with python was incredibly easy, from there i only had to deal with the video side. A previous project had left OpenCV burned into my head and google search history, so this also turned out trivial.

When comparing colours, I have a colour space I like to use. If the HSV colour space can be imagined as a cylinder, my XYV colour space is the box containing that cylinder and the colour values the coordinates within that space, no non-Euclidian weirdness.

I settled on 3 different levels of saturation " ", "-", "=" and "#", hard-coding a CSV of each combination and its approximate XYV colour.

The colour detection is terrible. It seems to work some of the time, but something is definitely up with the hard-coded CSV file.

The finished system runs at about 1 fps.

Space Weather

Issued by XMDV Radio, created by William Greenwood, supported by the NOAA

"Utter Radio's answer to the shipping forecast" - Garry Morrisroe

While Checking the weather one day i got distracted. The Met Office has a page hidden away on their website called "Space Weather" describing the current solar climate (its actually pretty complex and unstable).

I quickly attempted to get their API. unfortunately, for some unknown reason, they where not going to give me free access to huge amounts of valuable data that a large amount of man-hours had gone into interpreting. Luckily the US Government was.

The plan: An automatically generated space weather report. Generated every day and broadcasting on all my stations as well as the newly associated Utter Radio, who's playout system I now had the password for.

Originally attempting to bodge it to work with the audio streaming scripting language liquidsoap, I instead chose to switch to python. It requests the .txt file provided very kindly by US taxpayer dollars, does a ton of regex to get it formatted properly, runs it through a TTS (eSpeak with the Scottish accent), sticks a ident at the start and end and then underlays a bed (sonified data from the sun).

At some point I plan on building some kind of system to sonify the day's solar data (also kindly provided by the NOAA).

It currently broadcasts between 10pm and 2am on Utter Radio.

You can listen anytime, or read-along with the regex-ified version here. (blocked on some connections due to the weird port, no SSL and dynamic DNS)

Break Glass and Climb onto Tracks

 

Welcome to Break Glass and Climb onto Tracks, with me, Will.

Playing non-stop breakbeat, jungle, rave &c. Official station of PrawnOS: !!Now broadcasting(?) across the third and along the fourth in beautiful 32kbs mpeg!! Available 24/7 in the player below, or 00:00-02:00 on XMDV Radio!

This station runs off the same machine as described in my post on XMDV Radio.

It can be found: here.

XMDV Radio

Live: From the bottom of the Marana Trench

XMDV is here! Previously created as a run of one off radio shows with your beloved hosts: Raymond D. Ozone and Anthony Tanner, it has been reborn as my newest audio vehicle.

Now broadcasting around the clock, XMDV Radio provides you with one-off William shows like: PDW, Broadcasting in the Aether, The rules of Blackjack 2 &c.

But how did this happen? And at no cost to myself?

The Setup

1. Laptop running Debian 12
2. Liquidsoap scripting language
3. Icecast streaming server
4. DuckDNS and Lets Encrypt to make it accessible
5. Neocities client

The whole system is currently running on a 9 year old Asus laptop that I loving call "my servers".

I used to run it on a c201 chromebook, as one of the few -maybe only- users of CrawfishOS (fork of the esteemed -at least 5 users- PrawnOS). Long story short: computer was cursed. One day I tried to download docker and the WiFi driver deleted itself.

So I "upgraded" to the current machine.

The above setup list is complete, but it does not include the hundred of hours to understand and build each part of this pretty extensive system. This was my first real computer project, and I was starting with entirely no experience of Unix computers, networking, scripting, HTML, CSS &c.

The same machine also runs Break Glass and Climb onto Tracks, Spaceweather and the Utter News playout system.

The Content

XMDV draws on everything I've created that I feel is both fit for consumption and judgement, as well as fitting the station-sound (weird).

One of my favourite parts of it are the various idents and jingles, created by splicing together parts of speech from shows on the station.

Pretty much anything that's on the station is also on my Soundcloud.