suboptimal : programmer

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 152 points 4 weeks ago

That's VGA, it's gonna be fine. Most wires are either ground or not used for actual image data. R, G and B are analog so noise on those just makes the output noisy, no big deal. That leaves us with HSync and VSync. They are digital signals with 3.3V between on and off and only a single pulse per line / frame so they're also pretty robust against noise.

So unless you're going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance, the worst that will happen is that your image will look grainy like TV static. It would take quite a bit of interference before the sync signals degrade enough to not get any image at all.

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 82 points 4 weeks ago

Now I wonder if I can route VGA through unusual items. Cutlery, the railing on a staircase, swords, something like that. As long as I can find six pieces of metal of roughly equal length, it should work.

[-] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 99 points 4 weeks ago

Q: So do you have any hobbies?

A: Well lately I've really gotten interested in routing VGA through unusual items!

Q: Ooooh, that's so hot right now

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 27 points 4 weeks ago

Well... I don't think it would be the weirdest thing I've done with my free time. Would probably barely rank in the top three.

[-] buffing_lecturer@leminal.space 23 points 4 weeks ago

I'm listening.

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 44 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Let's see:

Back in 2007 or 2008 I attempted to create a CPU architecture that directly uses Brainfuck as its instruction set. I had to put it on hold before it was completed because I had a custom FPGA development board with really bad documentation but if I ever get my hands on an affordable FPGA, it will get done eventually.
I've created a nonogram that solves to a rickroll QR code. I had to rely on the error correction because the exact pattern didn't result in a well-defined solution but I've recently learned about some more parameters that you can tweak on a QR code. So now I just need to acquire or more likely build a QR code generator that lets me manually control those parameters and an automatic nonogram solver so I don't have to manually solve a bunch of 25x25 nonograms to confirm they have a single solution.
My plan for tonight is to start porting a 22-year-old handheld game to a ~35-year-old home console. I've acquired a C compiler but will probably have to learn assembly for a CPU architecture that was barely used for anything else. There is no chance to ever share the resulting game without getting sued to hell and back again.
I've made chainmail bikinis for a couple of friends.
Edit: One more because it might be my magnum opus. Have you ever played KJumpingCube? That doesn't only work on grids but on arbitrary graphs. My friends and I chose a Risk board. Not a digital one. A real life physical Risk board with actual dice on every country that need to be turned by hand. A single game took us about 6-7 hours with the winning move alone taking up the last hour.

That's just what I comes to mind at the moment. I'm sure if I spend some time thinking or digging around old hard drives, I can find more.

[-] Jesus_666@lemmy.world 6 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Jumping Cubes is the kind of game that works really well on a PC and has super simple rules but is absolute hell in real life.

That game on the Risk board was fun, though. IIRC North America in particular tended to have those terrible chain reactions that just kept going and going.

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[-] zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 4 weeks ago

This is excellent. This reminds me of when I couldn't get any hard requirements or specs for a back end tool that I was tasked with making, so to spite everyone, and maybe myself, I wrote it in brainfuck. It was rock solid for years, and then I left due to management actively preventing me from furthering my career. I still wonder how long that process kept being used before someone had to look into the source to make changes.

[-] TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 4 points 4 weeks ago

So... how much fabric is in these chain-mail bikinis, exactly?
Because without any, they're basically going to be see-through, right? Not that I would complain.

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 8 points 4 weeks ago

No fabric at all, just metal rings and a bit of string. They are far from see-through though because they are pretty dense. If you’re close enough you can see a bit of… anatomy… but it’s more on the side of a coarsly knit sweater than transparent fabric.

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[-] njordomir@lemmy.world 5 points 4 weeks ago

There are worse hobbies. There's also no shortage of items to try.

Ideas:

eyeglasses
braces
bra underwire
Freddy's hand
Edward Scissorhand's hand
fake flowers with a wire core
bread bag ties
beer cans
tire tread reinforcement
a knight in chainmail
Christmas tree tinsel
photoframe
tie clip
tooth fillings
a bicycle
a tricycle
chain link fence
chastity belt
hammer
aluminum wrapped baked potato

[-] 30p87@feddit.org 10 points 4 weeks ago

Through your body with nippleclamps?

[-] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 9 points 4 weeks ago

I'd need a couple more volunteers to make sure all signals have the same delay.

[-] WhyIHateTheInternet@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

Ugh... Fine... Let's get started.

[-] Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 4 weeks ago

I once routed a SCART signal into cinch with an assortment of different paperclips. Worked perfectly fine

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[-] grue@lemmy.world 14 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

So unless you’re going for an extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor over a long distance

Speaking of "extremely high resolution on a really cheap monitor," it took a solid decade and a half before I was able to buy a digital flat-panel monitor capable of resolution comparable to the analog CRT I was using in 2002. VGA was no joke!

(The only problem with QXGA on a 19" CRT, aside from the weight and power draw, was that in a world before decent high-DPI fractional scaling the text was too tiny to read easily. Other than that, it worked fine.)

[-] glimse@lemmy.world 8 points 4 weeks ago

The last part reminded me of a night my friends and I played Dead Rising on a CRT. Couldn't read any text so we were just guessing what to do

[-] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 weeks ago

I have a flat panel from the early 2000s with a resolution of 1600x1200. I use it for old consoles because it also has an s-video input.

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[-] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 61 points 4 weeks ago

As someone who works in R&D in software/electronics, I can say I do this kind of thing regularly.

[-] moonshadow@slrpnk.net 31 points 4 weeks ago

No matter how slick tech gets, peek behind the curtain and this is what you'll see :)

[-] einkorn@feddit.org 18 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, but there is a difference between the research and development phase and consumer usage.

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[-] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 37 points 4 weeks ago

I once took a really crappy RS232 cable to India as part of some equipment to train our remote developers. The cable barely worked in our lab in the States. I told our hardware engineer that it wasn't going to work in India, and I was right. So in India I ended up having to wrap the entire wire bundle in a wire that I soldered to ground on both sides. Soldered it together with a plumbing soldering iron. I am a software engineer, but I have an electrical engineering degree. The VP that I was traveling with couldn't believe that the crap I made worked. Realistically, I couldn't either.

[-] palmtrees2309@lemmy.world 14 points 4 weeks ago

India loves this barely working lifehacks known as "Juugad"

using a fan as a sprinkler system

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[-] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 4 weeks ago

Okay, don't get me wrong I'm impressed and I also enjoy macgyvering things like that... But if it's for a work thing, surely it can't be that hard to go out and buy a new cable from any old shop nearby? I would think the cable is common enough to still be in stock in a lot of places, even if it's ancient.

[-] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 17 points 4 weeks ago

This was a proprietary cable specific to our board design. Believe me, I wish we could have used a standard cable.

[-] msfroh@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 weeks ago

I built an RS232 cable from parts from RadioShack 25 years ago, with no soldering, just electrical tape. It's surprisingly easy if you don't need speed. Mine capped out at 1200 or 2400 baud. Was it good? No. Did it work? Absolutely.

[-] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 7 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, the protocol itself is pretty robust. The cable I had didn't have enough noise immunity for the dirty power the building had in India (afternoon brown outs when the voltage dipped when the air conditioners ran). The Faraday cage that I made around the cable helped with the noise and also (and I believe more crucially though I had no scope to confirm) gave the two boards a common ground. I had a little trouble with before I left, but it didn't work at all in India until I modded it. Made the hardware engineer buy me a beer when I got back.

[-] cranakis@reddthat.com 6 points 4 weeks ago

This makes sense actually. The issue with the bundle was regarding some part of it that was subject to RF interference and you shielding and grounding stopped all of that. Packets hate noise. This applies double to coaxial cable, in my experience, especially spanning up.

[-] Tilgare@lemmy.world 33 points 4 weeks ago

One time as a kid, I got myself in trouble and I got TV taken away from me - my dad came up to my room with a pair of scissors and just cut my coax cable. I stripped that bad boy and shoved the end back in to my TV, worked a treat. I also had my wifi antenna from my desktop taken from me at some point, so I took a paper clip and stuck it in there - not GREAT reception, but it was good enough!

[-] Damage@feddit.it 17 points 4 weeks ago

I've got to tell you, when you started with the coax cable I imagined a different era than what was revealed when you wrote about wifi

[-] rustydrd@sh.itjust.works 31 points 4 weeks ago

Unshielded wire in a guitar amplifier be like: "Ayo, how is everybody doing, let's go and MAKE SOME NOOOOOOISE!"

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[-] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 16 points 4 weeks ago

I've done some very dodgy things with VGA cables in an effort to route the cables through narrow bulkheads. For normal computer-to-monitor-lengths this is probably fine.

I haven't noticed much signal degradation below 4m-ish.

At 12m, you better solder properly and wrap some extra shielding around your splice.

Source: I've ran plenty of VGA cables between bridge computers and a deck monitor on ships.

[-] aeharding@vger.social 12 points 4 weeks ago

Posted from my 2m aliexpress usb-c cable running at 40gbps

[-] QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 12 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

edit: also thanks for fixing that bug I found that one time :>

[-] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 4 weeks ago

It appears that we have been graced with the presence of the lead developer of Voyager himself! I wonder how many times he gets this question and if he regrets giving his user a special color :P

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[-] zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 4 weeks ago

This image triggers me so much, but mostly because it is truer than I want to admit.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 6 points 4 weeks ago

VGA didn't care much about interference.

Lan party, we didn't have T connectors, so we cut two coax apart and spliced them with some tinfoil. it worked until someone bumped it hard.

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[-] JohnSmith@feddit.uk 9 points 4 weeks ago

Now lets see the same hack but for the port above.

[-] lb_o@lemmy.world 17 points 4 weeks ago

Port above is COM. It experienced even more abuse than VGA.

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[-] ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 9 points 4 weeks ago

Glares at high-speed DAQ electronics and high-frequency analogue sensing circuits

PCB cries in EMI

[-] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 weeks ago

Regular circuits: "What's that? You want to hack me together with a breadboard from 1963 and a hodgepodge of old telecom wire and misc parts? Sure, sounds great!"

DSP circuits: "Being more than 2mm from the IC makes me feel icky :("

[-] ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 9 points 4 weeks ago

Where's my emotional support coupling capacitor? I can't function without my emotional support coupling capacitor!

Hand drawn PCBs from the 60s: look at my beautiful curved tracks, don't they just accentuate my thick copper fills?

Any PCB since Gerber: you'll take my 45 degrees and like it!

[-] lemonSqueezy@lemmy.world 9 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

This reminds me of a mod around the time of the TI-83 ish , where you had solder diodes to a cable connecting two devices.

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[-] riskable@programming.dev 6 points 4 weeks ago

Big Cable is the one generating all the noise to begin with!

[-] Hupf@feddit.org 10 points 4 weeks ago

https://xkcd.com/1590/

[-] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 weeks ago

I made a composite cable for my Sega megadrive by splicing an RCA cable with two pieces of a thick paperclip. Worked great. I just had to remember which were the two holes to stick it in

[-] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

those are used syringes found in a 1980s Soviet medical facility.

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