1 00:00:00,001 --> 00:00:29,600 Welcome to the bootloader. I'm Paul Cutler. And I'm Tod Kurt. Each podcast, we bring you news, project updates, product talk from the tech and maker scenes. In this episode, we'll be talking about three things and chat about them for a few minutes each. Paul, what do you have us this week for your first one? My first one is sun setting Mu. The Mu code editor is coming to an end. Nicholas Tollervey and the Mu maintainers released a blog post in mid-December sharing that they will be retiring and sun setting Mu. 2 00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:37,120 What started off almost 10 years ago with feedback from the Raspberry Pi Foundation turned into an editor thousands and thousands of people used. 3 00:00:37,540 --> 00:00:43,160 If you got started with CircuitPython, this was the editor that was recommended, and it also worked with MicroPython and CPython. 4 00:00:43,780 --> 00:00:48,940 It included Python built in so you didn't have to install it, which is what made it so easy to use. 5 00:00:49,660 --> 00:00:55,300 And one of the other cool features is it also included a serial monitor and plotter, things that you don't find in most IDEs. 6 00:00:56,080 --> 00:01:00,140 One of the reasons it was so successful is Mu had four key design features. 7 00:01:00,800 --> 00:01:05,080 Less is more, remove all unnecessary distractions, keep it simple. 8 00:01:05,260 --> 00:01:08,920 So Mu is easy to understand, walk the path of least resistance. 9 00:01:09,080 --> 00:01:11,120 Mu should be easy and have fun. 10 00:01:11,460 --> 00:01:13,080 Learning should be a positive experience. 11 00:01:13,660 --> 00:01:16,300 I would say they hit all of their goals and had a good run. 12 00:01:17,380 --> 00:01:20,780 The blog post kicks off with this decision has been coming for a while. 13 00:01:21,260 --> 00:01:25,100 And if you followed Mu at all, it hasn't had a release for over two years. 14 00:01:25,640 --> 00:01:40,300 What I think is so cool is that they communicated that Mu is coming to an end, but what to expect from them going forward. So there will be two more releases before the end of March. The first will be a legacy version based on the current main branch with all the bug fixes that they can do. 15 00:01:40,840 --> 00:01:41,220 Oh, great. 16 00:01:41,780 --> 00:01:45,820 Yep. It's hoped that this version will still work for a while for schools and other educators using Mu. 17 00:01:46,640 --> 00:01:51,500 The second and last version of Mu will be updated to use all the newest version of libraries included in Mu. 18 00:01:51,920 --> 00:01:57,680 And I think one of the big challenges they had was how they integrated Qt and PyQt and the different versions in between. 19 00:01:57,940 --> 00:02:02,780 So I think they're going to try and upgrade that so it'll help with life on the Raspberry Pi as long as it can. 20 00:02:03,640 --> 00:02:09,640 Yeah, that's a shame. I really like Mu because it was the most like the Arduino IDE for CircuitPython. 21 00:02:10,140 --> 00:02:12,940 and that it was a pretty usable editor. 22 00:02:13,440 --> 00:02:16,520 It talked to the hardware, and it had a serial monitor 23 00:02:16,700 --> 00:02:19,780 and a serial plotter, which are like the three things 24 00:02:19,880 --> 00:02:21,660 that you need when you're doing Arduino stuff. 25 00:02:21,720 --> 00:02:23,980 And like, oh, if you're coming from an Arduino environment, 26 00:02:24,180 --> 00:02:26,620 which I was, here's something that acts kind of like it. 27 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:29,140 And people crap on the Arduino IDE a lot, 28 00:02:29,260 --> 00:02:30,620 but it's actually really good. 29 00:02:30,760 --> 00:02:33,780 But there's a lot of choices, like the various things 30 00:02:33,820 --> 00:02:35,740 that you're talking about, about what Mu focused on, 31 00:02:36,140 --> 00:02:37,440 is the same things in many ways 32 00:02:37,540 --> 00:02:38,680 that Arduino people focus on. 33 00:02:38,680 --> 00:02:45,620 It's like make it simple make it you know so you can have fun don't get bogged down in configuring JSON files or adding plugins 34 00:02:45,860 --> 00:02:51,340 You know it's like like there still isn't a good replacement in circuit Python that will replace mu 35 00:02:51,460 --> 00:02:56,500 I think yet. I would agree. There's nothing that has the the serial and the plotter for example 36 00:02:56,900 --> 00:03:00,160 Yeah, I mean we're seeing we're seeing some of the online IDEs have the serial 37 00:03:01,100 --> 00:03:07,439 Which is a must-have I think when working with these microcontrollers, but there's still a ways to go for I think for the online 38 00:03:07,440 --> 00:03:37,420 I'd ease to catch up a little bit. So thank you, Mu. It was my thing that I always recommended to people when they're first getting started. Now I'm at a loss as to what to recommend. Well, hopefully we'll have a couple more years before that we have to transition away from it completely. What do you have for us next? So my first one is something I've been wanting to talk about for a long time because it's something I've been really excited about for many years and it just keeps getting better and better. So I goof around with music. You've heard me talk about synth stuff and one of the gizmos I use the most is 39 00:03:37,440 --> 00:03:43,900 most is called the SynthStrom Deluge. It's a device that's about the size of maybe a sheet of paper, 40 00:03:44,040 --> 00:03:49,100 it's about maybe an inch and a half thick. It's in the groove box category, if you know what that is. 41 00:03:49,480 --> 00:03:54,900 Groove boxes are these things that kind of came around in the 90s mostly, that were little self-contained 42 00:03:55,080 --> 00:04:00,560 music making devices that had drum machine plus the ability to make some sort of synthesizer 43 00:04:00,760 --> 00:04:05,760 noises and a sequencer to sort of tile together maybe some other things. That's kind of the basis 44 00:04:05,760 --> 00:04:10,960 This is what a groove box was. So the Deluge is kind of in that category, but it's a lot more. 45 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:35,200 It's kind of like a digital audio workstation that is about the size of a book. You can put it in your book bag and take it around. It's got a grid of 144 RGB buttons in a matrix and a couple knobs at the top. And it can do all the stuff. It's a MIDI sequencer, sampler, drum machine, multi-track audio recorder. It's got a built-in battery and a built-in speaker. So you don't even need to really have any other infrastructure to goof around. It's also got CV gate outputs. 46 00:04:35,280 --> 00:04:42,700 So you can hook it up to modular synthesizers. That's what your thing is. And so it's kind of the hub of my music making world 47 00:04:43,300 --> 00:04:49,340 It's the thing sometimes I compose entirely on it. Sometimes it's just the controller for things that exist outside of it 48 00:04:50,400 --> 00:04:56,280 But it's just like this amazing little box that seems like a really premium piece of gear and it's made by a small team in New 49 00:04:56,480 --> 00:05:02,059 Zealand it's like it's mostly like one guy was the coder and another guy was the salesperson or whatever 50 00:05:02,060 --> 00:05:06,380 but they've got a small team now, but like for many years it was just, I think, the two of them. 51 00:05:07,020 --> 00:05:11,800 And so the only way to buy it used to be was to order from their website New Zealand. And it was, 52 00:05:12,700 --> 00:05:17,420 so it was like a real, real best spoke piece of gear. And it felt like a really quality bit of 53 00:05:17,580 --> 00:05:23,480 kit. And every year they would improve the deluge. They would like release new firmware that would 54 00:05:23,580 --> 00:05:27,899 add new features, like not just fix bugs, but entirely new features, like the ability to record 55 00:05:27,900 --> 00:05:34,160 audio or to act as a looper, to have wave table synthesis. And then a couple years ago, they 56 00:05:34,500 --> 00:05:40,180 offered a new version of the Deluge that had an OLED screen, but they also made it so that if you 57 00:05:40,340 --> 00:05:47,440 wanted to send in your old Deluge and get the OLED screen upgraded for your device. It's like, what? 58 00:05:49,440 --> 00:05:57,080 Hardware makers never offer upgrades to their gizmos. It's very rare. But then on top of that, 59 00:05:57,260 --> 00:06:00,960 Two years ago, I think, they released the Deluge source code on GitHub. 60 00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:05,680 And instead of just having it be like some, what some companies do, they just 61 00:06:05,760 --> 00:06:08,440 like release it and it's like, okay, do whatever you want with it, but the 62 00:06:08,640 --> 00:06:12,880 licensing is either unclear or not very permissive, so you can't really use it 63 00:06:12,900 --> 00:06:14,840 for anything, they made a GPL. 64 00:06:15,360 --> 00:06:16,980 So it's like truly fully open source. 65 00:06:17,480 --> 00:06:22,640 And they created a Synthstrom community fund to help financially assist anyone 66 00:06:22,800 --> 00:06:24,040 who wants to work on the firmware. 67 00:06:25,280 --> 00:06:31,580 So the community really stepped up within a few months, the entire code base was refactored, like just totally reorganized. 68 00:06:32,180 --> 00:06:37,360 Because it was a product of kind of one person, the code is kind of in just a couple of files, a couple of big files. 69 00:06:37,420 --> 00:06:40,080 And so the team pieced it all out. 70 00:06:40,520 --> 00:06:45,640 These people working globally on just on GitHub, they piece it all out to make it more usable by a team. 71 00:06:46,600 --> 00:06:53,440 And so that first version came out and it was had all the same functionality as the normal version, but now it was all like refactored. 72 00:06:53,900 --> 00:06:57,440 And then a few months after that, they came out with official version of the community firmware. 73 00:06:58,440 --> 00:07:01,820 Now this is a parallel track from the official firmware from Synstrom, 74 00:07:02,540 --> 00:07:07,520 but it had a couple improvements. It had like a couple new UI modes, it had some new features 75 00:07:07,620 --> 00:07:13,520 like audio effects and filters, some new sequencer modes, and it was just like it was better in so 76 00:07:13,600 --> 00:07:18,000 many ways. Like it had a new reverb algorithm that just had a much better sounding built-in reverb, 77 00:07:18,200 --> 00:07:20,800 was one of the coolest new things that came out of the first version I think. 78 00:07:21,580 --> 00:07:25,880 and every few months new features are added. At any point you can just go to GitHub and download 79 00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:31,840 the latest build to see what crazy new thing they added. Like on December 25th of 2024, 80 00:07:32,120 --> 00:07:40,240 just a few days ago, they released the 1.3 version of the Community Firmware and it adds a DX7 FM 81 00:07:40,540 --> 00:07:44,860 synth emulation. So like in addition to all the other ways you can make noises with this box, 82 00:07:45,180 --> 00:07:54,680 it now can recreate the sort of pinnacle music synthesizer from the 1980s, the Yamaha DX7. And it 83 00:07:54,820 --> 00:07:59,840 also has some other cool like useful abilities for me like the ability to export stems. So like you 84 00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:04,360 create this multi-track composition and currently if you want to record that you kind of just have 85 00:08:04,380 --> 00:08:10,200 to record the stereo out. Now you can essentially export each track individually as a multi-track 86 00:08:10,780 --> 00:08:14,460 folder of waves and then use that pull out into your computer if you want to do some post-production. 87 00:08:14,540 --> 00:08:20,300 And it's just like it's ever since I've bought this thing like six seven years ago every year 88 00:08:20,380 --> 00:08:27,640 It's like getting a new bit of gear because it gets improved over and over again first by since from originally and now by the community 89 00:08:27,760 --> 00:08:29,760 Of people who are hacking on it every day 90 00:08:30,320 --> 00:08:35,060 So this isn't some deluge if you're looking for music piece of gear, this is not sponsored, but I love this thing 91 00:08:36,080 --> 00:08:39,019 That's awesome. It's so cool to see open source and action like that 92 00:08:39,219 --> 00:08:55,280 So many times like you were talking about a company will come to an end-of-life product and throw the source code over the fence and say have at it, but we're not going to support you at all. So to see it on an active product with an active community making all of those kinds of changes to it is pretty darn cool. 93 00:08:55,960 --> 00:09:08,100 I'm a big believer that open source can work as part of your business model and Synthrim just showed like here's a way of doing it, you know, and it's just it's really nice. So yeah, so that's my first one for this week. 94 00:09:08,220 --> 00:09:31,940 Paul, what's your second one for this week? My next one up is Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition. I'm fascinated by Home Assistant, the home automation software platform that people usually run on a Raspberry Pi. I have an instance running with just a couple of things hooked up, and it's one thing I wish I would spend more time with. But I also know that home automation can be quite the rabbit hole once you go down it, especially the effect on your wallet. 95 00:09:32,220 --> 00:09:44,200 Back in 2023, the Home Assistant team dubbed it the Year of the Voice and started to lay the groundwork for building a voice assistant into Home Assistant. It had to align with their goals, especially around privacy. 96 00:09:45,120 --> 00:09:55,780 All of that work over the last two years has culminated with the Home Assistant Voice, a small square device that listens for your wake word. It features a big button in the middle to activate it, a speaker, and a built-in microphone. 97 00:09:56,220 --> 00:10:01,820 It's 59 bucks, so it's more than a Google Home or an Amazon Alexa, but it's fully private. You can 98 00:10:01,900 --> 00:10:06,540 use a large language model locally if your hardware is beefy enough, like a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, I 99 00:10:06,720 --> 00:10:13,520 believe. Or you can use OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more in the cloud if you choose to. Since it's 100 00:10:13,620 --> 00:10:17,200 open source, they crowdsource a number of languages, and it supports more languages out of 101 00:10:17,200 --> 00:10:21,739 the box than most of its competitors, with over 25 languages supported already. And that's just 102 00:10:21,740 --> 00:10:46,720 the preview edition. And again, like we were talking in the last one, it'll be interesting to see how the open source community rallies around that and how many more languages grow over just the 25. I don't have any Amazon Alexas or Google Homes in my house. Siri on my iPhone is about the only voice assistant that I use. This I'm actually tempted to dip my toes into. That whole idea of privacy, like we've talked about in past episodes really appeals to me. 103 00:10:46,740 --> 00:11:16,720 Yeah, me too. I've been an avid spectator of the home assistant scene for so long because I want to play with these home automation thingies, but I don't want the privacy invading gizmos that are the Google and Amazon things. But yet, one of the problems with getting a home built system working is getting just audio input reliably into a Raspberry Pi. And so this kind of solves that "last mile problem" for you in a really kind of aesthetic way. You know, it looks pretty good for a little $300 gizmo. 104 00:11:16,740 --> 00:11:21,920 And presumably you could have multiple of them one per room in your house or whatever if you wanted to do that. 105 00:11:22,580 --> 00:11:27,840 Exactly. And then yeah, and you just run the actual beefy guts on an old PC 106 00:11:28,000 --> 00:11:32,480 you have that you have as a server or maybe a Raspberry Pi somewhere in your basement or whatever. 107 00:11:33,700 --> 00:11:37,980 And that does the actual like large language model I think, right? Exactly. That's exactly how it works. 108 00:11:38,620 --> 00:11:41,280 So you can choose to run it locally or in the cloud and I think it's 109 00:11:41,600 --> 00:11:46,720 Raspberry Pi 4 is the minimum for the beefy that you need, but plenty of people have an old computer lying around. 110 00:11:46,720 --> 00:11:50,980 typically too that you could run that on. Yeah, so I'm really intrigued and I 111 00:11:51,000 --> 00:11:54,000 actually think I might get this just because, hey, we can finally do some 112 00:11:54,220 --> 00:11:58,740 open-source home assistant type stuff now without needing... Exactly, I'm just 113 00:11:58,900 --> 00:12:02,240 afraid once I open Pandora's box it's a rabbit hole I'm gonna go down and not be 114 00:12:02,260 --> 00:12:06,060 able to climb out of. Oh yeah, yeah, I know I've heard some people have been hooking 115 00:12:06,160 --> 00:12:11,300 up their garages and their cars and stuff to Home Assistant. What do you have 116 00:12:11,300 --> 00:12:17,760 for us next. Okay, so to continue the synthesizer theme that I had in the 117 00:12:17,820 --> 00:12:22,240 first one, right before Christmas, a few days before, I attended a workshop hosted 118 00:12:22,360 --> 00:12:26,900 by the Hackaday Supply Frame Design Lab. It was called The Sound of Logic, 119 00:12:27,100 --> 00:12:31,120 Klangorium, and it was taught by Richard Hogben. He's the guy who does the really 120 00:12:31,240 --> 00:12:34,640 great interstitial music at Hackaday Supercons. If you've watched any of the 121 00:12:35,420 --> 00:12:39,300 live streams of Supercons on YouTube, all the music that happens before and after 122 00:12:39,300 --> 00:12:44,580 the talks are his compositions. And he taught the workshop and the workshop is 123 00:12:44,620 --> 00:12:48,940 about this little kind of synthesizer board called the Clangorium that was 124 00:12:48,980 --> 00:12:52,820 made by Elliot Williams who's the I think the head editor now at Hackaday. 125 00:12:53,320 --> 00:12:57,980 And he's been working on this board since 2015 which is now 10 years. He's 126 00:12:58,040 --> 00:13:00,880 documented a whole bunch of it via a series of Hackaday articles. We'll have a 127 00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:07,120 link to those in the show notes. But unlike most modular synthesis boards you 128 00:13:07,120 --> 00:13:10,880 might have heard this board is not expensive it's like just a bunch of 129 00:13:11,000 --> 00:13:16,160 logic circuits because it turns out if you're a clever hacker you can turn some 130 00:13:16,160 --> 00:13:22,900 of these really boring old 80s era logic chips like a hex inverter into a six 131 00:13:22,940 --> 00:13:28,760 voice oscillator you can turn a shift register into a sequencer and because 132 00:13:28,800 --> 00:13:34,920 it's just square waves you can just use a diode or as a mixer it's kind of just 133 00:13:34,920 --> 00:13:41,640 nuts that you can do a bunch of this stuff that sounds like a lot of the components you would 134 00:13:41,820 --> 00:13:46,720 have in a modular synthesizer setup, but it's just a couple of little logic chips that are like 50 135 00:13:46,920 --> 00:13:53,300 cents each. And this board is, you know, it's about maybe five inches by eight inches, and it has 136 00:13:53,420 --> 00:13:57,220 little sections that are different parts of what you might have in a synthesizer like oscillator, 137 00:13:57,700 --> 00:14:03,720 mixer, filter, that kind of stuff. And it's got little pin headers like you would have on an 138 00:14:03,720 --> 00:14:08,600 an Arduino or a breadboard where you just connect wires between them to patch your synthesizer sound. 139 00:14:09,200 --> 00:14:14,540 And so the workshop was soldering up part of that board. It's a pretty big board so you couldn't do all of it. 140 00:14:14,600 --> 00:14:19,880 We did about maybe a third of it. And getting the oscillator section working and the little drum voice, 141 00:14:19,940 --> 00:14:24,500 because there's a little drum voice on there that was easy to solder up, and then the output section. 142 00:14:24,960 --> 00:14:30,060 It was a lot of fun. And I love that it's been this work of love by Elliot for the last 10 years, 143 00:14:30,060 --> 00:14:42,780 is that every so often he comes back to it, he teaches like maybe a workshop at a Supercon, or he writes another article on the blog, and we get to learn more about this crazy, let's use logic circuits to make synthesizers stuff. 144 00:14:43,580 --> 00:14:48,740 This reminds me of the Charles Lortok from Supercons that we had in our last episode. 145 00:14:49,300 --> 00:14:49,580 Totally. 146 00:14:49,960 --> 00:14:55,460 Microcontrollers are just radios in disguise, where he's using a microcontroller to do something that it was not intended to be. 147 00:14:56,140 --> 00:14:56,300 Yep. 148 00:14:56,540 --> 00:14:58,640 And that's what comes to mind when I hear about this project. 149 00:14:59,100 --> 00:15:29,080 Yeah, it's so nuts. It's like normally, so the way these, this circuit works is you have an inverter, which normally it takes the input that's high and turns into low and vice versa. And you feed it back from the output and back to the input. And normally feedback like that is bad. But if you insert a little resistor capacitor in that whole loop, you've now delayed the signal a little bit. And the amount of delay is kind of how fast the oscillation happens as the chip goes, Oh, I should be high. Oh, no, wait, I should be low. Oh, I should be high. Oh, I should be low. Oh, I should be high. Oh 150 00:15:29,100 --> 00:15:34,040 low. That's an oscillator and change that resistor and they can change the pitch of the oscillation. 151 00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:38,820 It's just kind of funny that like two things that we're taught as engineers not to do. It's like 152 00:15:38,960 --> 00:15:44,120 don't do positive feedback like this and don't do you know don't do analog stuff with digital 153 00:15:44,340 --> 00:15:49,260 circuits and and here we are doing it and it sounds pretty neat. Okay what's your next one Paul? 154 00:15:50,040 --> 00:15:53,760 I'm going to call this segment fun with 3D printing. There's been so much 3D printing 155 00:15:53,920 --> 00:15:59,080 news in the last month you may have missed it if you blinked. First up is a four axis 3D printer 156 00:15:59,080 --> 00:16:04,060 By 4-axis, Joshua Bird has created a 3D printer where not only does it have the normal X, 157 00:16:04,100 --> 00:16:07,820 Y, and Z planes, but on this printer the nozzle can rotate as well. 158 00:16:08,300 --> 00:16:11,840 You almost have to see it to believe it, but it allows you to have greater than 90 degree 159 00:16:11,960 --> 00:16:12,600 overhangs. 160 00:16:13,040 --> 00:16:15,720 It's open source and I've linked to the YouTube video in the project source. 161 00:16:16,580 --> 00:16:21,900 Then there's Mobiprint, which looks like a 3D printer on a robot vacuum, which it literally 162 00:16:22,140 --> 00:16:22,320 is. 163 00:16:23,300 --> 00:16:27,120 You have it map your room using its built-in LiDAR, and then you select the objects you 164 00:16:27,120 --> 00:16:31,420 want to print and where in the room you want it printed and it prints right on the floor. 165 00:16:31,680 --> 00:16:32,620 [laughter] 166 00:16:33,020 --> 00:16:33,740 This sounds dangerous. 167 00:16:34,140 --> 00:16:38,480 I'm not sure how well that works when I know how clean I need to keep my 3D print bed and I can't 168 00:16:38,620 --> 00:16:44,240 imagine what a dirty floor is like. Next up is a video by Stephen Hawes on how he used the UV 169 00:16:44,540 --> 00:16:51,440 light in a resin printer to print onto a fiberglass copper block and make a working PCB. It's about 15 170 00:16:51,560 --> 00:16:55,160 minutes long but it's an interesting process and he goes over the challenges he ran into. 171 00:16:55,440 --> 00:17:01,400 And it's not for the faint of heart. Some of the chemicals he used, you actually need to talk to your municipality and how to dispose of them. 172 00:17:01,760 --> 00:17:05,120 But it was pretty cool that in the end, he was able to make a working PCB. 173 00:17:06,480 --> 00:17:12,380 The Lemontron 3D printer debuted. This is a small, mobile 3D printer that prints inverted, upside down. 174 00:17:12,740 --> 00:17:16,180 It's only $400 to build yourself, so it's relatively affordable. 175 00:17:16,780 --> 00:17:23,680 And they say that gravity really doesn't affect it because the filament cools so fast that you don't get any stretching when you print it upside down. 176 00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:27,819 Back when like the first wave of open source 3d printers were happening at Maker Faires, 177 00:17:28,319 --> 00:17:32,900 there would always be a couple of people who would have the 3d printer in a backpack and some of them 178 00:17:32,940 --> 00:17:36,560 would have them mounted upside down because yeah if you do it if you have the settings just right 179 00:17:36,640 --> 00:17:42,800 or have the fans blow fast enough that it cools before it can droop. Yep. Next up there's a new 180 00:17:43,140 --> 00:17:48,640 add-on kit for your 3d printer mostly Creality type stuff it looks like that straps an inkjet 181 00:17:48,640 --> 00:17:54,060 toner to your 3D printer and allows you to add some color to your 3D prints. The beta unit kits 182 00:17:54,320 --> 00:18:00,000 retail for about $200 but are currently sold out. It launches later this month in January for $250, 183 00:18:00,500 --> 00:18:05,540 I believe. So an interesting way that if you don't want to do MMU, you know, multi-material prints, 184 00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:11,180 this just basically is spray painting it right on. That's interesting. Much better than the 185 00:18:12,080 --> 00:18:18,620 attach the sharpie to the edge of the filament that I've seen. Exactly. And then lastly, there 186 00:18:18,620 --> 00:18:33,480 PET Fusion 2.0. This is a Kickstarter where you buy the STLs and bill of materials to create a device that recycles plastic bottles and turns them into 3D printer filament. It's pretty unique and it was fully funded in just three hours. 187 00:18:33,620 --> 00:18:46,380 You build in a motor that cuts the bottles into two strips, then you feed those strips back in, and it's extruded as 1.75mm 3D printer filament, and then you can add a dye to it as well to color it. 188 00:18:46,980 --> 00:18:58,420 It looked pretty neat, and it was relatively cheap. The STLs, I want to say, started at $40, and only went up to about $120 for commercial versions if you wanted to resell them. So, interesting product. 189 00:18:58,620 --> 00:19:08,140 Wow, that's really amazing. Yeah, I would love to see more home recycling of the various plastics we have. I know it's like a really hard problem, but this is pretty interesting. 190 00:19:08,580 --> 00:19:13,740 My challenge would be is I don't really buy soda bottles because I don't want that kind of plastic in the environment. 191 00:19:14,080 --> 00:19:15,100 Same, yeah. 192 00:19:16,040 --> 00:19:17,360 What do you have for us last? 193 00:19:18,400 --> 00:19:24,920 Pinball. All right, I love pinball. I grew up with mall arcades with pinball machines. The machines were usually kind of broken. 194 00:19:24,920 --> 00:19:29,000 and we're definitely old timey compared to the video games or like all the cool new thing. 195 00:19:29,640 --> 00:19:34,180 But when I got to college, whoever ran the laundry room in the dorm basement was really smart. 196 00:19:34,360 --> 00:19:37,920 And he had room for a couple of coin-op video games and one pinball machine. 197 00:19:38,540 --> 00:19:40,300 And that pinball machine was always in good shape. 198 00:19:40,920 --> 00:19:46,080 And if you're a college kid like me with some leftover quarters waiting for his laundry to dry, what are you going to do? 199 00:19:47,480 --> 00:19:48,540 You're going to play some pinball. 200 00:19:49,160 --> 00:19:49,300 Yeah. 201 00:19:49,420 --> 00:19:51,060 I got really good at that pinball machine. 202 00:19:51,640 --> 00:19:54,860 So from then on, whenever I'd come across a pinball game, I'd play it. 203 00:19:55,200 --> 00:19:57,120 But pinball is kind of like, they're like little puzzles. 204 00:19:57,320 --> 00:19:59,260 You spend more time with them and you unlock more fun. 205 00:19:59,800 --> 00:20:01,360 That takes a lot of time, can get expensive. 206 00:20:02,060 --> 00:20:03,180 So I mostly didn't play very much. 207 00:20:03,800 --> 00:20:07,060 Then, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago or 15 years ago, a company called Zen 208 00:20:07,340 --> 00:20:11,400 Studios came along with a really solid pinball physics simulation engine and 209 00:20:11,660 --> 00:20:15,820 licenses to many of the classic Williams pinball games like Theater of Magic, 210 00:20:16,160 --> 00:20:19,700 Attack from Mars, and my laundry room game, High Speed. 211 00:20:20,560 --> 00:20:26,120 They have apps on mobile and tablet and Xbox and console, PC, everything. 212 00:20:26,840 --> 00:20:30,960 And so I've been playing these games for many years virtually, and I've gotten 213 00:20:31,120 --> 00:20:34,140 really good at a few of them because now that I have it on my phone, if I got a 214 00:20:34,240 --> 00:20:36,120 couple of minutes, I'll just play a little pinball, you know? 215 00:20:36,660 --> 00:20:39,880 And so this is all background for what I did during my Christmas vacation. 216 00:20:40,700 --> 00:20:43,640 While visiting family up in the Bay Area, I was fortunate enough to visit the 217 00:20:43,840 --> 00:20:45,800 Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda. 218 00:20:46,500 --> 00:20:50,020 And it's a nonprofit and it takes this nonprofit charter pretty seriously. 219 00:20:50,040 --> 00:20:54,360 It has, it has events, but it also has wall text for every one of the 220 00:20:54,540 --> 00:20:55,640 hundred plus machines they have. 221 00:20:56,040 --> 00:20:58,280 That explain why this particular machine is important. 222 00:20:58,840 --> 00:21:03,440 In addition to like all the old games they have from like 1800s or early 1900s, 223 00:21:03,500 --> 00:21:06,200 where like, you know, flippers hadn't been really considered yet. 224 00:21:06,300 --> 00:21:09,140 So it was just like mostly a game of chance where the ball went from the top 225 00:21:09,180 --> 00:21:14,420 to the bottom and hitting pins, you know, but they have like a, also a bunch of 226 00:21:14,460 --> 00:21:18,140 the modern games or, you know, from the nineties and two thousands games, um, 227 00:21:18,140 --> 00:21:22,040 including classics, like the ones that I'm really good at, 228 00:21:22,120 --> 00:21:24,940 High Speed and Theater of Magic, and I got to play both. 229 00:21:25,980 --> 00:21:26,660 - Nice. - It was really great. 230 00:21:27,080 --> 00:21:27,680 It was so good. 231 00:21:28,600 --> 00:21:31,480 And I sucked at both of them. (laughs) 232 00:21:31,860 --> 00:21:33,000 - The real world's a little different 233 00:21:33,080 --> 00:21:34,680 than the virtual world, is that what you're saying? 234 00:21:35,000 --> 00:21:38,300 - Yeah, see it turns out that the Zen Studios Simulator games 235 00:21:38,800 --> 00:21:41,320 they present this perfect machine to you. 236 00:21:41,480 --> 00:21:44,100 It's a machine that's just come off the factory floor, 237 00:21:44,720 --> 00:21:46,860 doesn't have wear spots on the table, 238 00:21:47,420 --> 00:21:50,060 or a flipper that's kind of weak on the second hit. 239 00:21:50,580 --> 00:21:52,620 You know, it's like just, it's just perfect. 240 00:21:53,420 --> 00:21:55,820 But in real life, every pinball machine is kind of unique 241 00:21:56,020 --> 00:21:56,640 and ever-changing. 242 00:21:56,940 --> 00:21:58,420 It's got to kind of get to know the machine 243 00:21:58,480 --> 00:22:00,360 and know that it can't do certain things 244 00:22:00,400 --> 00:22:02,780 or you have to like do different actions 245 00:22:03,040 --> 00:22:04,120 to get what you want. 246 00:22:05,000 --> 00:22:07,800 So I'd forgotten that. (laughs) 247 00:22:08,100 --> 00:22:10,800 The distance between when I really played a lot of pinball 248 00:22:10,960 --> 00:22:13,420 and playing a lot of pinball on computers 249 00:22:13,840 --> 00:22:14,640 was like pretty vast. 250 00:22:15,000 --> 00:22:16,960 So I decided to visit more real pinball places. 251 00:22:17,140 --> 00:22:22,580 And it turns out there's a really good arcade that's a few miles from me in Pasadena called 252 00:22:22,760 --> 00:22:23,640 Neon Retro Arcade. 253 00:22:24,220 --> 00:22:27,100 You know, I got some gift certificates and I'm going to go and visit them in a couple 254 00:22:27,140 --> 00:22:27,660 weeks I think. 255 00:22:28,180 --> 00:22:32,260 And I just looked on pinballmap.com, which is a great website, you should go visit it. 256 00:22:32,780 --> 00:22:38,460 That in Minneapolis, there is a place called Lit Pinball Bar that has 47 pinball machines. 257 00:22:38,620 --> 00:22:39,880 So Paul, if you want to go. 258 00:22:41,020 --> 00:22:42,200 I will have to check that out. 259 00:22:43,900 --> 00:22:49,100 There's also, I think, an app version of the pinballmap.com website that I have on my phone. 260 00:22:49,360 --> 00:22:52,820 So if you want to check in real time, "Hey, I'm in this random location. 261 00:22:53,040 --> 00:22:55,320 Are there any pinball machines within two miles of me?" 262 00:22:55,320 --> 00:22:55,920 Oh, crazy. 263 00:22:57,780 --> 00:22:59,080 So yeah, go play pinball, people. 264 00:22:59,260 --> 00:22:59,560 It's fun. 265 00:23:00,580 --> 00:23:05,120 Before we end the episode, I'd like to give a shout out to RadioFreeFedi, who I covered 266 00:23:05,160 --> 00:23:06,540 last June in episode nine. 267 00:23:07,320 --> 00:23:10,960 Turning off the lights on the online music streams later this month, and I'm grateful 268 00:23:11,100 --> 00:23:12,200 to have been part of the community. 269 00:23:12,800 --> 00:23:18,600 really did rock. And that's our episode. Thanks for listening. For show notes and transcripts, 270 00:23:18,740 --> 00:23:22,240 visit thebootloader.net. Until next time, stay positive.