Alexis @OhHeyItsAlexis@queer.town

Tried a new recipe tonight!
Sadly tasting them will have to wait until morning.

Continuing my newfound habit of having homemade cookies around. This time I made black raspberry jammy dodgers.

I tried making meeple stained glass cookies tonight! It was my first time and I was a bit heavy handed, so they came out a bit more bulletproof than stained. The candy was this rainbow pride one that my partner's ex sent her as a gift, which resulted in the weird tie-dye.

I cleaned up some old electronics, and had enough shelf space to work on making this little display. It's three concrete vases with Doryphoros on the left and Venus on the right. Both are just full of greens, like ferns and hops. In the center in Hermaphroditus, who is instead bursting with a bouquet in beautiful, bright colors.

It's so nice, seeing a body that looks like my body as a work of art.

Trans goth breakfast

Two of the plexiglass panels broke while dancing, and the thin metal ones were... well, a deeply unpleasant replacement. So tonight I got some half-inch mahogany plywood, operated a jigsaw for the first time, and did this.

I think at this point it has real Steam Steam Revolution Punk vibes.

I did at least lace them and get some toe caps on. They're so pretty. 😭

The morning was surprisingly stressful, so I decided to postpone studying and try a new nail technique. Not half bad for my first time striping. The green is the Zelda-inspired "A Hero Will Rise" by Color Spectrum Polish and the gold is "Million Mille Hues" by Essie.

Took a break from studying to finish up the last bits I needed to make this pad my daily dancer. I took the thin metal sheet that was originally screwed over the bottom (it wasn't structural... I think it was meant to make it look like a solid unit) and chopped it up into squares. One went to cover the electronics on the bottom. Two others went to serve as top plates for the two previously empty panels that I flipped and turned into working buttons! Oh, and I tore out the internal reset button.

Please enjoy my beefy stompers doing their initial attempt of Justin Timberlake's Can't Stop The Feeling on the new pad. I'm sad I couldn't fit the upper half in frame, as that's where all the cute moves are. Maybe next time. 😁

This is it! I popped on a janky-ass temporary cover for the bottom, plugged it in and it wooooorks! My friend joined me for the inaugural dance, which I'll post in a jiffy.

There is one more teensy weensy issue... standing on the center panel pushes the reset button on the Arduino. 😅 Nothing some desoldering can't fix.

And, y'know, covers for the back so you're not stepping into foam holes.

Okay, so one pad's wire had broken, and required a quick resoldering.

The other issue was code-based, as I was using integers for the extra analog inputs, but you do still need to specify them by their constant name to get it right.

Cleaned up the code, moved it to use an actual joystick library instead of key inputs (which makes debugging less annoying, added some button labels, pressed each to see which pin it was tied to and...

It's aliiiiiive!

Next step: finding resistor thresholds

Aaargh, so close and yet...
Modified the code to support digital input for the front start and select buttons. I accidentally had them registering a pull-high instead of a pull-low, which meant a lot of it typing "abba" when you plugged it in.
Of the 8 sensors, ↙️↘️↗️⬇️ seem to be working, with ↖️⬆️➡️⬅️ not quite hitting the mark (either they're linked together or not returning any change.) Heck, I'm not even 100% sure ↗️ is actually doing its thing or just accidentally measuring changes.

Okay, so upside of a modern digital soldering iron is that they are super light and heat up crazy quick. The downside is that as soon you finish wiring in some resistors you think, "well, I mean... it'll only take a moment to do on more." The Arduino is now all soldered together, with the breakout boxes connected.

All I need to do to tomorrow is strip & screw in the sensor wires, find them a home in the pad, modify the source & then pray I didn't fuck up my circuit.

Oh my aching fingers. I soldered all of the force-sensitive resistors, ran the wiring, cut and covered them with the foam pads, and screwed everything together. The only thing left to do is actually connect and program a microcontroller before I am ready to test...

Today I finally found myself with enough energy to try and rebuild the frame. I flatted the warped panels as best I could. Then I replaced all of the screws with new ones (thanks god I got those measurements correct...) so that they'd be nice and consistent. The previous owner had stripped a lot of them, and replaced some missing round head screws with considerably less foot-friendly flat heads.

After last week's terrible mani, today'a went a whole lots better. I forgot that you're not supposed to put pressure on the card you use to smear the stamping polish into the plate. The red is "Lights Fires When Nervous" by Garden Path Lacquers, which I now love and definitely need to spend some time outside with it. In the sun it glints and glimmers like Dorothy's slippers. 🤩

We found scratches on the corner of our garage door and went into detective mode. My partner was able to, based on the dates she reported seeing wood chips, track down the culprit in our garage camera.

Alright! All of the plexiglass panels are free of their glued-on padding. If you ever find yourself in this same scenario:
1. slash the metal conductive tape as much as possible, to make it permeable
2. coat completely with Goo-Gone and let it rest for an hour
3. the foam should peel off easily, leaving the adhesive behind
4. scrape the remaining adhesive and stubborn bits with a plastic razor blade (they're amazing, if you haven't heard of them)

I plan on taking the paint off the plastic panels too, and using them as a place to keep all of the stickers I've been slowly collecting. Here is the left arrow graphics panel! This goes behind the plastic, so it should be safe from shoes.