beastlykings

Some background: I love flashlights. Been in the hobby for years. I have an original group buy version of "Giggles" the GigaThrower, and upgraded it with the new emitter and driver when the GT70 came out.

I've got a group buy LT1 and C01 as well.

I've EDCed a D4 for as long as I can remember, added Lexel custom aux emitters before they came standard. Wore out my first D4, had to replace the switch. Upgraded to a D4v2, used it for years. I forgot it on a job site a few weeks ago and it got stolen. So I have a D4v2 dual channel in the mail.

I'm pretty sure I was the first to mod a D18 with aux emitters, there's proof on Reddit somewhere. Definitely modded my fair share of headlamps with custom Lexel drivers and emitters, upgraded springs, etc.

All this to say: I've been around. But I definitely haven't been active in a long time, and even when I was I definitely focused on stuff that runs anduril. So I don't know what's out there these days.

I love the idea of a big fat heavy flashlight. I have a maglite, and I keep it by my bed. I know it's silly, but I like the idea of having a short club in hand if I hear a bump in the night..

I put an LED conversion bulb in it. But what I want is something like an xhp50.3, and anduril. I could modify it myself, 3d printed trays for 18650s and such, but I worry it won't have the weight I want.

Giggles is too big and expensive for the task. I want something maglite shaped and weighted, running anduril, but not ridiculously expensive. Doesn't even have to be that crazy bright either. Just big lol.

Any suggestions?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31482764

This picture shows the rough-in before I made it look nice. I soldered it in by soldering the old mounting holes directly to the casing of the connector. Seems sturdy enough. I might put a piece of foam in there to help hold it in place, take any excess pressure off the PCB.

I used this connector from Amazon, and soldered in my own 5.1k resistor to make it compatible with USB C PD chargers. I hate devices that leave that resistor out. Very annoying.

It's crazy, this thing was made in 2012. USB C wasn't even ratified until 2014. The first name brand Android didn't have it until ~~2016~~ 2015. And here I've drug it into the future. Cool stuff!

Screen off:

Screen on:

This picture shows the rough-in before I made it look nice. I soldered it in by soldering the old mounting holes directly to the casing of the connector. Seems sturdy enough. I might put a piece of foam in there to help hold it in place, take any excess pressure off the PCB.

I used this connector from Amazon, and soldered in my own 5.1k resistor to make it compatible with USB C PD chargers. I hate devices that leave that resistor out. Very annoying.

It's crazy, this thing was made in 2012. USB C wasn't even ratified until 2014. The first name brand Android didn't have it until ~~2016~~ 2015. And here I've drug it into the future. Cool stuff!

Screen off:

Screen on:

Edit: fixed date.

Pulled this thing out of storage, cleaned it up, hacked a lipo into the old BMS, modded it and installed moonlight.

Runs great! Though coming from a steam deck, the resolution leaves a bit to be desired. Still a fun experiment.

Next I'm gonna mod it with a USB C port. And get an actual battery for it haha.

I love the steam deck, and recently, so does my wife! Don't get me wrong, I couldn't be happier. And she would find something to play on her switch if I asked for the deck back. But I don't want to stifle this new found love for the deck.

So I decided to get creative. What you're seeing is horizon forbidden West on maximum settings, streaming from my desktop to an over 8 year old Chromebook, with an Xbox controller.

It's honestly pretty good, considering. Every minute or two I get some hitching and stuttering, something to do with the Wi-Fi. Also there's a weird green bar at the bottom I can't seem to remove 🤔 But otherwise it's smooth and clear. Good enough to get me through until we can justify a second Deck 😬

I'm surprised it works at all! But it's steams built in streaming, when the Chromebook steam app 🤷‍♂️

Edit: in case anyone comes by later and wants to know or could find this useful: the Chromebook is an Acer R13 from 2016, mediatek CPU. My wifi is a 1st gen Google WiFi puck. And the stuttering started turning into zero audio at times.

I bought a random $15 gigabit Ethernet USB C adapter with pass through charging, ran cat 6 tm under my couch to where I sit, and now things run 99.9% smooth. Very pleased. This will hold me over until I can justify another steam deck.

Edit 2: I fixed the green bar by realizing I was an idiot. I never looked at my PC when it was streaming, and it was using my crappy secondary display at 1400x900. This Chromebook is 1920x1080, so it was doing weird things. Moved it to my main display at 1080, and now it looks even better, and no more green bar.

Edit 3: Now I'm using a WiiU gamepad.

Cat tax: That's not a small pineapple, he's just a big cat.

I'm cheap, and I also have barely any time for breakfast in the morning, and my wife likes it when I make her breakfast but she leaves for work an hour after me.

So this is what I do, and have done for almost three years straight now.

You get yourself some Some And a big bag of shredded cheese, your choice

First thing I do when I walk into the kitchen is start the toaster oven, getting it hot. Then I take a chicken patty out of the freezer and break it in half on the edge of the counter while it's still in the bag. Then I take a half sheet paper towel, and fold it in half, because I hate doing dishes. I put both halves of the chicken patty on it, pop it in the microwave for one minute, 30 seconds per half if I'm only doing one. Then while that's going, I slap two tortillas on the counter, sprinkle a healthy dose of cheese on them and spread it out evenly. By the time I'm done, so is the chicken, so I put each half on one side of each tortilla. Next comes the flavor. You can sprinkle a little garlic salt and pepper, or a dash of worcestershire, or my favorite was a dab of Chick-fil-A sauce under the patty. Then, slide it onto the rack in the piping hot toaster oven. Then I walk away to go start getting ready for work, just a simple task like finding socks or something, then I come back a minute or two later and the cheese is nice and bubbly, the tortilla is browning on the edges, it's just about ready to pull out. Then I pull them out, fold them in half, put mine on my water bottle to cool, and hers goes back into the toaster oven, but it's a fancy oven so I set the temp to 160f so it's nice and hot when she gets up, but doesn't keep cooking too much.

The whole process takes less than 10 minutes, maybe even 5 minutes if I'm really on my game in the morning.

The whole thing costs like 50 cents, and is plenty filling for me. It's probably not the healthiest option, but.. 🤷‍♂️

Why don't I use something more breakfasty, like sausage? Because I can't find it as cheap as the chicken. Funny enough, I actually started this whole process during COVID, with frozen precooked sausage patties. We got a bag of them with one of our low income commodity boxes, and couldn't figure out what to do with them. So I started doing this. Then when the bag ran dry, I transitioned to chicken. Not as good, but still good, and like I said, I'm cheap lol.

I'm going to do some a/b testing to compare to the rubber duck antennas I've been using. I don't expect much more, but perhaps a little bit more range?

Going from the little stubby coil of wire included with the heltec v3s, this should be amazing.

Edit: I tested it and it works just fine, or at least within the margin of error of my test. It wasn't significantly better or worse than the Amazon bought high gain rubber duck antennas, a little disappointing but 🤷‍♂️

As has been said before, height is might. Line of sight counts for more than increased power.

I'll still probably use them on some permanent nodes 🤷‍♂️

Just putting this here in case it's useful to someone else.

I'm still working on setting up my local nodes and meshing to my buddies houses. Part of my testing involved going to the top of the tallest hill in my town, (1300 feet above ground level, the rest of the ground is relatively flat around here).

The problem was that I couldn't connect to my home node, around 2.5 miles away, good line of sight. Testing showed that my home node received all my messages, but the return confirmations never made it back.

The problem? The tallest hill in town is also home to two fully loaded cell towers, blasting away, presumably deafening my node, overloading the front end with strong out of band signals. 900mhz GSM perhaps?

At any rate, I looked into band pass filters. I'm a ham and I've dealt with poorly filtered front ends by the likes of baofeng, so I know filtering can do a lot, and I wasn't sure how much a standard node came with.

The answer? Some, not much. Enough for most use cases. Oddly, most information I found on the subject, specific to Lora, advocated against using filters, saying they are usually unnecessary, etc etc.

While that's probably true most of the time, it's definitely not true all of the time. I'd be interested to see some a/b comparisons of 20-40 foot high nodes in urban environments, both with and without filters.

From experience I know that a baofeng 144mhz radio (known to have poor filtering) with a 1/4 wave vertical antenna up 40 feet, was mostly deaf to any distant signals, and actually performed better in some instances by just using the stock antenna and standing on the ground. Likewise when using the 40 foot tall antenna and adding a filter, the reception was massively improved.

Add to that experience my most recent test. I added a 915mhz band pass filter to my node and brought it on top of the hill, next to the cell towers, and was able to make full duplex communication with my home node.

I'll be doing more testing, some a/b testing with the filter on my home node to see if it improves my range tests.

Filters probably aren't for everyone. And they aren't free performance gains, you can't forget insertion loss. But don't be afraid to buy one and try it if you think you might be having desense issues.

It was supposed to rain, but we pressed on, and it ended up being beautiful. Chilly but pleasant. Just cold enough to make you appreciate the warm fire. Plus the sound of the river to lull you to sleep.

Hard to beat!

I usually go with dehydrated meals, but packed heavy on real food this time, for science. I got myself a small lightweight nonstick pan, and fried up a whole steak for dinner, bacon and eggs for first breakfast, and pancakes and eggs for the second breakfast. I only had one dehydrated meal this trip. I learned a lot!

It was supposed to rain, but we pressed on, and it ended up being beautiful. Chilly but pleasant. Just cold enough to make you appreciate the warm fire. Plus the sound of the river to lull you to sleep.

Hard to beat!