Tuesday, August 15, 2017

The Quest for The Love Song IC - Thwarted by Paywall (different kind of paywall)

So I was looking for the "Lovesong" IC shown in this video:


I'm doing this because I fried the sound chip I loved that contained the same song
 (I took it out of an alarm clock, and I shorted the clock resistor accidentally, killing the chip)
And discovered that original seller Aitendo discontinued the product...
*facepalm*

So I went to Chinese wholesale sites to find the module.

And yes, I seemed to have found one:



The problem? Well, you can clearly see the problem on the translated page, courtesy of Google:


Yes. You have to buy 1000's of them if you don't want to ask the seller about the quantity.
The price shown above is price per piece; Meaning you have to pay for 1000's of them, whether you like it or not.

D'oh!

And I don't know Chinese nor have a mobile phone ready for this purpose!
And they don't accept emails as far as I can see :(

Should I give up?

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Dork Magic: Finding out approximate height of Torbjorn's turret

So I needed to get the height data of the turret so I can rebuild the blueprint for the turret itself.
(it got destroyed in the hard disk snafu)
And since I couldn't find non-fan-made models of the turret itself, I decided to do the dirty work myself.

I first hopped into the game and loaded up Practice Range so I can play around without getting penalized as long as I want.
Then I took some screenshots while using Heroic emote.
Turret's level is different in some photos, but don't worry, unless it goes into Level 3 (which, different from Beta, only activates when using Molten Core ultimate) the actual height rarely changes.
Even if it changes, it doesn't matter because of hysteresis and error compensation range is big enough.
(The top flap would occupy around 12cm of turret's height)

Then we draw lines on the top of each object, like this:
And here we go, we have some lines to compare things to.

We then fetch results of each line's distance, which were:

For the turret and:

For our lovable dwarf friend Torbjorn.

 And through the magic of repetition to give it some redundancy and error correction...
We get those values:
---
60.81mm (torb)
54.77mm (turret)
Value difference: 6.04
---
61.32mm (torb)
53.42mm (turret)
Value difference: 7.90
---
113.61mm (torb)
75.10mm (turret)
Value difference: 38.51
---
61.59mm (torb)
46.61mm (turret)
Value difference: 14.68
---
54.40mm (torb)
47.91mm (turret)
Value difference: 6.49
---
 And then we calculate the difference between him and his turret.

The formula goes like this:
(Torbjorn's height in picture) - (Turret's height in picture) = 
Difference value in mm
Repeat for all data sets

Then:
(Torbjorn's height in mm) - (Median) = 
Turret's height in mm (+/- 500mm)

The value is as follows:

Torb = 140cm = 1400mm
Median: 14.72
= (Turret = 120~130, median: 125)

There we have it! The Z value of the turret. Now it's my duty to find its X and Y value.