iirc LoRa has much Lo-er Ra when its line-of-sight isn't obstructed, but wiki says even in urban areas the range is about 3 miles, which certainly beats wifi..

would a T9-esque keyboard system be a decent compromise?

i love how much the theme matches the wallpaper

happy pride month from madeline—it's supposed to be 2/3 of the trans pride flag—and also happy pride month from hyfetch if you run hyfetch rn

Imagine, if you will, a pager. The old devices that go bleep blop and would give you a short message from someone, and that was it. Sometimes you could give an acknowledgement, and some of the fancier ones would even let you respond, but mostly it was a way for someone to remotely poke you on the shoulder.

Nowadays, with our newfangled "cellular telephones" and "3G", communication is instant and two-way, five-way, maybe even twenty-way??? The possibilities are endless, and I will have no part in it!

But acquiring one of these elusive "pagers" is not as easy as one might believe. The remaining few carriers such as Spok primarily cater to the health care industry, where reliably receiving critical information is treated as more important than a confetti effect when someone writes "birthday". Even with resellers available, POCSAG is notoriously insecure, and from what I've heard, has far spottier coverage than modern cellular bands.

Enter: LoRa. It's not always better in terms of coverage, but it's at least a much more open standard with encryption built-in. Modules are readily available, and there are multiple development kits that come with an RP2040 already wired up.

This is very early days, and I have nothing to show for it yet. I'm not even particularly versed in electrical engineering! But I figure if I'm going to learn, I should start with something actually interesting to me.

So far, the sub-tasks:

• How advanced should it be? A full keyboard would be too difficult, but acknowledgements or even simple responses (suggested by @iliana) would be nice.
• I'd rather avoid a piezoelectric speaker, as they can be pretty harsh. While this is probably ideal for a pager, I'd rather not annoy everyone around me in the process. I'm thinking of a monophonic synth a la Nokia phones, but that'll involve learning how those actually... work.
• I've been playing with a 16x2 LCD Character display, and it has definitely revealed to me that at least 3 rows are necessary. I'm guessing the driving of the display be the easiest part of the process.

covered a song that's traditionally performed in the key of S with a neat trick to squeeze an extra not-quite-channel out of the PSG


the sneaky math in question: manually summing adjacent notes from the harmonic series, such that i could have something that approximated triads on a piano in the intro and guitar chords in the chorus without sacrificing the vocal melody or noise-channel percussion.

i did this by drawing a sin(2x)+sin(3x) into channel 3's wave data register for a perfect 5th, and sin(3x)+sin(4x) for a perfect 4th. (you can do sin(4x)+sin(5x) for a major 3rd, but it starts sounding too buzzy due to the low-resolution aliasing)



a technique like this was demonstrated a dozen years ago and called "the ghost channel" - this video shows someone adding square-waves to sine-waves by hand, but only at octave intervals

another one: Stardust Speedway Bad Future!


i could've used the patcher tool to put the real vocal samples in, but the goofy little speech synthesis engine in stock LSDJ makes me feel like it's Metal Sonic itself telling you to 'get down' / 'hit it'

very happy with it now! thanks to artemis for teaching me how to use the wav synthesizer

Quote from: viviridian on May 16, 2025, 06:10 AMi've only tried single player so far, but it's cool. it's even more turn based than I expected lol

Oh yes, especially "single player" (which feels more like local multiplayer lol). I kinda want to see if I can make a "dedicated" lobby without having to have the game open so others can join whenever, although I imagine it wouldn't be the most useful without multiple people being there...

intriguing... most of my smash bros skill is in the context of brain-off, do-whatever-comes-naturally. i wonder what'll happen if the action slows down and i have to think about what's happening on the screen. much to consider