Scratch-Building Styrene Space Ships

In this 23-minute video on BP Custom Creations, Ben scratch-builds a 1/32-scale space ship inspired by sci-fi artist Ian McQue. There are tons of videos out there on kitbashing and trash bashing (making models almost entirely from junk). There aren’t as many videos on building everything from scratch.

For this ship, Ben intended to create an almost entirely scratch-built model, but the use of kit-bashed parts for the greeble (details) was just too tempting. In the end, he uses cardboard, styrene, and EVA foam for most of the main construction.

The video includes a bunch of great tips, like prototyping your design in card first and using EVA foam behind cuts in styrene to create bends that won’t break. And this pearl of wisdom (about painting and weathering a model): “It often looks like a mess until it doesn’t.” That has been my experience, to the hilt, and a distinction between a newbie and a more experienced modeler who’s learned to trust the process.

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Scratch-Building Styrene Space Ships

In this 23-minute video on BP Custom Creations, Ben scratch-builds a 1/32-scale space ship inspired by sci-fi artist Ian McQue. There are tons of videos out there on kitbashing and trash bashing (making models almost entirely from junk). There aren’t as many videos on building everything from scratch.

For this ship, Ben intended to create an almost entirely scratch-built model, but the use of kit-bashed parts for the greeble (details) was just too tempting. In the end, he uses cardboard, styrene, and EVA foam for most of the main construction.

The video includes a bunch of great tips, like prototyping your design in card first and using EVA foam behind cuts in styrene to create bends that won’t break. And this pearl of wisdom (about painting and weathering a model): “It often looks like a mess until it doesn’t.” That has been my experience, to the hilt, and a distinction between a newbie and a more experienced modeler who’s learned to trust the process.

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YAY! floppy disk interfacing part 7, a floppy flux milestone!

whew! so, turns out it was an underspec’ed power supply. so now we know, 500mA is not enough for a floppy drive you really need 1A. but with that out of the way, we were able to cleanly read all 160 tracks of flux from a floppy disk! this particular disk is one that our friend hid in that place that one time, and we’ve been waiting to be able to see what’s on it… will we be able to extract the sectors and discover what secrets lie within??!? – video (watch until the END!)…

reading floppy disk data part 6, MFM sector decoding

reading raw floppy disk data part 5, at night the greaseweazles come

interfacing with floppy disks at low level, part 4

Reading floppy disk data, part 3! itsa pulse party

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 2

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 1…

Adafruit Floppy is a project to make a flexible, full-stack, open source hardware/software device for reading, archiving, accessing and duplicating floppy disk media. It joins a family of open source hardware and software such as greaseweazle and fluxengine, and will attempt to increase the availability and accessibility of floppy disk controllers by: porting the greaseweazle / fluxengine firmware to Arduino so that it is less tied to specific hardware, adding firmware support for the RP2040 chip / low cost pico, adding hardware support for reading apple ii disks including index sensing, adding woz/a2r support to greaseweazle / fluxengine, and investigating analog flux data acquisition methods for repair of damaged disks. all of this with permissively licensed hardware and software so folks can re-create without licensing agreements, NDAs, or discussion.

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YAY! floppy disk interfacing part 7, a floppy flux milestone!

whew! so, turns out it was an underspec’ed power supply. so now we know, 500mA is not enough for a floppy drive you really need 1A. but with that out of the way, we were able to cleanly read all 160 tracks of flux from a floppy disk! this particular disk is one that our friend hid in that place that one time, and we’ve been waiting to be able to see what’s on it… will we be able to extract the sectors and discover what secrets lie within??!? – video (watch until the END!)…

reading floppy disk data part 6, MFM sector decoding

reading raw floppy disk data part 5, at night the greaseweazles come

interfacing with floppy disks at low level, part 4

Reading floppy disk data, part 3! itsa pulse party

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 2

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 1…

Adafruit Floppy is a project to make a flexible, full-stack, open source hardware/software device for reading, archiving, accessing and duplicating floppy disk media. It joins a family of open source hardware and software such as greaseweazle and fluxengine, and will attempt to increase the availability and accessibility of floppy disk controllers by: porting the greaseweazle / fluxengine firmware to Arduino so that it is less tied to specific hardware, adding firmware support for the RP2040 chip / low cost pico, adding hardware support for reading apple ii disks including index sensing, adding woz/a2r support to greaseweazle / fluxengine, and investigating analog flux data acquisition methods for repair of damaged disks. all of this with permissively licensed hardware and software so folks can re-create without licensing agreements, NDAs, or discussion.

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Steve Bannon named Media Matter's “Misinformer of the Year”

Angelo Carusone, CEO and President of Media Matters, joins Yasmin Vossoughian to discuss Steve Bannon’s uniquely dangerous position in spreading misinformation and how he communicates with his base, despite being banned from most social platforms.

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reading floppy disk data part 6, MFM sector decoding

we fixed some track seeking code errors we had, and now we’re able to start getting data from greaseweazle. since the diskette we’ve got is an ibm pc 1.44MB format we can use the built in ibm pc MFM format decoding module. the good news is that its able to decode *some* tracks…but its not able to decode all of them, like it’ll read 10 good sectors in a row, then just cant find any sectors at all – which is a little suspicious. makes us wonder if we got the flux transfer and index pulse encoding right, or if its a formatting thing, because the diskette is readable on a computer with a usb drive connected – video.

reading raw floppy disk data part 5, at night the greaseweazles come

interfacing with floppy disks at low level, part 4

Reading floppy disk data, part 3! itsa pulse party

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 2

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 1…

Adafruit Floppy is a project to make a flexible, full-stack, open source hardware/software device for reading, archiving, accessing and duplicating floppy disk media. It joins a family of open source hardware and software such as greaseweazle and fluxengine, and will attempt to increase the availability and accessibility of floppy disk controllers by: porting the greaseweazle / fluxengine firmware to Arduino so that it is less tied to specific hardware, adding firmware support for the RP2040 chip / low cost pico, adding hardware support for reading apple ii disks including index sensing, adding woz/a2r support to greaseweazle / fluxengine, and investigating analog flux data acquisition methods for repair of damaged disks. all of this with permissively licensed hardware and software so folks can re-create without licensing agreements, NDAs, or discussion.

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reading floppy disk data part 6, MFM sector decoding

we fixed some track seeking code errors we had, and now we’re able to start getting data from greaseweazle. since the diskette we’ve got is an ibm pc 1.44MB format we can use the built in ibm pc MFM format decoding module. the good news is that its able to decode *some* tracks…but its not able to decode all of them, like it’ll read 10 good sectors in a row, then just cant find any sectors at all – which is a little suspicious. makes us wonder if we got the flux transfer and index pulse encoding right, or if its a formatting thing, because the diskette is readable on a computer with a usb drive connected – video.

reading raw floppy disk data part 5, at night the greaseweazles come

interfacing with floppy disks at low level, part 4

Reading floppy disk data, part 3! itsa pulse party

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 2

Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 1…

Adafruit Floppy is a project to make a flexible, full-stack, open source hardware/software device for reading, archiving, accessing and duplicating floppy disk media. It joins a family of open source hardware and software such as greaseweazle and fluxengine, and will attempt to increase the availability and accessibility of floppy disk controllers by: porting the greaseweazle / fluxengine firmware to Arduino so that it is less tied to specific hardware, adding firmware support for the RP2040 chip / low cost pico, adding hardware support for reading apple ii disks including index sensing, adding woz/a2r support to greaseweazle / fluxengine, and investigating analog flux data acquisition methods for repair of damaged disks. all of this with permissively licensed hardware and software so folks can re-create without licensing agreements, NDAs, or discussion.

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