Drift King Godot project

Every time when I decide to make a game I'm very excited. I like to code but it takes time. I've always started everything from scratch. It took months to finish and when I was about to finish I was bored with it. Right now I'm very busy but I had three weeks spare time and had an aportunity to learn how to make game in godot. The pronciple was to make very simple game very fast without reinventind the wheel. Just make all the mechanics and with royality free assets available free online. In this game you control small car on a road. This car can drift and basically that's it. You need to be carefull not to fell of the map. Sometime in the future I will add buildings or maybe dirt map. It would be great to make it online game to play with friends or make some AI to compete with. Anyway I can tell you that godot is rather easy to learn considering that there is a ton of online videos. Sometimes its tricky spacially with grid map when you want to draw your map using objects that you imported from online file like FBX or OBJ. And it requires you to have some basic knowledge about 3D grafics and handling physics. Great thing with godot which made me decide to learn using it was the ability to export your game to APK and run it on mobile. When I finish this game sometime in the future I will share it on this page. As of now you can see the final result on my short video here.

Roland SPD30 MIDI extension

I have this Roland SPD30 digital percussion pad and Alesis DM6 electronic drum kit. I like SPD30 sound and that you can customize it to your needs. Roland pads are nice, but you cannot play them like real drums. But you can expand it using external pads and hi-hat control. Unfortunately, there are only 4 inputs, so you can only set up, for example, hi-hat, snare, kick, and ride. I wanted to have a full drum experience, so I came up with a solution.

The Roland SPD30 also has MIDI input (DIN5 and USB). With a bunch of laying around electronic components, I have built a MIDI extension. Basically, it's just 4 analog inputs on Arduino (protected with a diode and resistor) that are connected to piezo triggers on Alesis DM6 pads. There is even a dedicated Arduino library for this called HelloDrum. Another useful library is the Arduino MIDI library, which lets you send MIDI data using a UART serial interface. I'll be testing this design now for a few days. I like the way all parts came together to fit in a small enclosure that's been collecting dust for many years.

Arduino hand programable PLC training station

To properly test my new device I came up with this training station like design that fits in the smallest case I could find. I like how everything fits so well and is so portable now. There is even room for some addons (which I planned because PLC has i2c extension port). But the main benefit of this is that everytime when I make a project like that after some time is put in some sort of box. But now when it has this dust/damage protection it wont get lost anywhere I can return to it when ever I want.