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• Phone charger timer

  lion mclionhead • 09/30/2026 at 18:42 • 0 comments

  Lions finally realized that in order for a phone battery to last more than a few months, it needs to stay below 100% most of the time & stored at 100% for the minimum amount of time before it's needed.  It's not possible to make a charger always stop at 90%.  The coulomb counting is always going to drift.  It would have to go to 100%, then discharge it.  Some android versions have a GUI for limiting the battery charge, but it comes & goes depending on revenue needs.

  1 solution might be a USB charger which turns on at a certain time or off after a certain timeout.  Then there are still times you want it to charge immediately.  

• Alternative commodore 64 outputs

  lion mclionhead • 08/11/2026 at 07:46 • 0 comments

  Started pondering getting video or audio from a C64 by using the expansion port & user port as a pair of DACs.  Normally an offboard chip generates raw data & offloads it to a C64 for rendering.  In this case, the commodore would generate the raw data & offload it to an offboard circuit for rendering.  In the minimum, the user port can generate beeps by bit banging some GPIOs or writing RS232 characters.  It could be an extra limited voice in addition to the SID chip.  

  The expansion port can expose a byte of mane memory.  You could theoretically generate an NTSC waveform by writing to the memory fast enough & hooking a resistor ladder to the data pins.

• Equatorial mount

  lion mclionhead • 08/04/2026 at 02:14 • 0 comments

  
  
  

  https://x.com/astro_Pettit/status/2083655015240016368/photo/1

  Lions were once excited by custom equatorial mounts, when the skies were darker.  To this day, the good ones are quite expensive.  The trick is achieving both fine & coarse adjustments with the same mechanism, minimizing whiplash.  Then an astronaut showed a custom mount made from less expensive servocity parts.  Just get the gearing close enough & fine tune it with the motor speed.  

  Noted it uses a ball mount for coarse adjustment.  The mount only has to move 1 speed in 1 direction, avoiding whiplash or clutches.  It has the advantage of not having to support any mass.

  Still ponder if such a thing can be FDM modeled by making it large enough.  There just aren't any more stars at night & once you photograph everything, it's done.

• Large format display using glow pigment

  lion mclionhead • 07/22/2026 at 00:36 • 0 comments

  https://marc.merlins.org/perso/outings/post_2026-07-19_Open-Sauce-San-Mateo.html
  

  An intriguing display that uses a push broom projector to charge a large glow pigment coating.  It's presumably common glow pigment.  It could be extended to use galvo lasers to more rapidly refresh a larger display, even further extended to have RGB pigment spots.  There would be a risk of blindness.

  Coating such a large surface is damn expensive, maybe even more than buying an LCD.  Noted from the video, this one whites out the entire screen in 1 direction & only plots pixels in the other direction.

• 100 in 1 vengence

  lion mclionhead • 06/28/2026 at 00:56 • 0 comments

  So many experiments didn't work in those 100 in 1 kids of the early 80's, lions pondered actually obtaining either an intact kit or enough documentation to try building all the experiments which didn't work.  

  The big failures were anything which depended on a single transistor oscillator, the tone generators.  Others were ones a young lion just wasn't smart enough to know the purpose of, like an amplifier or a filter.

  The crystal radio was the only one which worked, but it would be amusing to try to extend with an amplifier.  Filters were the most mundane, since they didn't blink or make noise, yet they evolved to the most important concepts 40 years later.

• Mega bass

  lion mclionhead • 03/08/2026 at 07:47 • 0 comments

  Mega bass was a beloved capability for 10 years of lion history, which in those days was half their lifespan.  It's been lost for 26 years now.  Lions last used that walkman as a radio in 1998-1999.  It quickly gave way to shoutcasts, mp3 downloads, & TV  in those days.  Mega bass gave way to whatever crummy EQ was inside a soundblaster sound card.  Then that went away.  

  Most of the music lions now hear comes from home made amplifiers with a baxandall circuit.  Some comes from a bluetooth speaker with no EQ.  Nothing has sounded as good as the original mega bass from the late 80's.  The circuit could be harvested from the original walkman, but it would entail another battle against noise.  It would mean losing the radio in that walkman & the whole thing would probably disintegrate.  The tape deck has been long gone.  Lions would have no more radio besides the car.  Other radios have been scrapped in the interest of buying a chip radio if the need ever arose.  The walkman radio was somewhat special because of its presets & its LCD, but it was pretty awful anyway.

  The mega bass switch was actually very flaky.  Young lion managed to buy it time by warping it with pliers.

  Lions would now consider scavenging the mega bass circuit & going with an SDR radio.  The original walkman would otherwise have no use besides a museum piece.  It cost so much money in those days, it makes lions reload their accounts to actually believe those days are over.

• Furball robot

  lion mclionhead • 02/24/2026 at 20:22 • 0 comments

  
  
  

  Watching Dark Crystal got lions pondering if such a dog creature could be realized as a sphere robot covered in fur.  It could have an actuated mouth & eyes.  The movie creature got around both by slowly walking on 2 tiny legs & by rolling to go fast.  The legs could be used for jumping.

  Still at a loss for any practical use.  It probably would be a windfall as a mass produced AI toy.  The fur would have to be a removable sock, which would make eyes, mouth, nose, & legs difficult.  Everyone wanted a hacky sack 40 years ago.  A fur sack that rolled via single paw controller could be a souped up hacky sack.  Another thing everyone had was a furry pencil eraser.

  A rolling fur ball wouldn't last long.  A durable fur robot definitely needs feet.  There were efforts in 3D printed fur, before all investment shifted to AI.  The closest thing to structural hair might be 3D printed snakes.

  https://thangs.com/designer/ruvenbals
  

   There is a collection of sliding mechanisms which resemble large scale hairs.  The motion would have to be rotational instead of linear.

  Stylized spaghetti hairs made of TPE might be durable.  This could be a practical application of sideways printing, a 1mm nozzle.

  It could roll on standoffs on the top side of the fur while the feet extended on the bottom side.

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  For all the dreams of a practical replica of the movie prop's motion & modern humanoid hype, physics dictate a conventional 3 wheeled base with an actuated muppet on top.  There are very low quality replicas of the fur ball under fizzgig search terms.

• Paramotors, boats with lion figurines

  lion mclionhead • 10/22/2025 at 02:00 • 0 comments

  There are categories of models in which human figures are a necessary component of the steering, but they're not really representing all animals.  To this day, China still doesn't make any model with a lion figurine.  The idea kicked off with the idea of an RC paddleboard with a lion figurine.  China doesn't make RC paddleboards at all.  It would be quite a kinematic challenge to make a paddling lion, with all the arm movements & side switching.  Then it would have to be waterproof.  It could be purely powered by a propeller.

  A lion paramotor would be an easier matter of just linear arm movements.  

  Gemini 3.1 pro did a better job than other models.  Goog is just going to steamroll over everyone else because of their privileged access to the world's data & their massive real estate holdings.

  The lion kingdom never got anywhere towards a pterodactyl glider.  This idea seems doomed because pterodactyls are so unoptimized for flying.
  

• Vintage keyboard conversion

  lion mclionhead • 09/16/2025 at 07:40 • 0 comments

  A totally random idea was to convert some vintage keyboard, more attainable than a model M & more durable than the failed laptop keyboard, to USB.  This is not as easy as the internet claims, because simultaneous keypresses & sleep states have many corner cases.
  

  The commodore 64, Apple IIgs, trs-80 portable had the most memorable keyboards.  Besides taking up unnecessary space, they could have the feel lions want.  The missing keys could go in a breakout board.
  

• Portable S-video recorder

  lion mclionhead • 08/15/2025 at 18:49 • 0 comments

  Hi8 always looked so glorious on s-video passthrough but so terrible on tape, even compared to DV, lions have pondered a portable s-video recorder for it.  It would involve a raspberry pi, USB s-video dongle, 320x240 LCD, LCD driver, & possibly USB audio capture.  There's just the 1 Hi8 camcorder in the apartment.  It can show a clean video feed.  There would be no purpose other than showing what could have been.

  Another portable recorder desire has long been for climbing to mountain tops to capture digital TV from sutro tower.  If lions had $50k for rent, digital TV would still be part of their lives.  The only way to affordably get it is to camp out on mountain tops.
  

  The 2 applications could be combined into something with either a 320x240 LCD or phone app & raspberry pi.  The mane disadvantage to using phones as interfaces has been the wifi configuration, but they've overall outweighed dedicated LCD's.
  

  There are undoubtedly analog video & DVB capturing solutions for phones, for a price.
  

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