That Dragon Guy

Phil no

“Draw your OC drinking from the Manteca water tower” or whatever.

A city in California used to pipe hot lard to every household…until The Woke happened.

#MonstersJustHangingAroundDoingNormalPeopleStuff ❤️

Plz I have too many rarsuit projects as it is.

Keep calling your reps.

I am once again begging artists to learn the difference between the word “palette” (as in colors) and “pallet” (as in freight)

This is how I access Bluesky

Thinking Machines CM-2 supercomputer from the 1990s. A 2x2x2 arrangement of ominous black cubes with hundreds of blinking red lights.

Thinking Machines CM-5 supercomputer. It’s a different shape than its predecessor, still black and red and ominous, but with staggered cabinets rather than cubes. More powerful but not quite as cool.

The only Thinking Machines that matter.

A curse on them for calling their startup Thinking Machines. There is only one Thinking Machines, how dare. I’ve had a lot of sweets today and I’m gonna get something salty.

Yes, but mostly about tattered underwear with holes or sad elastic. But the concept so stuck with me, there’s certain underwear I’ll only wear on days I’m not leaving the house (every multi-pack of men’s briefs without fail includes one teal or orange).

Of course it can’t, but I like to imagine the half I cut off could also boot Linux, like some kind of computer starfish…each half would grow back the missing parts. That’s not creepy or anything and they definitely do not make them this way at the factory.

Like imagine you water-jet cut a circle through the middle of a NeXTstation Color and it still booted. It’s like that. I cut the Pi and somehow didn’t hit any arteries.

(Photo by John De Cristofaro, from Adafruit blog)

Swap in a proper A+ board and we’re in business.

Still couldn’t bring myself to throw away the bastard half-a-Pi board, but this time I added the “EVIL” sticker before tossing it back in the drawer. Keeping it, and the case, for posterior.

I fully disassemble the Cupcade and spread out the parts to troubleshoot…and there it is…

It’s really the B+ that I’d CUT IN HALF with a bandsaw. IT COULD STILL BOOT LINUX. IT COULD STILL PLAY GAMES. It didn’t see the keyboard because the USB port was a glued-on FAKE. But it otherwise SURVIVED.

New boards & new OS releases often made this project a moving target. All the time. It was fine earlier on a B+ not in a case. Disconnect keyboard & try WiFi dongle to ssh in, no go. Typical. I’m sinking hours into finding the “bug” in “my code” or whatever the Mystery Variable is…

A tiny laser-cut acrylic version of a Pac-Man arcade game

Time passes. A+ boards are readily available now! I’m tasked with redesigning the laser-cut “Cupcade” project to use this smaller, cheaper board.

I’ve got the new enclosure with an A+ in there, RetroPie boots to the input config screen, but not seeing the keyboard that’s attached for this step…

I was able to design the case around this. Photographed from the right angles, you’d never know it was actually the sad remains of a chopped-up B+ board. Success!

Because I can’t throw anything away, and in case more pics were needed, I tossed this in a parts drawer.

So…I took a working B+ board, desoldered the USB & Ethernet ports and the bridge chip, and used a bandsaw to chop off that whole side of the board. Sanded nice and smooth with the rounded corners and everything, and glued on a fake dummy USB port according to the dimensional drawing.

The case would just need tweaks then, not a total do-over. I’d be more comfortable with an article to test fit, this was like flying on instruments…and there would need to be product photos of the assembled case…but there were no boards yet.

After much pleading they were able to get a dimensional drawing of the Model A+ board. Good news was that everything between the four mounting holes was unchanged. The right side of the board, which on the B+ had 4 USB ports and Ethernet, was shortened with just 1 USB & no Ethernet.

Raspberry Pi Model A+ computer, resembling a shortened version of the B+ with fewer ports along the right side.

Nice product photo of the acrylic case I’d design for it.

The smaller Model A+ came later. A couple weeks before launch I was tasked with adapting the prior case to the new board. They wanted these in stock for launch day. Problem was, board was SEKRIT & they wouldn’t have any in-hand themselves until launch. But cases were needed. For a nonexistent board…

Raspberry Pi Model B+ computer, about the size of a credit card, with various ports along the right and bottom sides; USB and Ethernet and HDMI and such.

The B+ computer inside an acrylic case, with cut-outs for ports and cables. My ego used to say the design got ripped off a lot, but in hindsight I think it’s just form follows function. It’s a box. The computer has ports. The box needs holes for the ports. There’s only so many permutations.

The Model B+ was a tidy & improved version of the original (kinda haphazard) Model B, and I’d designed a laser-cut acrylic case for Adafruit as was the style at the time.

Still from “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem” - Splinter at home seated on an easy chair, captioned with the quote, “Just for that, I tell you the long version.”

Seemingly a Raspberry Pi A+ board in a laser-cut acrylic case, but the silkscreen is labeled “B+” because Phil is an assclown. A P-Touch label that reads “EVIL” has been applied to the board. Some copper traces are scuffed up and exposed.

This particular Pi 1 “Model A+” holds a special place and I need to keep this one too. There’s a story. I’ve told it before. Maybe you get it again anyway.

Raspberry Pi 1 computer, one of the super early boards before they even figured out mounting holes, with a 2011 copyright on the board silkscreen

The OG. Still works. Might frame it.

BuT…CrEaTiNg VaLuE fOr OuR sHaReHoLdErS!!!1!™️

People about monsters...

Came here to say this. 🍦🍦🍦

Rawr.