eufyMake UV Printer E1 more experience

I am very much getting the hang of it now.

Crystal glass is an issue, and still one option still to try involves a primer, which is on its way.

But some success stories are worth while.

For a start, printing on the resin printed 3D stuff works really well. This stargate for example. Looks very nice. This helps enhance some of the products we sell now, and having put on social media I promptly got an order where as previously they had not been selling at all. Once Tindie is back on-line I'll offer a choice of stargates.

Printing on various objects works well. The max height of 60mm when using the camera (due to focal length), or 100mm when not (needs measuring to position accurately).

Way better than using the label printer on tools :-)

I have got the large bed set up now, 420mm x 330mm (larger than A3), and that works well.

I also found some tumblers on Amazon. This was a little bit of an experiment as they are designed for dye sublimation printing not UV. I printed some text and put through the dishwasher (yes, they say hand wash only, but wanted to test). No problem at all, even without a gloss overcoat.

This bodes well as there are lots of dye sublimation blanks for printing available.

That tumbler is quite big, and can take an hour to print, but the end result is awesome, and so I have several grandchildren with them already.

But obviously one of the jobs I am working on now is testing designs to print on the new FireBrick front panels. That is next I expect.

eufyMake support have been generally helpful - I have found a couple of bugs, and made suggestions. It looks a lot like they use AI to reply, but I said not to, and got what felt like a real reply to my latest ticket, which is good.

So yes, impressed overall.

Perfectly normal hobby (#Stargate)

I'll keep saying it - perfectly normal hobby...

The [legitimate] excuse was testing LED placement and reliability - how close we can place them, can we put vias under them reliably, what size vias, how much power do a lot of LEDs really use. Also testing the code to place LEDs in rings and other formats automatically. These are all sensible questions, and answered best by getting a few test boards made - ones with lots of tightly packed LEDs. Another test is using PCB files to automatically make OpenSCAD data to allow designs to work directly from PCB to make 3D models. A complicated little project, and once again, best tested by actually having resin cases made and confirming how well they fit - so you need a few resin cases.

So it is legit R&D, honest - trial and error, pushing boundaries, etc. The fact I have a couple of design tweaks in both the LED PCB and the 3D model design is why I have a few now. I mean everyone should own at least five Stargate models, right?

Now, I do have some of the LED panels for sale on Tindie. But I can't really sell these R&D prototypes. The base 3D design is also non-commercial licence, so I can't really sell that (well, maybe at cost). So now trying to work out a good home for a handful of gates. I don't seem to know quite enough geeks... Toot for more info.

I have made a video on how it all goes together... No toaster required. Enjoy...

Playing with a serious number of WS2812B RGB LEDs

I have done some fun stuff with LEDs, but now I have found some very small 1mmx1mm WS2812B LEDs, I decided to make a Stargate.

Well, the doctor said to rest, so this is my resting! I have spent a week on this - much of that waiting for slightly wrong 3D prints to print. 3D printing is always a massive time hog.

My first ideas was 210 LED, but then I went for a better design with 372 LEDs.

I have since revised the design to 507 LEDs!

The image shown here is the 372 LED design.

Needless to say, some C code was used to place the LEDs and caps and vias and tracks for this.

To my surprise the power usage is not that bad, all 372 LEDs on full white is 3.6A, including the ESP32. So can run off a suitable USB charger.

In practice, the Stargate dialling sequence does not go over 0.8A, so no problem.

As usual, all open source on my GitHub.

However, I did find that JLCPCB cannot cope with more than 400 designators on one line in a BOM file :-)

As for spinning, I could make a spinning effect using 117 LED rings, but I could not spin the actual glyphs - so as a compromise I illuminate the glyphs that are dialled in situ. I think it works quite well.

Of course, the challenge then was a 3D case for it. This was tricky - there are a lot of 3D models of stargates, some more easily printed than others, but I wanted one I could nicely slice in two and allow the PCB to be inserted. That proved more complex, so I designed one from scratch in OpenSCAD. It is simplified to be easy to 3D print, even though the whole thing is nearly 7 hours print time.

I also needed a reasonably neutral colour to allow the LEDs to show. I ended up using the ColorFabb Glowfill, which has the side effect that it glows in the dark.

Here is it dialling...

This is the latest 507 LED PCB design, the main change is an extra kawoosh ring that will be inside the 100mm gate ring. The idea is that this could then work with a mirror and half mirror perhaps to make a gate tunnel effect. I'll see when I make some more. It works out around £30 per board, shipped.

The extra tabs are not a space gate effect, honest, they are tooling holes and fiducials for production, and get snapped off.

That's a lot of LEDs

Dialling the gate

People will know I am a slight Stargate fan (!), and I like making PCBs. So, well... Latest is...

LEDs

First off, the LEDs. There is a very popular LED format, a WS2812B chip and RGB LEDs in a package. These use a serial daisy chained control channel allowing 256 colours of each of Red, Green, and Blue, to be loaded individually to a whole chain of LEDs. This design has 372 LEDs.

There are standard libraries to drive these, but I have discovered the ESP32 S3 is better as it uses DMA for the "remote control" hardware that is used to drive the data for these LEDs.

You can get these on tapes, and rings, and so on, usually 5mm x 5mm, or 4mm by 4mm, and I had even seen some 2mm x 2mm, but was surprised to find they are now available in these tiny 1mm x 1mm format. This ring design has a 100mm diameter centre hole.

They also usually need 5V power, but amazingly these small 1mm x 1mm modules work on 3.3V (or 5V), which is impressive (Blue is usually the voltage hog).

They are also very cheap. Part XL-1010RGBC-WS2812B, LCSC Part C5349953.

Alignment

My first mistake with the LEDs was making the layout simple, so a grid of these LEDs were one way up on one row, and the other way up on the next row. This allowed GND to be between two rows, then VCC between two rows, and so on. I put caps at the ends of the rows (which works well). This allowed me to pack them at 1.6mm spacing.

This was impressive, but I missed the (apparently well know) issue that the LEDs are placed within the 1mm x 1mm space, so for example Red is one side, and hence an all grid red looks like this, not evenly spaced.

They have to all be the same way around to avoid such issues.

Diamonds

I tried doing the same way and really a pain to track. The trick is to actually place them at 45 degrees, diamond style. This makes tracking really simple.

This allows a track at the top for GND, and at the bottom for VCC, and a link from LED to LED corner to corner for the daisy chained data line. Shown here I have vias for extra power. With thin tracks between the pads of the capacitors (expected to be one per LED) it makes for a really neat layout.

Grids

Grids were easy, and grids of LEDs like this are simple, with 2mm spacing (no caps), which is not bad. Caps added at end of row or column.

Apart from tracks joining VCC and GND top and bottom, or side and side, I actually created zone fills to make for thicker overall power tracks.

The latest design at 2mm spacing is 10mm x 18mm for a 5x7 grid, and allows them to be placed next to each other for a whole row at 2mm spacing, LEDs at the top and bottom of each column.

Rings

The other thing to do was rings of LEDs.

The principle is pretty simple, tracks (this time arcs) for GND, data, and VCC. Some zone fill for VCC and GND, again arcs (well polygons and lots of points).

Adding vias is fun, and I ended up with code that puts them off to one side if diodes and caps too close together (as above image) or in line in the GND/VCC tracks when enough space.

A simple ring with evenly spaces LEDs and caps is easy, but then I decided I needed some grouping of LEDs together with specific tighter spacing (the chevrons in the top image).

I also had to cater for the fact that power vias from one ring could clash with some of the next ring, and so omit some that were too close.

C code

If you have tried doing this in KiCad, it is far from easy - even with the grid locking and simple spacing like 2mm, it is hard, and making a ring with 39 LEDs, i.e. 4.6153846 degrees between LED and cap and LED, is, well, totally impossible. No chance doing it manually at all.

So, obviously, I ended up making C code, parsing in the PCB file, and moving LEDs and caps and making tracks and vias and fill zones. I have code for grid layout and ring layout now.

The gate

Working out the exact animation for the gate will need a bit of trial and error I expect - I cannot actually spin the symbols, so some poetic licence involved, but easy to "spin" the rings of 117 LEDs.

I have actually gone for a number of rings...

• 117 inner rings, this is 3 per gate symbol, so makes for a nice "1 in 3" spin effect and allows the inner to be lit up and made sparkly for the gate open.
• 39 gate symbol ring, so I can light individual symbols during dialling (seeing as they don't spin).
• 18 ring for bottom of engaged chevrons (9 chevrons, so 2 per chevron).
• 117 outer ring, again for spinning, but also can be two for chevron when engaged, and 3 for chevron end when not.
• Two 18 rings for chevrons getting wider.
• A 45 ring, so 5 per chevron, for the lights at the edge of the gate when selected.

I think making it dial will be cool. PCBs ordered, so a week or so (maybe more, some holiday in China), and I can post video of the real thing.

Open source

This is all open source, PCB designs and code, but if you want to buy one of these, and a driver, let me know. I have 5 on order.

Dial the gate

One of the things I have not previously tried is LED strips/panels.

These are quite clever as they daisy chain one data line, allowing you to send colour data to every LED in a sequence, and hence make them all have any pattern you like. They are pretty quick too. There are a few chips out there, but Amazon have loads of strips and panels, such as a 1m/144 LED strip for £12 using WS2812B controllers.

Obviously libraries exist to make this easy to control. I use the ESP32 chips with the ESP-IDF development environment. However I am (for reasons too tedious to go in to) using CMake now instead of Make. I really do not know CMake well. So was fooled initially. Trying to include "led_strip.h" did not work.

It turned out that all I had to do was add "led_strip" to the CMakeLists.txt in COMPONENT_REQUIRES. And bingo. I am sure I tried that first, but must have got it wrong, but worked in the end.

It is then easy to use. Simple call to initialise, clear, set pixel colours, and flush out.

So what was the project? Well, I printed one of these from thingiverse. It is designed as a light. I struggled the thread the LED strip into it, and so I recommend printing 10% larger. I then wired directly to a USB powered ESP32 module, so 5V to the LED strip, and the 3.3V data line. To my surprise that works, as I was expecting to need to switch it to 5V data. Also, the LEDs can easily draw too much power causing USB to shut down, but by limiting the brightness (it was way too bright anyway) and using only 72 not 144 LEDs, I have kept it working. I just needed a bit of glue gun then.

This is the result :-)

The sequence is too fast for proper dialling, obviously, and it is spinning a blue LED not actually turning the ring. It lights in the chevron positions, but not the actual chevrons. But the bright light for the kwoosh, and then sparkly/fadey for the open gate, seem to work quite well. All on github.

It talks MQTT so I made it that when the house (electric) gates open, the gate opens in the living room :-)

That said, I also have a Shelly button1 lying around that does it too.

Fans (Stargate, etc)

There are fans of all sorts of TV shows and films, obviously, but it struck me there are some very different types of fans out there.

You may have guessed I like Stargate. I have watched it lots of times (SG-1, Atlantis, and Universe). It is very good as "background TV" for when I am doing something else. Yes, there are some serious plot holes like any show, and some massive tech inconsistencies even allowing for it being sci-fi with its own set of science rules. But it is fun, and entertaining.

I did try to make some Stargate playing cards, but sadly the licensing is basically impossible.

But in my case, being a fan is more of "I liked the episode when they went back to 1969", and if I hear the first few seconds of an episode I could tell you exactly what happens because I have watched them so often. No, I cannot name every actor and actress or say every other film or show they have ever been in.

My brother, on the other hand, is very much a different sort of fan of these things, and not just relating to Stargate.

He is far more "They filmed effects in 16:9, but when the released a DVD in Germany (which was made for UK as all in English) they used scaled up 4:3 effects for some reason", and frankly spouts every pointless bit of shit like that! (I am paraphrasing, I was not really listening).

Which sort of fan are you?

Game Over for Stargate playing cards

I am really sorry to have to admit defeat.

After a lot of work on this, and a lot of obstacles, I believe it is impossible to get a licence from MGM. Whilst their contract has a number of issues, by far the most problematic is that in order to purchase a licence from them, they require me to assign all copyright in my product to them. No, they don't pay me for that! If this seems backwards to you, you are not alone.

I made it clear from the start that the designs included some creative commons work - so they knew it would never work all along. Even if that could be solved by a lot of re-design, it would mean rights in my playing cards designs assigned to them - which means all the other playing cards I have made being theirs - so I'd need to buy a licence to use those (even though I designed them!). This is not, in my view, how copyright is meant to work!

Anyway, this is the video I made earlier. I have not had any further reply from the licensing people, which I can only take as confirmation of my understanding. A bit rude to just ignore me, but seems to be typical of all of the interactions I have had on this. Shame.

I went to Cal Mah, and sadly there was not much merchandise using MGM copyright material (apart from "Stargate Command" stuff which I believe is MGM) - now I know why.

Sorry for getting anyone's hopes up. I'll be removing the Alteran Bridge Club pages, etc.

Cal Mah

I nearly called this "Cal Meh" but I feel that is probably more a reflection of my expectation than the event itself. In case you missed it, Cal Mah was a Stargate fan event in Leicester this weekend. It was quite small (I felt), but that is probably to be expected for a UK event. It had some talks, and some of the actors, and a few stands with vendors. I went on the Saturday and felt it did not really justify two days, for me. I suspect that had the organiser not decided to unilaterally cancel my expensive ticket, then I may have had more fun with the extra evening events. Shame.

I am not one for dressing up, sorry, but I did go as far as a lab coat and an "Area 51 ID card". I even made a card for the organiser, and left at the desk when I left. No idea if he likes it, he has blocked me on twitter!

I seem to have been banished to a ship in a distant galaxy!

What was interesting was the number of people that did dress up, and some of them in quite impressive costumes. It seems like quite a community of fans, very friendly.

So, yes, a fun small event. If I can find someone to go with, I may consider one the the bigger events such as Gatecon in Vancouver, one day. I was surprised to see someone dressed as a full Star Trek captain though!

As for the event organisation, obviously I'm not impressed with my ticket being cancelled. It was three weeks after the "misunderstanding" on Facebook and with no warning. It was after I had spent money on a hotel room which he refused to cover. I still don't know who is actually running the event though - "FCD Events presents Cal Mah" does not explain the legal entity involved at all. I saw no terms and conditions as part of buying tickets, and the receipt from PayPal says it was paid to the organiser personally. It seems no data protection registration that I can find, and not complying with PECR (he emailed trying to sell more tickets using the email I used to buy the ticket, with no opt-in having been requested). No accessible privacy policy (just a generic contact link). I'm rather concerned that it is pitched as a charity, which has a whole set of rules of its own. Lots of rules (and laws) broken, or so it seems to me. In the end I decided to go, and not waste the hotel booking for which I would have no doubt had to sue to get my money from the organiser. It really was not the way to treat a fan (or a customer)! Had it gone better, not only would it have been a couple of expensive tickets but could have been a stand at the next event, etc. I am far happier being involved in events than just going to them. I could certainly have informally helped him with meeting some of the legislation! Oh well.

Not the Alteran font

This blog post has possibly no use whatsoever - I was pondering whilst I went for a walk, and came up with the idea. Unless you are a film producer looking for a free font to represent some high-tech alien race, then I doubt the blog is useful :-)

The thought I had was that in Stargate they use a block font for the Alterans/Ancients. No doubt with the objective of looking like some high tech font used by an alien race. It is based on grid format, 3 wide by 4 high, and then has a special case of an extra half pixel below the centre middle to mark numbers.

It occurred to me that you could make a more efficient font that this. Yes, I said this was a useless blog post, honest.

So my thoughts were, a 2x3 grid, i.e. 6 blocks, making 64 combinations. However, there would need to be a few restrictions as generally you do not want it to be possible for one letter to look the same as another letter if you cannot see the base line of the text, so we need a few rules.

A first rule is no symbol should look the same as another symbol simply because it has been shifted by a pixel. Oddly, I decided later that there could be a few exceptions to this, but I'll come back to that. Basically, you don't have these two as separate symbols.

.. XX
XX X.
X. ..

I.e. a small "r" shape should be in one position. Now, within a row of text, yes, you could tell them apart, but not on their own, and, if there are other symbols like this, one could easily have a whole word where the meaning depends on whether the word is shifted up a pixel or not. The same logic applies to something only on the left which could appear the same on the right. Oddly enough, I have decided later that some punctuation, which is rarely not next to other characters, could maybe break that rule. However, we definitely want that rule for normal letters and digits.

Restrictions like this cut down on the possible combinations. I did the sums in my head as I was walking, and work out I could easily allow for 40 combinations where there was always something both left and right, and always something on bottom row. These two restrictions meant the above rules were met. 40 is good, as you can have A-Z and 0-9 and 4 other symbols. Obviously any alien high tech font has to map to our normal characters and digits (the Alterans do!).

Digits

It occurred to me the digits should be logical, and obviously aliens will use base 10 (Alterans use base 8 except when it comes to their font). If I make them all from characters with the bottom two pixels set I am left with 16 combinations. This can be 0-9 and 6 extras. Sadly we have 4 extras over A-Z and 0-9 so that means I cannot make all letters out of characters where the bottom two are not set, there will have to be at least two letters will have to be in this style along with the digits. Shame.

So the digits I did as follows. I went for coding 0 as "10" because of underscore (see later).

.X X. XX .. .X X. XX .. .X X.
.. .. .. .X .X .X .X X. X. X.
XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX
1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  0

Letters

Some letters could be made to vaguely match their normal characters, upper or lower case, e.g.

.X XX .X X. XX .. .X XX XX X. .X X. XX XX ..
.X .X X. X. X. XX XX XX XX XX XX XX .X X. XX
X. X. X. .X X. X. X. X. .X XX XX .X .X XX XX
j  g  i  l  f  r  z  p  q  b  d  s  T  C  o

So that was a good start.

Punctuation

I had space for 4 punctuation characters in this style, so went for some basics...

.. .X X.
.. X. .X
XX .X X.
_  (  )

I decided the one, a solid block with all 6 pixels set, would be best as the .notdef special character for when a character is not defined.

But there was more than I could do, if I break some of my rules. For a start, I could make a few cases for where punctuation would be next to other characters so less ambiguous. We live with hyphen and underscore being the same (in some fonts). So...

.. XX
XX ..
.. ..
-  "

I could also do some single pixel wide options :-

. . X X X X
. X . X X .
X X X X . .
. , : | ' `

The only one I did not define, and may come up with something for, was a centre dot.

I could do a few more like this maybe... 

Spaces

I decided to make a space that is just a blank character, but this sort of text probably looks better with no spaces. As far as I know, once upon a time people did not use spaces (when paper was expensive), and you can often work out when one word ends and another started #susanalbumparty

Making a font

I downloaded BirdFont for Mac. I have to say I don't like it much, but for this purpose it worked. I had a go with FontForge, and that looks better. I may re-make from scratch some time.

The result...

This font... TTF which you are free to use (some credit would be nice).

P.S. Crap, I have just re-invented Braille, haven't I. Oops.
P.P.S. And yes, Teletext and even TRS-80 allow exactly this style of block characters :-)

A lesson on how to piss off a fan!

As I said, I am going to a Stargate event next month. Cal Mah....

I purchased the good tickets :-



Yes, the expensive Daedalus pass "the pass that give you it all".

But oddly I found there was an "Ascension pass" that is better, and covers a special MGM event on the Sunday. Odd, as I have a pass that "give [sic] you it all"?

So I asked about it...



And more



And more



Well now I have :-



That is the way to deal with me, obviously. Oh and...

If I was mis-sold, so were many others. And by blocking me I have to seriously consider taking this to ASA and Trading Standards now. It started as a fun poke at them, but now is getting a tad more serious.

How many more have been mis-sold "the pass that give it all" not actually getting it "all" I wonder?

P.S. Reported to trading standards now - could have been avoided by talking to me and not blocking me.

P.P.S I think this is  first for me - blocked on facebook or twitter. Obviously, on both I have altar egos that can post and read and comment, and have done so, which just shows the stupidity of doing so.

Update: They have now posted an explanation (and unblocked me)...

We have found were the confusion lies.
We had a pass on sale called the Destiny Pass, this Pass was also available on a payment plan. Which at the time we issued these passes, it was correct It did “give you it all” When they sold out we removed it from sale but had to put it back on our ticket sales site to allow people who were on the payment plan to continue to make payments. 
What we had not realised was when we updated the sales desk the information didn’t transfer correctly to the newly created Daedalus Pass. 
These Daedalus did sell out so we again removed them from sale, however when people did not keep up their payments a certain amount where put back on sale with the correct information. 
We humbly apologise for the confusion and hope that this explains the situation to your satisfaction. 
Please feel free to message us if you wish to discuss this further.

And now the description has changed, after I purchased the ticket. Kind of admitting I was mis-sold...

Cal Mah

I have never been to a Comicon or similar. I don't do the whole "dressing up like Captain Kirk" thing, honest (that is more my younger brother).

But I have booked to go to Cal Mah in Leicester 17/18th Nov. (tickets here). It seems to be an unofficial Stargate convention in the UK!

Why? Well, I do like sci-fi, and Stargate, and a few other things, and thought it would be fun. I nearly went off to an event in Vancouver just for fun, but chickened out.

My daughter suggested I went as a Klingon! I mean, no, and no, and WTF? and no, and I would be lynched I expect. Star[things] are not all the same, honest.

I am not wearing a "costume" as such, but I'll take a small step. I remembered that one episode has an "Area 51 ID card" in it. I googled for an image and did not find the one, which was odd. But too much clutter I think. I did find a reference to the episode, SG-1 s8e10 "Endgame", and so watched and found the card :-

No doubt it was deliberately minimalist, but the back was odd...

As it appears to have text about parking! I have tried to reproduce that.

Anyway, suffice to say, I have my "costume" ready...  making use of the A&A card printing service.

Area 51 techie

And maybe I have the Stargate dialling address for Earth on the business cards I am taking, on the end of the address, maybe. That would be sad, wouldn't it?

As I say, never been to a thing like this, but it is a good chance to gauge interest in my Stargate playing cards. Still waiting on UK agent for MGM on that. I'll take the sample pack to show people.

If you want to meet me, get a ticket! I'll be the one badly disguised as an Area 51 techie, with a beard.

Now for extra geek/nerd: Cal Mah is Goa'uld for "Sanctuary" but is also where K'tano, a Goa'uld posing as a Jaffa, gathered rebel Jaffa and was ultimately found out and defeated by Teal'c and then the site was destroy by Goa'uld Lord Yu. So is this conference as scam by a Goa'uld I wonder?

Licensing intellectual property - a tale of two journeys

I thought I would do a comparison of two "journeys" in trying to get licensing of intellectual property.

1. The bar codes used by duplimate bridge card dealing machines so I could make promotional cards for a bridge club.

• I searched for their web site, and emailed the published tech support contact asking about licensing
• Within minutes I got a reply, advising €0.10 per pack and giving me the email address to contact
• I emailed that email address asking how it works, and actually got a one page licence agreement back, which tells me what wording to put on the Ace of Spades, to send 4 sample packs, and a licence number to use, and where to send the money.

For extra bonus points, this is a Swedish company and they conversed in English (apart from spelling licence wrongly for English English), and this all happened on a Sunday afternoon! Also, no set-up fee, and no minimum number of decks. So simple.

2. The Stargate glyphs and Alteran characters to make my Stargate themed cards...

• I searched and found the MGM media licensing web site, which has an email address to ask questions about licensing. I checked it was really MGM. I emailed.
• I emailed again 5 days later
• I emailed again 2 days later (got an out of office reply for that day)
• I emailed again a day later
• A day later I emailed the web master asking if the email address was right
• I waited a week, nothing still
• I went to the site and filled in the registration page
• I waited a couple more days, and eventually got a confirmation of registration
• I submitted a request on line - it is mainly for using stills/clips, but what I want to use is gate glyphs and Alteran characters which come from stills from the show, so maybe this is sensible, not sure. I filled in all the details carefully explaining the use I wanted.
• I waited 3 more days, and emailed asking how long this takes normally
• Another day later and I got an email saying I need to talk to consumer products and giving me their email.
• I emailed Tricia in consumer products.
• After 3 days of no reply, I emailed again.
• After 3 more days, I emailed again
• Finally I managed to exchange a few emails on the same day (evening as US time) and they confirmed $5,000 advance royalties. They asked me for sample images, yay!
• I emailed images
• I emailed again a day later
• I emailed again three days later
• I finally got a reply saying they could give me a licence and they sent an application which I returned
• I emailed again three days later
• I emailed again another six days later
• I even left a voicemail
• I finally get an email saying this is not how they normally work and I should contact a UK agent, which I emailed yesterday...

I think I have all the delays right in that list, but we are now 7 weeks to the day since I first emailed MGM. They routinely ignore emails for days or weeks. They could have said - go to this UK agent on day 1. They almost seem to be trying to put me off. At the end of the day if you make it hard to licence your IP then people will just sell unlicensed stuff and you have to faff with cease and desist and enforcement and suing and crap - why mess people around?

Now I start with a UK agent, I'll let you know how it goes. Hope people find this stuff interesting :-)

P.S. I hate using "journey" like this, as we are not going anywhere (literally, and in the case of MGM, metaphorically, so far) but I could not think of anything better. Maybe "story" would have been better?

P.P.S. Two emails and a tweet to the UK company, and no replies at all. I may have to try a call!

Where am I with these damn Stargate playing cards?

Previous design, see end of this post for latest.

This whole project would be at least a month sooner if MGM simply replied to emails even just the same day. Even next day would have been good. It is very frustrating, in some cases waiting a week, or more, for a reply.

However, I finally got (on 20th): "I have been receiving your emails however I have not been able to spend time on this at present. If you are willing to pay a $5,000 minimum guarantee (or BPS equivalent) and have liability insurance, we can grant you the license for the cards."

So, they can grant a licence. I immediately sent back the completed application and asked how I pay the $5,000. No reply since (that is two of their working days they could have replied). Not even a clue how long it will take. I don't hold out hope for a reply this evening either (they are US time zone, obviously).

$5,000 is a lot. It is about 10,000 packs of cards worth of royalties, and is not something they will refund if I don't sell that many. However, I have got to the point where I want to do this anyway. I have created these cards from the C code to make the pips and layout to the drawing of the court cards and put in a lot of my spare time on this. I'm a bit of a Stargate fan, and so if I just break even I'll be happy, and if not, it will be a bit of a folly, but entertaining and educational anyway. It may be a "sunk cost fallacy" but I'd like to see it through now. At the end of the day it is my money - some people have cars - I have MGM licence (soon) and Stargate playing cards! I rarely get to do anything even vaguely artistic (failed Art O-Level), but I hope people like what I have created.

The only advantage of the delay is I have spent time verifying things like checking gate addresses (not easy), and that the shape of the Stargate dialling glyphs are correct (also not simple), and fine tuning the layout and exact composition of the packs I have designed, etc.

The card designs are all ready. Ivory Graphics are putting together the quote for printing now - and I have decided to "tack on" a couple of other packs to make use of the volume discount. The plan is to make 1,000 Stargate packs initially (500 single packs, and 500 deluxe packs). Maybe not sending all to Amazon at once in case I find other channels by which to sell them.

The two extra "fun" packs I am tacking on are a seriously minimalist pack, and a left handed pack. Left handed just means the index is only on the right. The minimalist pack however is even more minimalist than the minim pack, having just an index character and suit in one corner, all white otherwise, white backs, and white box (apart from barcode on base). Both packs should be interesting to list on Amazon and great fun to play with (especially as I am not actually left handed).

As for the Stargate cards, I have decided the format of the two packs. Firstly, a 64 card deck with this story:-

Found in a corrupted section of the Lantian database was a reference to various common games, including playing cards. Stories of these card games no doubt inspired the early card games on Earth in the 15th Century, but some details we lost in the mists of time. For a start, Alteran playing cards have 64 cards in a deck! 

We know from the time that Jack O'Neill had the Ancient repository of knowledge downloaded in to his brain that the Ancients did, at some point, use base 8. It should be no surprise that the Alteran playing cards have 64 cards as that is "100" in base 8. Any race with a fondness for powers of two would create games using nice round numbers like 4 and 16 and 64. 

We also know from Samantha Carter, when reprogramming a Tobin mine, that any advanced civilisation needs to have invented "zero", so it should be no surprise that the cards start from a zero value. 

Once travel to and from Earth was finally established, the Atlanis Bridge Club were able to get decks of cards made up in the style of those original Alteran playing card decks to play proper Alteran card games. Sadly the database lacked details of the court cards, so we used classic 19th Century designs, but we do know they used Alteran characters and digits in the corners. This was not easy, as personal items are hard to get shipped on the Daedalus, but because of their small size an exception was made. 

Playing bridge is easy, 16 cards each and allow bids up to 16. What can be more challenging is playing other common games using Alteran playing cards.

Learning the Alteran digits and characters should not be hard.

Secondly a deluxe deck which has the same 64 card deck plus a second which has 41 gate symbols, a gate symbol name card, and some gate address cards. Making games for these extra cards is not so simple.

Dr Elizabeth Weir realised that the replicators had given away some more detail about Lantian playing cards after she had a nasty run-in with nanites invading her brain. They showed her that there are playing cards with gate symbols on them. Unfortunately it is not clear how they are used in games, yet.

I have also created Facebook and Twitter for the "Atlantis Bridge Club" so there is somewhere to discuss the cards and the games.

If you want to see the actual card designs, the decks are here. Happy to have comments on the design, whilst I wait for MGM.

So, still, I am ready to roll and get cards printed and on Amazon, just waiting yet again for MGM. So, watch this space!

P.S. After some comments on the back, how about this? (amended again, lorem ipsum text and symmetric, even though gate is not)

Stargate addresses

OK, I know that film / TV show producers don't really care for this level of detail, clearly, but some times it gets a tad annoying!

I was trying to compile a list of known gate addresses to put on the cards I am making. Seemed like a nice touch to include them. There are wikis and blogs which are a good start, but I was being diligent and checking them (like I need an excuse to watch SG-1 again!). Whilst there are minor typos on various lists which I picked up, in some cases the producer of the show seems to be just taking the piss.

SG-1 s2e14 Touchstone, literally a few seconds apart in the show.

I may as well give up and just make up addresses randomly. I have no idea which is "right" for P5F-5T2 and P7J-1P3. One wiki listing gate addresses had :-

That is almost, but not quite, the top one! Looks like they type 39 instead of 36 for first symbol.

I can do my best. The cards are coming along nicely, just working on discussions with MGM over royalties.

P.S. Thinking about it, that scene involved flashing up the same scrolling list when searching three times in a row. To make the addresses different would have actually meant some deliberate action. Why? Just why?

P.P.S. This address (same dialling shot I assume) is used a *lot* which makes it difficult. This is from SG-1 s3e15 A Matter of Time but is the address of Chulak!

P.S. I found some more references not on the wikia page (s3e20 Maternal Instinct) - yay!

Gate glyphs (#stargate)

I was trying to work out the right artwork for the Stargate glyphs. It turns out to not be as simple as you might expect!

There are several gate drawings, e.g. this simple svg, and this more detailed one. They have subtly different artwork.

A simple example from that is Pegasus which shows in different orientations and with or without an extra point/triangle.

 

Whilst the orientation actually on the gate should be fixed and defined, when shown as a gate address or symbol on a playing card, the orientation is more flexible. I have gone for the way it would be at the top of the gate. But that does not explain the subtly different designs.

Another orientation issue is Gemini, which shows in different orientations. In the above examples, they are almost the same, but in the third example, it is aligned with the ring rather than at an angle.



One site, stargate.wikia.com, has a good set of glyph SVGs. But its idea of Pegasus has the extra point/triangle :-

So I tried to work out if there had been different versions of the gates, which meant watching the original film, and episodes from several series of SG-1. All are the same, even series 10 opening credits show clearly no extra point/triangle on Pegasus. There are differences in the CGI in the opening credits though which may be a clue. Interestingly the film has the same constellations but again slightly different artwork, but still basically the same as the series.

Even today, at gatecon in Vancouver, they are doing photos with a green screen and gate in the background. One occasions to see a high res photo of a gate, and it has no extra point/triangle!

I think, however, I have found the source of the "wrong" glyphs, the book Stargate SG-1 The Ultimate Visual Guide (of which I have now obtained a copy). On page 10 they show the gate and glyphs in detail :-

Though even page 12, which has actual pictures of the gate, contradicts the drawing on page 10. You'll also note that symbols like Piscis Austrinus are shown with outline rather than filling in artwork, where as the gate does not have outlines like that.

So, I think my glyphs are actually correct, and the right way around (as would be viewed at the top of the gate).

Of course, if these cards ever get launched there will be fans saying I have it wrong. Par for the course I guess.

P.S. The glyphs on the screens in Stargate command are different to the gate! So this is another source of the different style:-

P.P.S I found some excellent work here... "...I went back to the Gate used on the show, and created my glyphs from that primary reference, making this list more accurate in both shape and orientation of each Glyph..." - these match my glyphs nicely.

The RevK brand

I am far from retired, and may never be. There is a lot involved in running a company even if you have very good staff to handle a lot of the day to day work. However, I am trying to find more time for myself, and that does mean some times I come up with little projects of my own.

Historically, as a business, we have embraced many new things from laser engraving to 3D printing, and incorporated them in to the business. Indeed, these can be very useful - we use laser engraving on some FireBrick products and right now I am looking in to some 3D printing with flame retardant ABS for a related project. So they are not totally divorced from the main company activity. We are known for broadband, but have always been involved in a wide range of goods and services.

However, just occasionally, it is quite fun to try something completely different. Some times such things are commercial though.

Unfortunately it does not really make a huge amount of sense for me to set up a separate company and VAT and so on, unless I do come up with some more serious viable project. Obviously if I do, then that is a consideration. It also does not make a lot of sense for me to try a commercial project as myself, with the extra tax implications, and so on. So generally new projects that have any commercial prospect do go through the company, even if they are totally off the wall and unrelated to our main business. Obviously that means the business makes any profit from these ventures, and also, obviously, such projects need to be low risk and/or profitable.

So the plan is to make use of my personal brand, "RevK", for which I have a registered trade mark, and the business will sell some RevK branded stuff from time to time.

You may already see that we have RevK reproduction playing cards listed on Amazon.

My latest side quest, as you will have noticed, is these Stargate related playing cards. The good news is MGM are finally talking to me. The bad news is how much they want up front in royalties. The amount per pack of cards is not crazy though. However, we are talking, and it may actually happen. It is a nice change for me to do something creative and fun. So watch this space for possible new RevK branded stuff.

Stargate address numbering P3X-421

One of the nice things about taking the odd walk (to try and get more healthy / lose weight) is I get 20 minutes to ponder something totally random - like how are the Stargate address numbers worked out?

This is a matter of some debate. Basically, the show references gate addresses by a code, e.g. P3X-421, rather than by the gate symbols which would be tricky (though we later find they do have names / sounds that can be strung together to make words of a sort). An address is actually 6 (non repeating) gate symbols from a set of 38.

[Someone commented as a linguist that the idea of the gate symbols having sounds that make up the names of planets was crazy as no way the location in space and the name would happen to line up. They missed an obvious point that the people naming the planet may have been the Alterans and they named the planet using the sounds from the planet's gate address. But that is beside the point]

Anyway, back to these gate numbers. The Milky Way gates are almost all P something. This suggests that maybe the letter is not part of the address (P=Planet), but even the odd exception (M=Moon) does not quite fit, and a B and K have also been used. With no doubt deliberate irony the Pegasus gates start M.

This leaves 5 alphanumeric characters to define a gate address. Even if you take all letters and numbers (36 combinations), 36^5 is only 60,466,176, but there are 1,987,690,320 possible 6 figure addresses (38*37*36*35*34*33). So it cannot be a simple mapping to the gate address.

Except, and this is where the pondering whilst walking around the block comes in, let's pretend we accept the original description for how a gate address works.

The way it is described is that the 38 symbols (apart from point of origin) are constellations as viewed from Earth (which they are, you can work out which they are even), and that they represent points in space. You need 6 so as to make three lines which intersect at the destination, and then to "plot a course" you need a 7th (point of origin).

OK, here are a few of the issues:-

• A constellation is not a point in space, the "stars" that make it up are at different distances and some may even be very distant galaxies.
• Even if these symbols represented a point in space, the chances of ever making three lines that intersect exactly out of 38 arbitrary points is, well, slim at best. The chance that such an intersection is actually where you want to go (hits a planet, or even a solar system) is even slimmer. It is just not a way to address points in space
• Obviously, even if using points in space as a reference, you can make a target using just one line and one point. Even so, the possible points are nowhere near enough to address a planet or solar system in the galaxy from 38 control points.
• The fact you used reference points means that actually the expansion of the galaxy is likely to ensure gate addresses do stay the same, yet apparently they stop working after a while.
• You obviously do not need a point of origin - the origin is "here". If you did, then how come it does not also take 6 symbols to define it. Also, does that mean by dialling a different symbol as the 7th you create a wormhole from some distant gate to some other gate in the galaxy?

OK, let's forget all of that, it is a film, let's pretend it makes sense, and that is how gate addresses work.

Well, that may solve the gate numbering issue. Each line is a pair of symbols, but clearly it does not matter which way around they are as they make the same line. So that reduces the combinations by 8 (2 for each of the three lines). Also, the order of the 3 lines does not matter, so that reduces the combinations by 6.

So instead of 1,987,690,320 gate addresses, we have only 41,410,215. This is smaller than 36^5. In fact it can be covered by 34^5 which is nice, as I would leave out "I" and "O" to avoid confusion with "1" and "0".

So yes, in theory, the Pxxxxx could be a full gate address using just the 5 letters and numbers. And the "P" could indicate type of destination somehow.

Of course, what the actual mapping is, is a different matter. It is very likely they are just random.

As an aside, why can't film makers employ a geek for a few days whilst making the screenplay. I would be trivially cheap for them, but things like this could be made to a proper scheme of some sort and have some consistency. They could have avoided the whole "points in space" crap and maybe gone for just "it's like a telephone number" which would have been way easier to explain and not tied their hands as much. Even if they just pinned down the made up rules and made up physics at the start they could avoid making inconsistent story lines later. Oh well.

Alteran digits

I am making progress on the new Alteran deck(s) design as per previous blog post. I am making some progress that someone on twitter says they may have a contact at MGM. We can only hope.

So first off, I have a pretty good set of glyphs. They are from wikimedia, and to be credited on the box.

They are the orientation that matches the placement on the gate, which is not quite the same as the cards Dr Weir deals, which is a shame. I plan to do a bit more research (watching SG-1 episodes) to check these...

Now, the other sticking point is Alteran characters. There are a lot of fonts out there for this, really, I am amazed.

It is 100% clear that normal Alteran letters are a simple 3x4 block structure. No problem. Takes me back to the block graphics on a TRS-80 and even teletext graphics (both 2x3). Those were the days.

However the digits are another matter. They have a bit that sticks down in the middle. One font, and a web site, claims that the bottom row of blocks has half height left and right, like this.

This creates an odd shape for the "0" as the bottom does not match the top as a box. However, it fits the overall size nicely.

However, this does not fit the control stations in Atlantis. They are clearly 3x4 with a bit below.

These are odd, the second panel (as I noticed when first watching this) is back to front. However, this is clearly a 3x4 with an extra half pixel below the bottom middle. The "0" looks way neater. I assume the back to front digits was a production error.

Stargate Universe makes this even easier to see, with a countdown clock.

Here we see the 3x4 grid and what looks like a whole pixel below rather than half of one (making 3x5 grid) but not 100% clear to be honest from that picture, sorry. They have colon and dot which is nice and confirms the "baseline" for the font so the pip on the bottom of the digits is definitely below the baseline.

So I have decided to make my Alteran characters for playing cards use a 3x4.5 grid with the extra half pixel below much like an accent, a Cedilla if you will, only half a pixel high.

As I said before, a 16 card per suit deck, 64 total (100 in octal) makes sense, and I have it all designed now.

I have even designed the box, and we are ready to go once MGM confirm licensing.

So, watch this space! Or give me a contact at MGM...

BTW, the back is just the Stargate unless I have better ideas. Suggestions welcome.