I suck at vacation - What I did this week

Well, it seems I'm lousy at vacation. I'm still learning what I'm supposed to do. My wife is working and the kids are still in school so here was my week.

3D Printed Brackets for my new HTC Vive

I treated myself to an HTC Vive Room-Scale VR system. I'll blog extensively about this later but let me just tell you. It's AMAZING. I've used Google Cardboard, I've used Gear VR, I've used Oculus. Vive is it. Full Room-scale VR with something like the Doom 3 VR Mode is amazing. This fellow has a version of Doom 3 coded up at GitHub that modifies your existing purchased version and adds a REALLY compelling VR experience. I will say spent less time fighting demons and more time looking closely at wall textures. I admit it.

There's a joke about folks who have 3D Printers. We just end up printing brackets to hold stuff.  Well, I got a Vive so I wanted a nice way to mount it. Problem solved.

I dig #3Dprinting because you can make EXACTLY the brackets you need in a few hours!

A photo posted by Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) on Nov 25, 2016 at 11:40pm PST

3D Printed a Rifle Stock for the Vive

There's a popular VR game called Onward. It's basically a Call of Duty-type squad shooter with a focus on squad teamwork and realism. However, holding two VR controllers up to your cheek and pretending they are a rifle doesn't really work. Fortunately an intrepid maker named SGU7 made a prototype you can 3D Print.

I made one first in Yellow but it broken because it lacked enough infill. I made it again in black (because I had a lot of black. I wish it looked less aggressive, though) and it works great. Note that the part in my hand is a controller and the other controller is attached to the front. The front one can pop off and act as your left hand to reload and throw grenades.

It was a challenging print with five large pieces and two small along with screws and nuts to hold it together. However, it was super fun and it makes the game WAY more realistic. More on this later. I've also been experimenting with some new exotic filaments.

Made an AdaFruit Cupcade Raspberry Pi MAME Arcade

My teenage nephew and I worked on a Cupcade a few months ago but it was his. I 3d printed and made a PiGrrl (Raspberry Pi GameBoy) last year, so I figured I'd make a Cupcade (Raspberry Pi tiny Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator) as well. It's also somewhat challenging but I never really had the time until vacation. You can get the plans and source many of the parts locally, or you can get a complete kit from Adafruit. I did the partial kit for cheaper without the plastic case, then had a local makerspace lasercut a $5 piece of clear acrylic.

Set up Alexa to talk to my Nightscout-based Blood Sugar system

I got a few Amazon Alexa "Echo Dot" devices, so now we have three around the house. I upgraded my Nightscout Site (this is the Azure-based system that that allows remote management and viewing of my blood sugar as a Type 1 Diabetic.

The most recent update of Nightscout added Alexa support. I headed over to https://developer.amazon.com and made a dev account and got it all working. It's pretty slick. I can ask it all kinds of things (as can my kids. They love to know about how I'm doing when I'm out of town.)

Here's a video of it working!

"Alexa, what's my blood sugar?" #Diabetes @nightscoutproj #video

A video posted by Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) on Nov 30, 2016 at 2:44pm PST

Basically I've been just making stuff and fixing stuff around the house. I even sat in a café and read the news. Madness.

I wonder if I could do this full time? I guess that's called retirement. ;)

Sponsor: Big thanks to Octopus Deploy! Do you deploy the same application multiple times for each of your end customers? The team at Octopus have taken the pain out of multi-tenant deployments. Check out their latest 3.4 release