Henning 
Optimize your own Dog Food In this post we’ll look into how to make your own dog food, seen as an optimization problem. I’ll give a short background intro into this way of feeding your dog (called BARF), which I’m by no means an expert in. What you thus can not expect from this article … Read more
We consider an issue that appears frequently in game development and simulation projects: We have many moving points in a 2d world and need to find out which points are in range of which other points. We’ll call this the “range query problem” here (even though that is a bit imprecise). This has several applications: … Read more
Finally the pinball machine can be considered finished 🙂 although I’m sure there will still be things to do every now and then. Here are some visual updates.
Another week of working on the Pinball machine! Heres some (mostly visual) updates. Enjoy! Nothing really changed here recently but since so far I didn’t really show this, here some pictures of the various solenoids that are driving the playing field action. (Including a rather creative solution for a missing pop bumper switch plastic) Here … Read more
In the previous posts in this series we dug into some data analysis on Magic the Gathering cards and tried to model the mana cost of cards in order to answer questions like “how much does ‘flying’ cost?”. We found a linear model that could explain the costs to some degree, however it struggled to … Read more
The display module started out as a pretty messy wire contraption with individual transistors. Boy, fixing short circuits with these things was no fun I tell you. At some point then I discovered TLC5940, groked the basics of KiCad, spent a bit of money and out came my first real PCB: Actually a bit proud … Read more
Since pretty much the beginning of the Pinball project it was clear there is gonna be a Death Star featuring a critical weakness in the thermal exhaust as easy to hit as a womp rat. The overall idea would be that there is some kind of ramp and if you manage to shoot the ball … Read more
In the previous post on this topic, we raised the question on how much particular abilities such as “flying” cost in the widely known trading card game Magic the Gathering. We found luckily there is a nice, usable free database out there that should be helpful to answer this and while trying to take a … Read more
Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game I happen to like. It also so happens that there is a database of cards available online. Additionally I (like many programmers) kind-of got into Machine Learning recently. Lets see if we can combine these ingredients to come up with something interesting, shall we? Have you ever … Read more
