So my friend gave me a bare circuit board for a premium nextech 0.5 UHF walkie talkie. I’m going to make a 3d printed case with space for a lithium battery that fits a nextech radio’s curcuit board, because we all know that cheap radio with smash the microsecond you drop it. So far I have built a Shrek Pod of a radio using stuff I had.
I recently locked in and did a tonne (kinda forgot to post a bit) But I started designing a case in fusion 360 (FreeCad stinks) I also put screw terminals on the side with a DC barrel jack for power input
I procrastinated trying to get the gradients look look smoother with random noise, ended up removing it because it was drawing like 700,000 pixels with RNG and made the menu run at like 3 - 10 fps lol.
I also added a credits part of the main menu that reads out of ./data/credits.txt and displays the credits on screen, the slider from the last devlog has competition now!
I’ve kept myself busy! I’ve soldered in the socket and part of the right channel, the rest of the circuit’s parts have been pushed in and I will solder them in the morning. additionally I have soldered up left / right RCA jacks and a volume knob out of two trimpots vertically mounted and attached with a board at the top.
This is all going surprisingly well considering the complexity of building a dual-channel amplifier with just the datasheet’s schematic to go off of!
My goal for this project is to build a small high power amplifier that also doesn’t look trash and start fires. BUT STILL PLAYS SCARLET FIRE
I just dropped $50 NZD at jaycar for parts for this project 💀
somehow I managed to perfectly assemble one channel just out of following the datasheet’s example schematic, I know I’m amazed too but miracles happen! attached is the schematic I was using and a picture of what I built
I’ve switched to a pi 3b and I got LXQT going, it took quite a while but I got rust installed and working. I’ve been able to start actually working on the application, it’s been going well so far just working out UI style and starting to get the base of the Pi-Track-Pi application down
sorry about the bad monitor photo but getting files on and off the pi takes years. 
Holy this is taking a while I’m trying to get graphics on the pi 1b+ and it’s a massive pain I’ve not been able to get Xinit or XFCE working due to package servers being down, I meant to borrow a pi 3b from code club and accidentally took a 1b+.
basically I got half the bits (32 instead of 64) half the ram (512MB instead of 1000MB) 700Mhz instead of 1200Mhz
I’m cooked, if I can’t get a DE I’m getting a pi 3b
I now have made text appear on screen like it’s being printed out, making that really threw up a fight because of newlines taking up two characters in an array and only listing as one (I think) that has lead to me counting every \n in the text and compansating for it.
I have made a settings menu for setting the text speed with the world’s worst slider
Finished the menu and made the software save a file .config/FurView.txt to keep your choice of time between furries saved between sessions and restarts.
getting file loading was fairly simple as I have experience from M.I.S.E. getting saving was a bit more difficult but stack overflow saved the day!
I’ve got the starts of a config menu going now, using my UI library too!
Images now crop to fit the window nicely, I made the window force itself into a perfect square as you probably want widgets to be square and also it makes the image cropping easier 
also picture credit goes to it’s creator, I just saved a duckduckgo search for “protogen” as a complete page for testing and kept only the images
I’ve now implemented an std::duration to make sure each image stays on screen for ~two seconds if it is less than two seconds it redraws the frame buffer until it is
just getting started now! a problem with macroquad is that it cannot load .jpg files so when the program starts up it runs a shell command that uses ImageMagick’s mogrify command to convert every .jpg file to a .png file in the exec’s dir then starts looping through the images
trying my best to get characters showing up on screen, it has been surprisingly difficult as I have to load in each character, expression and what the expression is titled, I then have to match the right one to the one that is requested in the text input in the slide file almost there though :3
got an options menu going!
for example clicking Option One sends you to slide 1 and clicking Option Two sends you to slide 2, both what is displayed on-screen and what slide it sends you to are configurable using the slide .txt file
now I just have to make it look nice :/
kinda funny not really needed but makes everything look so much nicer (see code snippet), almost got the selection UI going to!
finally got multiple text within a slide working, I’m now starting on a selector that lets the user choose how they want to continue the story UI coming in the next devlog
Much pain… almost got lots of text and multiple text going it works but resets to the start every time you try to go to the next slide then once it goes back you go through it again then lets you continue by one more slide :(
I have made the menu UI a bit nicer and added proper image cropping for backgrounds instead of just stretching them, I also now have the starts of a UI for the in game text box
