knob VS kons-9

https://twitter.com/spbnick

The FW is quite complete, but I only have one HW implementation :D

And then I got distracted trying to find a good way to acquire and retain the requisite deep BLE knowledge (already had some for USB), and drifted into exploring knowledge graphs as a means of processing and recording that knowledge.

Turned out all of knowledge graph databases are heavily front-loaded with schema development (and there are no actual GUI apps for them), whereas I have no idea what the schema will be, and would like to experiment with unconstrained data first. So I'm building a Python tool/library to allow free-form knowledge graph creation and schema inference, with data/schema export to some knowledge graph databases (like TypeDB or Stardog). I got to figuring out graph-building operators and expressions so far, and am making them work (the code probably doesn't make much sense):

https://github.com/spbnick/knob

An STM32-based business-card synth with touch-sensitive back-lighted keys. Got all the parts of the hardware more-or-less prototyped and working, but PCB layout difficulty (and my perfectionism) killed my interest for now:

https://twitter.com/spbnick/status/1340348572068360198

Very cool. I must check this out.

I implemented some L-system features in my 3D Common Lisp system: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

In some small way I am revisiting the idea with https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

We'll see what comes of it.

I began my 3D graphics development on a Symbolics workstation at the MIT Media Lab in the mid-80's. This was before the S-Graphics suite was released. [0]

The outstanding feature of the S-Graphics suite was the polygonal modeler which used a winged-edge structure that was far ahead of its time. It survives conceptually in the Wings3D system, which is a quite faithful copy of that modeler.

And of course you got the extensibility that came with the graphics system being built on Lisp.

But Symbolics was never, as far as I saw, a serious or popular contender in 3D production. Not only was the system expensive, but the hardware could not keep up with SGI's graphics abilities. Furthermore, the mass of CG developers at the time came from a C/Unix background, and rendering especially was so speed critical that C (and Fortran) resulted in faster systems.

Almost 40 years later, I have returned to the idea of developing a 3D system in Common Lisp [1]. We shall see where it leads.

[0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/late-night-lisp-machine-hacking...

[1] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

If you are interested in 3D graphics, I have tried to keep my code simple and comprehensible: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

As a solo developer of my 3D system, my main focus has been to keep the enthusiasm and momentum going and to enjoy the development process, rather than worrying about how the code might not be optimal in various regards.