experiments, tests and things that only half worked. none of it is a finished project — this is the practice the projects came out of.
asked an AI to model a vase in Fusion 360 that I could print. texture is a part of Fusion I had never used, so watching how it got there was as much the point as the vase — I asked for something close to the weave on a HomePod mini.
it printed, and the file was clean: no errors, and none of the extruding into thin air that happens where a model has geometry with nothing underneath it.
this summer I used an AI to work in areas I had never actually been in — things I had some idea of, and had never sat down and done. this site and lab tools, both with Claude Code.
the part worth recording is not that it wrote the code. it is what I did on the many occasions I did not understand what it had written.
I asked, and then had the answer written into docs/learning-notes.md instead of left in the conversation. twenty-seven entries so far: why a column's width is counted in characters rather than pixels, why work appears to vanish between a branch and a remote, why a redirect has to exist before DNS moves. the chat disappears and the file does not, and I want to be able to rebuild this on my own.
for the same reason there is a page for adding a project rather than a template to copy. this gets edited in bursts months apart, and by then I will not remember what the frontmatter wants.
a game: five circles on screen, mix RGB until you match the target color. the interface is physical — buttons, knobs, and RGB LEDs inside ping pong balls — and the room's DMX lighting follows whatever color you land on.
the point of building it was to get TouchDesigner, Arduino and DMX talking to each other in one loop, rather than two at a time.
hand position from a Kinect, converted in TouchDesigner into how many LEDs light up.
simple, and that was the point. the mapping is trivial, so the only thing worth finding out was whether the whole chain could keep up with a moving hand. it does.
first TouchDesigner experiment. an ESP32 receives DMX over ArtNet on Wi-Fi and drives individual LED colors on a strip.
rough — no enclosure, no error handling, a wire falling out would take it down. but the networked part worked, which was the whole question.