Media - darkroom - Page 28 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of a small blue circuit board that's hanging by its wires from a piece of wood that's attached to the side of our back room. Towards the end of the wood there's also a blue box with a little fan vent in it (a Plantower PMS5003 air quality sensor) and a small white plastic enclosure that houses the existing DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor. And at the VERY end is my extremely dodgy solution to avoiding getting the sensors wet: a plastic tupperware that I've screwed into the end of the wood so it shields the sensors.

And we're alive!

That was quite straightforward, I found a MicroPython library for the BME280 and updated my sensor code so it can use either the DHT22 or the BME280. And as a fun additional point, the BME280 library also calculates the dew point based on the current temperature and relative humidity!

I don't have it running "in production" yet, I've just got it hooked up to a spare ESP32 and it's sending its data to an MQTT broker running on our Mac mini so I can keep an eye on it for a while, but it's very interesting comparing the values between the two sensors... right now the DHT22 says it's 20.2˚C and 94% humidity outside, the BME280 says 19.9˚C but only 71% humidity. I also want to get a better enclosure for the whole setup as well, I'll think I'll ask a friend who has a 3D printer to print me out one of the multitude of Stevenson screens that seem to be out there.

Posted on 3 April 2024, 20:02

A photo of three small dark blue printed circuit boards, two are BME280 temperature/humidity/atmospheric pressure sensors and one is a splitter with little connectors on all four sides, plus a selection of cables.

Yessss, new (small) project time!

our house darkroom new toys esp32

Posted on 2 April 2024, 15:03

A photo of a game of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. The board looks like the metal of the inside of an ancient steampunk starship, and the terrain is a bunch of walls all connected together in the same steampunk style to form number of interconnecting rooms. On the right of the board are the xenomorphs from Aliens pretending to be Genestealers, painted in a very dark blue colour. On the left are the six hulking and putrid Death Guard in large military green amour with all sorts of tentacles and demon faces coming out of the armour, and at the far side away from the camera are six Ultramarines of broadly the same shape armour as the Death Guard, but it's a rich blue and doesn't have tentacles and demon faces in it.

A closeup of my Death Guard Fighter, who is wearing hulking green armour with a HUGE toothed mouth in his chest armour going across his whole abdomen and chest and wielding two plague knives, facing off against one of the xenomorph "Warriors", which is down on four legs and looks like it's about to pounce. To the side is a smaller xenomorph more upright behind a set of ammo crates.

A close-up of a Space Marine aiming his boltgun (complete with a 3D-printed muzzle flash weapon effect) at one of the Tyranid Warriors, while a second one lurks just around the corner behind him.

We had our rematch of the Death Guard vs. Tyranids vs. Strike Force Justinian tonight, and because tomorrow is a public holiday we all stayed slightly later and managed to finish the whole game, AND I won 8-7-4! 🎉 (We did slightly fuck up one rule up about injuries and so my Heavy Gunner did better in close combat versus the Space Marine leader than he should have, and ended up killing the leader.) Instead of ten Genestealers, my friend playing the Tyranids took three Tyranid Warriors instead and used, uh... some different type of Aliens miniature for them that looked very cool.

The Death Guard felt extremely thematic, it was just a slow, steady, plodding advance across the battlefield, and they were hard enough to kill that they were difficult to dislodge from the objectives once they were on them. My plasma gunner was my MVP, he only shot three times but each one was a killing shot, taking out two Space Marines and a Genestealer. I also took the dual-plague-knives Fighter for the first time and he did okay, but he definitely served well as an extra close-combat threat beyond just my leader. The Disgustingly Resilient rolls were a lot swingier this game than usual, I either did fantastically well (my Plasma Gunner took nine damage from the Space Marine sniper and would have died but ended up rolling so well he only took four, and subsequently ended up vaporising the sniper in his own activation), or really badly (my Fighter took something like ten damage in his first melee combat and saved NONE of it), with nothing in between.

As with the first game, we had a couple of very cool cinematic moments, my Fighter facing off against one of the Warriors and a Genestealer, and one of the Space Marines shooting at another of the Warriors while one lurked behind him ready to pounce.

darkroom kill team games workshop death guard tyranids seven hills space marines into the dark

Posted on 31 March 2024, 23:45

Another Sunday, another game of Kill Team!

I didn't actually play tonight because I didn't have a great night's sleep last night and absolutely did not have the mental capacity for it, but I DID supply the terrain and it looked absolutely fantastic. It was Plague Bearers vs. converted Skaven Adeptus Mechanicus, but because there were 12 Plague Bearers and 11 AdMech we only got through two turns, final score was 5-4.

darkroom gaming kill team games workshop chaos daemons seven hills

Posted on 17 March 2024, 23:12

A photo of a dining table with four players worth of cards around it.

We went out to visit @scarydan and their lovely partner today, and brought good ol' Munchkin. Super-close game, we had everyone at Level 9 and @scarydan's partner who had never played before ended up winning!

darkroom gaming newtown munchkin

Posted on 16 March 2024, 18:14

A photo of a group of six partially-painted Space Marines, three Assault Intercessors and three standard Intercessors. They're all wearing the standard massive Space Marine armour with big shoulder pads which has been painted in a deep rich red colour. All the guns are black and they have brown leather pouches strapped to their waists. The armour all has lighter red strokes along the edges of the plates, and the only completely unpainted bits are the heads.

THE EDGE HIGHLIGHTING IS DONE!

::collapses in a heap::

I didn't even do the "proper" pin-sharp do-it-with-the-edge-of-the-brush thing except for the very lightest highlights at the very end, on the tops of their kneepads and along the edges of the armour in front of their faces, but man that took a while. I only managed to do two each night because it was that tedious, no way in hell would I be doing an entire army like this. Very happy with the results, though looking at the photo it's not super-obvious with the lighting there, but trust me, it is in person. 😅

our house darkroom kill team painting space marines

Posted on 15 March 2024, 21:48

A photo of a grassy area surrounded by trees, mostly Australian natives. The sky has just lightly overcast and the light is getting on towards sunset so it's fairly soft.

My left arm is definitely feeling sore now where the jab was so I figured doing my usual elliptical wouldn't be a great idea. Fortunately it's absolutely glorious outside now so I went for a walk amongst the greenery and it was a delight.

darkroom trees

Posted on 11 March 2024, 18:25

A photo of Space Marines, three Assault Intercessors and three standard Intercessors. They're all wearing standard massive Space Marine armour with big shoulder pads, the Assault Intercessors all look like they're mid-stride and are wielding got pistols and chainswords, and one has a grenade in her hand and looks like she's about to lob it. The other three are holding big boltguns, two look like they're in the middle of firing and the third had hers held upright in one hand while she points commandingly with the other. None of them have helmets and they've all got either mohawks or very short cropped hair and various cybernetic implants.

Making slow but steady progress on my Intercession ladies. The bit that's REALLY going to slow me down is when I get to doing the edge highlighting on their armour. 😬

our house darkroom kill team games workshop painting space marines

Posted on 9 March 2024, 17:25

I got myself a vortex mixer, no more shaking paint pots like some sort of barbarian!

You push the paint pot down into the middle of the blue silicon on the top of it and SOMETHING inside it apparently goes at 3000rpm and it generates a vortex inside the pot and mixes the paint. It's moving so quickly I can't actually tell what sort of movement it's making. It works incredibly well, though my hand feels weird afterwards from the vibration. 😛 It's pretty small but SURPRISINGLY heavy given its size.

our house darkroom painting

Posted on 9 March 2024, 14:13

A photo of two round golden brown loaves of bread covered in flour, sitting on a cooling rack.

Starting the weekend off deliciously. 😎

our house darkroom food portrait mode bread

Posted on 9 March 2024, 11:16