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u/jdxe

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▲ 23 r/Airships

Alberto Santos-Dumont Airship Flight Simulator

I have been going down the airship rabbit hole, and just read “My Airships” by Alberto Santos-Dumont.

I loved it. I wanted to get a better sense of what it was like to do the flights and scenarios that he described in detail in his book, especially since I am unfamiliar with the locations he describes.

So, I made a Alberto Santos-Dumont 3D in browser flight simulator based on the information in his book, topographic and open street map data.

Over the past few days I added multiplayer and VR to the game so people could try flying his airships around 1901 Paris too. There are scenarios he described in his book that can be re-flown and also time trials based on ones he did himself. In multiplayer mode there are races and also other game modes. It works on mobile, desktop, and in VR.

The game is at http://myairships.com.

My goal is to get it to be as realistic and accurate as possible. I need to work on the keels and I couldn’t find any good pictures of the control setup he used so I took liberty there. If anyone has this information I would be extremely interested.

If anyone tries the game and sees anything off there is a bug button in the top right corner that sends a screenshot along with a user provided description of the problem.

reddit.com
u/jdxe — 13 days ago
▲ 38 r/ePub+1 crossposts

Converting Physical Books into ePub Format for my eink reader

I just got an XTeInk X3, and I have a bunch of niche physical books in my backlog that are too cumbersome to carry around. I wanted to figure out a way to get the books into the XTeInk.

I didn’t want to buy a dedicated book scanner (expensive and seems like a lot of work to scan every page). I thought it would be neat if I could scan books by taking a couple slow motion videos while I flipped through the pages.

I set up my phone in a tripod ring light and aimed it at a book, and flipped through the pages on one side of the book from back to front, then did it the opposite direction to get the pages on the other side of the book. About 7 min of filming.

I created software to process these videos, deconstruct the videos into pages, OCR them using a local AI model (it’s much better at OCR than other methods like tesseract), order them, automatically generate table of contents, crop and caption figures, proofread, and process it into epub for device of choice. Then ways to manually polish if needed.

I’ve done a couple books this way and the results are good!

What I’m running: Ollama with gemma4:31b on a box with a single 3090. That’s about an hour per 100 pages, but it’s unattended so I just leave it going. There’s also an Anthropic API backend that sends the whole book as one batch (batching halves the price). I have never actually run a book through the Anthropic API, but allegedly a 300-page book comes to somewhere around $2-3 at Sonnet 5’s current rates, proofread pass included.

Documentation screenshots and code here:
https://github.com/JamesDavid/FlipScan

u/jdxe — 26 days ago
▲ 0 r/morse

I couldn't stick with Morse trainers, so I built a game to learn it — and it's finally working

.... ..

I've wanted to learn Morse for ages (I got my Extra 10 years ago but never got the hang of morse), but every trainer I tried was basically flashcards and I'd drop off within days. So I built the thing I actually wanted to play: a game where reading Morse is the gameplay.

It's a WWII "Y-station" game — you're a new operator on the Yorkshire coast listening in on U-boat radio. You learn the code by ear because the job needs it: copy intercepts, plot positions, take direction-finding bearings, key warnings back to the convoys. There's an 8-chapter story plus daily challenges and a practice room. (If you get a physical key and a vband adapter, it works with that too but you don't need any hardware.)

The surprising part is it worked on me — I'm having fun and I feel like I'm genuinely learning, which the flashcard apps never managed.

Free, runs in the browser, no install: interceptstation.com

Would love feedback from people who've actually tried to learn Morse — what lands, what's confusing, what would make you keep coming back?

reddit.com
u/jdxe — 2 months ago
▲ 32 r/esp32projects+1 crossposts

I Built an Open Source ADSB, Rocket, Satellite, Weather, Planet & Star Tracker for the $10-15 CYD ESP32

Overhead turns a cheap ESP32 "Cheap Yellow Display" (CYD) (I use the 2.8 dual usb variant) into a glanceable observation deck for everything happening above you right now, from where you are. Satellites passing overhead, rockets about to launch, aircraft on approach, aviation and space weather, the solar system, a live all-sky star map, and a "tonight at a glance" agenda all on a $10–15 touchscreen you can leave on a shelf.

It knows your location and the time, and an Intelligent Focus director quietly surfaces the one thing worth looking at across all of those tabs: an ISS pass in four minutes, a launch window opening, a geomagnetic storm, a thunderstorm rolling in.

Beyond being the best little air-&-space desk clock, Overhead exists to inspire kids. It puts the awe of far-away missions on a child's bedside table and makes it real: space stops being abstract and becomes "look — the ISS goes over our house in four minutes," "that rocket launches tonight," "this is the exact sky from the night you were born." A glowing window to the cosmos, always on, always current.

I hope someone else enjoys it as much as I do
- Code: https://github.com/JamesDavid/Overhead
- CYD Web Flasher: https://jamesdavid.github.io/Overhead/

u/jdxe — 2 months ago