How would you finish off the wood?

Case out of Multiplex Birch and sanded with 320 sandpaper.

Unfortunately the wood supplier delivered the wrong wood, and after the wood has been lasered, it turn out quite burned/black.

So I had to sand much more than expected and also using the dremel to not sand for ever, hoped I could make the case in one run but that will stay as Prototype, and I will make a flawless second one.

Curious about your thoughts on how to finish the case!

Hey everyone, i've been working on a project that turned out to be way more of a software challenge than I initially expected. the goal was to build a small desktop companion, a sort of bionic cat, but I was determined to make it feel 'alive', not just a looping GIF on a screen.

This meant two things:

1. A massive library of animations (goal is 500+) that can transition smoothly.

2. Real-time, audio-driven lip-sync that actually matches speech.

The hardware I’m using is an ESP32-S3 and an ESP32-P4 on a custom board, driving a 410x502 retina display. Pushing that many pixels is already a decent task for the S3, but adding the audio processing and animation logic on top created some serious bottlenecks.

After trying to brute-force it and failing, I realized I had to build a dedicated system to handle everything. I built a lightweight, task-based system that separates perception, decision-making, and execution. One core handles the audio stream and environment signals, while the other deals with rendering and animation states. I don't have a clean diagram of it yet, but it's a modular architecture that keeps things from crashing into each other.

For the lip-sync, I wrote an algorithm that extracts phonemes from the incoming audio and maps them to a set of mouth shapes. The tricky part was the transitions; just snapping between phonemes looked terrible. I had to add another optimization layer to create natural co-articulation, so the mouth moves more like a real muscle and less like a flipbook.

The animations were the other beast. To avoid janky, repetitive movements, I'm using an animation state machine. For example, the cat licking its paw isn't a single looping clip. It's built from several smaller, slightly different fragments that the state machine can combine in near-infinite variations. This makes the behavior feel much less predictable. The long-term goal is to have over 500 of these animation states, which is a whole other challenge for flash storage and memory management that I'm still figuring out.

Here’s a quick look at the protptype board and the system in action. Still a lot of work to do on latency and squeezing more performance out of the hardware, but it's finally starting to come to life.

Now my engine is ready, now things are starting to get more complicated and interesting hahaha.

Next chapter "Sprite"

Just wanted to share this project that you can do yourself which has been my obsession for a year. A little 3D printed physical interface to my Ollama LLM that I can talk to throughout the day and who will check in on me. I have to say that having a conversation with a physical presence and face (albiet a crudely drawn one) makes ocnversing with an LLM a little more personal.

Anyway, it's made with a Raspberry Pi 4B, ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT, and written in Python. It interfaces with various LLMs and contains a microphone/speaker array to allow "voice chat" (technically stt->tts, it's not actually listening to your voice). It also has a camera to check in on you to see if you are there, and will even take a picture of you to start a conversation!

This was my first big RPi project and a great beginner project!!
Build your own here: https://el3ktra.net/introducing-lilll3x-the-desktop-ai-sidekick/ and let me know how it goes!

New features added:

HP

Lives

Score

Enemies Boss

Creating a great boss following the concept art. Tentacles and Laser Beam.

Made a music player using a RPI0 2 W, rotary encoder for volume knob and tactile switches for controls. Connects via Bluetooth, no battery, powered via the Pi’s micro USB port. My only way I could think of improving is to make a smoother and better fitting case (the insides are a bit crooked) and add a battery for portability, and maybe an aux port for compatibility, possibly a more original name too. I liked how the black and white theme came out.

Simply by touching geometric shapes in sprites.

Never in any life, did I ever think I’d have to go pull out the old Thermal Grizzly®️"TG Shield" for anything except a motherboard… but here we are.

I’ve got this nasty split starting right beside my fingernail (that classic hangnail spot)...running down about a quarter inch at an angle on the front of my finger. Every time wind, water, or soap hit it, it burned like hell and the d@m thing just kept splitting wider every time I bent my finger or typed.

Tried my ancient bottle of New-Skin liquid bandage from 2012....it did jack squat & I wasn't heading to the store for a bottle of New Skin super glue....so I told myself and my kiddos screw it & YOLO!

Broke out the red conformal coating, and painted that bad boy like I was doing touch-up work on a PCB or GPU..

It’s been roughly 2 days and I’m honestly shocked at how good it has worked. The burning has completely stopped from the (elements hitting it) with every movement without cracking or peeling off...I have showered 3 times & no sign of cracking. Applied a generous amount to fill in my cracked finger the first time, and it stung about 90% less than Regular liquid bandage! I'm on day 3 and it seems to be healing up nicely...

🔗Here's a photo of my finger via ❇️↗️[Imgur]

☝️---------☝️

Thermal Grizzly could literally tweak a couple chemicals and market this exact stuff as a waterproof finger crack / cut liquid bandage. They’d clean up down here in Florida every time the weather flips from warm to cold or in my case...(cold to warm lol)

Anybody else ever used PC repair products for random body fixes, or am I the only one out here MacGyver-ing my fingers? 😂

I just wanted to share this so it would be documented on the web and internet archives if someone's ever in my shoes, has no other option & worried about if anyone else has ever used conformal coating on a small cut/scrape. I hope this can stay here to help others in the future!!

Godspeed TG friends! 🧡