Boston Brooks

 I've recently been on holiday in NSW, and my uncle gave me a pile of sapphire bearing gravel which he'd added gold to. I had lot of fun sifting through it and I'd love to go back and collect more of the stuff. I got the impression that the minerals in the gravel would glow under UV light, so I bought a UV flood light and some electronics to make a UV strobe. I could use the strobe to tell me if I'm digging in the right place. Only 1% of the bits of gravel glowed under the spotlight so that was a bust. I'm also thinking of looking for gold. I've been thinking a lot about how I could make my own metal detector. I purchased a solder-your-own metal detector kit, MDS-60, and it's not great. I could detect a 5c coin from around 5mm. It's a start, but I'd like to build a metal detector that can compete on sensitivity to small pieces of gold as an expensive unit. Here is a video of the device in action  With a bit of fine tuning I was able to achieve detect...

 I am (occasionally) working on an action RPG game where every time you attack you have to answer a maths question. RPGs are cool and I used to play them a lot but now I am a social gamer and I don't appreciate the brain-drain. I have accrued a large repository of spaghetti code with a few gems as I learn the ins and outs of game programming in C ( https://github.com/BostonBrooks/Spaghetti_Graveyard. ) . I chose C because it is what the electronic and computer engineers use and working as an ECE is a long term goal for me. I am using the C binding for SFML because SDL doesn't easily incorporate 2D meshes, to be used for 2.5D curved ground surfaces. A few demos below. Scritchyness is due to screen capture software.     All for now, Boston.   Update 17/02/2022 In the game, the terrain is represented as a 2 dimensional grid where each point has a third dimension (height). I have used bicubic interpolation (functions with x^3 and y^3 terms) to smooth the areas between po...