Part 45: Shenzhen Days: The Electronics Wet Market
Shenzhen Days: The Electronics Wet Market
Tilly checked in! Her assessment is completely on point: having seen some of it myself on my trip earlier, I can say that the scale of the sale of parts and stuff here is really, really something else. If any of y'all are in Shenzhen, I strongly recommend seeing some of the markets yourself.
As she says: Go see it. It's abso-freakin'-lutely bonkers.
megane posted:
Where does Jie get all these parts? Does he just have boxes of obscure niche microelectronica in his office?
See above! We're pretty much smack dab in the middle of the biggest electronics market the world has ever seen, so finding weird parts is just a matter of going out (or going to websites, depending) and digging them up.
Tombot posted:
You know what this calls for right? Oracle powered Vapes!
Unfortunately, we didn't buy many of the oracle chips, so there's none in the prototyping bin. Sorry! That'd be pretty cool, though.
Dareon posted:
Wow, they went all-out on the simulation, that piezoelectric generator in the divination chip means you're actually shaking the thing, not just pressing a button. I wonder if there's an accelerometer to determine when you've "cast" the oracle. And it's cost-saving, too, using microscopically-milled yarrow stalks means you can make several chips out of a single stalk of yarrow.
Do you have something in your prototyper that can simulate a coin flip, and if so, how would a knockoff I Ching using it stack up to the EK1 in terms of cost/power?
I'm pretty sure the simulator emulated the oracle chip with the coin flips, but the real hardware part does use the yarrow stalks and... yeah, I have no idea what's inside that thing.
Regarding coin flips, I could probably use the mystery chip that we used as an RNG for the haunted doll fiasco. It wouldn't consume any more power (assuming you attach an OR gate to it to force the results to 0/100), though the cost might be slightly different. One mystery chip + an OR gate is ¥3, I think - but no one told me how much each oracle chip sells for. The simulator classes it as 'free' because it has to be part of the design.
whitehelm posted:
The ID numbers seem to be all 3 digits and the other data isn't, so you can just keep sending to the same pin until you get a new ID (compare to 100). That means you don't have to worry about keeping track of the packet length which frees a register and gets the program short enough to fit on one chip.
wait: slx x1
mov x1 acc
tgt acc 100
+ mov acc dat #new packet
tcp dat x0
- mov acc x2
- jmp wait
+ mov acc x0
+ jmp wait
mov acc x3
¥5, 298 power
That is a very clever design! I have some reservations about sending it off to Mr Haotian, though - even if it were accompanied by an email saying, "Here are the constraints that make this design work" (no addresses under 101, no values over 100), it is my experience that people tend not to read emails with important caveats when the headline is, "You can save ¥5 a piece by—".
In short: I don't want to sandbag whatever he's doing by accident. That would just be embarrassing.
The_White_Crane posted:
Uhhh, have you considered you might be working on components of something... other than lawful?
I mean, aquaponics... offshore farming? Black-box security...
Should you report this to the MPS?
Dareon posted:
I mean, this is Sun Haotian we're talking about, it's not like he's building an army of flamethrower-equipped killbots.
TooMuchAbstraction posted:
Guys, you're missing the more obvious (and way cooler) explanation: they're building a spaceship! Aquaponics are clearly necessary for long-term survival in space, and so is EMP resistance if your device goes on the other side of the radiation shield.
Vauron posted:
And here I felt silly for guessing it was a component for an arcology intended as a refuge should nukes fly.
Whoa whoa whoa, I didn't expect all the tinfoil hat chatter! I strongly suspect the radiation and EMP resistance of the lock chips aren't actually being used - Sun just needed something tamper-proof. (I'm guessing.)
It is a bit of a question what he could be building, but I'm not sure I (or anyone else) has enough information to say for sure. That said, let's take a stab at this anyway...
Assuming every job is what it actually says it is:
• Modular aquaponics system: Sun needs to feed a lot of people.
• Smart grid router thingy: Sun is setting up or retrofitting an electrical grid.
Honestly, it sounds more like something out of SimCity than Fallout.
That said: From now on, if we get another Sun project in the drawer, I'll include a postscript where I theorize more about it with everything we know to date.
The_White_Crane posted:
YEEEEES. Make a version of the oracle that runs off the random number producing haunted chip!
Well, since you asked so nicely
Here's what it looks like - the chip is in place of the oracle engine. The reason I can just connect the chip up to the expander is that the expander treats 50 or over as on, and 49 or under as off. It's effectively a coin flip!
When the chip's value is 0, 1, or 2, the MC waits for the next time unit, reads six time units, and pushes it out to the display. Spooooky.
The main MC was originally the same as from my 8¥ oracle version, but I had to retrofit it to get it to wait a time unit before sampling the six values - otherwise the oracle reading would always start with a broken line. The main slp now triggers both at the end of the "wait to start a new reading" loop and at the beginning of the "making a reading" loop; once the making-a-reading loop has run twice and displayed the reading, the MC hits the slp again on its way back to waiting.
There's also two other new MCs I added to turn the output into something suitable for the LCD panel. It turns out the display Jie found, with six individual simple I/O lines, was also a custom item, so I'm reconstructing it with the display pattern and your garden-variety LuX Industry LX910C.
(All the script does in each display-processing MC is test the three digits of its half reading and turn on/off the appropriate segments. And the second one turns the entire display on at power on.)
Anyway, there you have it! Just turn it on and you have a not very authentic, haunted-ish oracle.
