Big Tower Tiny Square No Death

[Hilma Kolin]

Dodgebullets, leap lava pits, and wall-jump your way up the Big Tower in this tough-but-fair platformer.

Anyone can do that, right? Sure the controls are easy, and the obstacles are fair. But do you have the skill necessary to make it to the top? Precision is key to success! No sprint, no double-jump, and no floaty controls! Just quick deaths and generous respawn points.

Big Tower Tiny Square is heavily inspired by single-screen arcade games. The game is one giant level broken up into large single-screen sections. Each obstacle has been meticulously designed. It will take precision and skill to navigate the maze-like tower.

Controller Support

Plug in a controller (Xbone/360 fully supported) if you prefer to throw a controller instead of smash a keyboard after particularly grueling death. The controller must be plugged in before your browser is opened to be recognized.

If you use a parabolic dish to concentrate sunlight it is all good as long as the distance to the hotspot is constant and the parabolic dish is moving to adjust for the constant change of the suns position.

If you would use an array of small square mirrors, each mounted on a pan/tilt servo mount with 2 servos a raspberry pi could control those servos and you could concentrate the hotspot at any distance (and also the constantly changing position of the sun could be compensated by the servos, at least to some extent, for full compensation of this the whole array would have to be controlled by a heliostat mount).

There are other uses for this apart from burning random things, cooking with solar for example.

What I do not know is could the servo signal be the same for all mirrors with the pan-tilt mount rotated in the initial calibration of the mirrors with a fixed light source? If not how many servo sets of 2 could a raspberry pi control?

I learned how to drive airplanes in the airport next to Solar 1. they have a sample of the pipes they pump brine through to extract energy in the visitors center. it's the size of my palm and as heavy as a car battery. it's as black as a landlords heart, and when lit up it's blinding.

then you need an ephemeris to calculate the position of one particular celestial object; the sun. I chose one that predicts the next days sunrise time and location, so it can point at tomorrows sunrise immediately after sunset:

If I understand correctly is that you are suggesting that initially you line up all your mirrors to point at the actual position of the Sun and that after that you want to know if the same signal can be used to control all the servos.

As the Earth rotates once every 24H it appears that the Sun moves across the Sky by 15 degrees every hour. All your servos think that they are at 0 degrees, though in fact they might be pointing in different directions, but yet it seems to me that after 1 hour the pan position of all the mirrors should be 15 degrees.

As far as tilt is concerned all the mirrors in the Death Ray will actually be quite close together. So again I would have thought that as the Sun rises and then falls in the sky the tilt signal sent to each mirror would be the same.

As far as physically sending the same control signals to mutiple servos at a distance from one another that is a separate issue. You would need to say how many mirrors you would have and the distance betwene them.

I think RPi is not very good at timing and it will have hard time to control many servos directly. But it has unlimited memory and processing speed compared to Arduino. I think you could use the RPi to do all the processing, time getting, human communicating and use Arduino for servo control. Use some cheap Arduino (or standalone ATMega). IIRC one Arduino can easily control 10 servos and communicate commands from the RPi.

The sun is 98000000 miles away (about 150 million meters) and the rays are so close to parallel they might as well be. The flat mirror reflection is going to be as parallel as the mirror is flat.

How else could I use a palm sized piece of polished steel to signal people an SOS from miles away?

There's a solar power plant in Arizona that uses trough reflectors (need one tilt adjustment for sun path inclination) to heat oil in pipes to heat a big reservoir and run full power generation until about 11PM -- so much for solar only works when the sun is up!

Cooking with solar... there's so many youtube videos showing variants on an insulated box with black insides and a window on front it's not funny. From India one guy used pizza boxes with plastic wrap to cook food for a school without burning any fuel. In Canada one video shows solar cooking a large roast with 10 inches of snow all around, that took hours btw.

I wouldn't mind using a trough heater to heat air in a steel stovepipe. A PC fan could push air in the cool end and an oven at the other end circulate that around the food. Something would have to let cool air in to regulate temperature.

The rays from the sun are not parallel. The sun image occupies an area, it is not a point source. So the reflected image diverges with distance. If it was a point source, yes you could play "War of the Worlds".

For lab work with equipment made to ivory tower tolerances, mirrors cleaved salt crystal flat aimed near perfectly, no, the sun's rays are not all exactly parallel -- even the ones too close to tell apart.

I know this would work physically I tried manually with some mirrors, the spot of the mirrors does not degrade visibly, at least not over smaller distances like 50 meters over that normal servo resolution will be an issue for sure. I am not planning on burning enemies either and if it would work for 10 meters it would be good enough for me.

So controlling all sets of servos with the signal of one set would not work, and the Arduino Mega would be able to do 10 so that would be only 5 Mirrors, I was more thinking of a 10x10 row so 100 Mirrors seems not to be possible, probably thats why nobody built it yet. Maybe in a few years, with different hardware.

I think the microcontroller part is "simple". I think using one Arduino (or any cheap microcontroller you are able to use) per 10 servos generating the pulses and one "brain" than controls them all (either another Arduino or RPi or so) will be relatively cheap and easy compared with the servos and mirrors.

I don't see using servos. They require power all the time and a solar tracker moves slow.

Mirrors on a flat surface tilting up to reflect sunlight can't be packed tight without some shading others. The more off-center the focus and more off-overhead the sun is the worse that gets.

Op might like the GreenPowerScience videos on youtube. They're strictly low-end-science, little math DIY and do some impressive demos. I never saw solar panels kept cool by putting them in water.. in a fishtank.. and compared output to not in the fishtank.

Stripped of any signage, the mall buildings look naked, almost vulnerable; they have the presence of laboratory specimens, frozen in time. The surrounding ocean of parking lot only enhances the impression that this half-dead mall has been put on a pedestal for display. In this state, with the expansive parking lots wide open, the profane blemishes of commercial signage removed, the trees mature in their tiny square patches of earth, the Highland Mall may more than ever resemble its original blueprints. I wonder if the architects have paid Highland Mall a visit since she turned 40.

John Clary is a graduate student in the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT. His research employs GIS to explore the relationship between international migration, information and communication technologies, and the production of transnational spaces.

Clumps of seaweed are scattered across the foreground, and tiny flecks that I presume to be gulls are picking through the wet sand. A truck is driving away in the background; otherwise, except for whomever held the camera, my parents are alone.

The street where I grew up is a quarter-mile strip of wispy pines, anchored at one end by a water tower and punctuated at the other by a circle that finishes it, like the dot on an exclamation point. It is in Dickinson, halfway between Houston and Galveston but a thousand miles removed from them both. A lazy brown bayou trickles through the neighborhood. Instead of sidewalks, there are long grassy ditches.

Most of the residents, like my parents, have lived on this street for more than thirty years. Some are as close as family to us, but none of them could have guessed why Daddy summoned his four children home one Sunday in the spring of 1990.

From his tone on the phone, I knew the news would not be good. It was the same voice that once preceded squirmy lectures about sex or drugs or God. Daddy had been out of kilter since 1979, when Dickinson flooded and everyone on the street lost their possessions. But while the neighbors recovered, his bad luck continued. He caught hepatitis in 1982, was laid off from his accounting job in 1983, and never got his momentum back.

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