DieselPunk, AtomPunk, & Retrofuturism
Where technology meets style
I have always admired the steampunk cosplayers. Their moving parts and that weathered antique style always mesmerized me. I never had much of an excuse to join their ranks.. until now! I also wanted free rein to add as much technical gadgetry without disrupting the theme. There's a dozen flavors of what I had in mind. I didn't even know what to call it until after a few hours of googling. AtomPunk! I knew I wanted an unique theme for the bus and boy oh boy this is going to be fun!
This retro futuristic style can be seen in a small handful of games, most famous is the Fallout series! Basically you have wild technical and biological advancements that look to be created from technology from the 1950's to the 1980's. Most of which has a worn look that shows some significant age.
I'll update this page with drawings and ideas as they come to me.
(8/9/2015)
Computer control
One of the features I've always wanted to integrate into my living space is a computer controlled automation system. The FUN BUS will most likely use a raspberry pi to handle communicating with the small army of slaved microcontrollers over SPI that'll handle all the lower level functions. But it never occurred to me how exactly I would manage the system until just recently..
Floppy disks!!
I've done some research on whether or not I would be able to read a floppy disk with a microcontroller or pi.. Unfortunately that's an entire project itself! Additionally I couldn't find any way to be able to read a text file off 8 or 5 inch floppies, most are so old that they've lost their magnetic properties and are unreadable. Modern floppy disks can still be read if you buy a special usb floppy drive. Which I'd have to take apart and try to figure out how to fit into a genuine floppy drive.
That will just not do.. Instead!! I'm going to make the pc rack as planned with each of the drives plugged in and powered. However, when a disk is inserted and the drive tries to read it, a small RFID sticker on the inside of the floppy case will be read by a microcontroller and relayed to the main computer which will run the appropriate program.
(8/15/2015)