Monthly Report: November

The Benchmark obviously was the big release of the last few months, which is for now at least considered "done". I have not entirely made up my mind yet on what to do next. Probably first some smaller maintenance/bugfixing updates for my plugins, after that I'm not sure. I'm considering either of the following at the moment as the next project. As usual, I can't make any promises as to when this would be released.

IdlePoser Improvements

You might have noticed the release of AnimationPoser by haremlife (alias crawlman3), which is a fork of IdlePoser. This was done with my permission by the way. While I think the advertisement is a bit exaggerating the usefulness, there are some good ideas in there. I'm considering implementing a similar Layer feature, although better integrated. So you won't need multiple IdlePoser on the same character anymore. Also had an idea for a way to allow for interfacing with the Timeline plugin, to allow the best from both worlds. This is all very vague at the moment, so it might not work out, if it turns out too much work.

Connect GPIO

You might remember my Connect Audio plugin, which allowed you to control audio-driven E-Stim devices from VaM via triggers. I was thinking of a plugin that would allow you to set GPIO ports on a Raspberry PI in a similar way. The Raspberry PI is a low priced micro computer, well it was low priced before the current inflated prices for electronics ;) Anyway, it features a GPIO port, essentially pins you can turn on/off to control stuff. This kind of micro computer is often used for homemade "smart home" devices, like watering your plants, etc. 

Without any coding, just some soldering/electronics skills, you would be able control all kinds of toys/devices from VaM. At least those where you can access the electronics easily. For example, I modded a Suck-o-Mat some ages ago, since that box is just an air pump with two magnetic valves to create positive/negative air pressure inside a fleshlight. Hooking those valves to the GPIO port of a Raspberry PI is straight forward: On the small board on the right just some Optocoupler to isolate the circuits plus a Transistor/Resistor to amplify the signal to the required voltage. You could of course skip that white experimentation board and just connect directly with the PI. "Connect GPIO" would essentially be an easier to use and more generic revival of that old implementation.

Why not use a cheaper Arduino? Because I don't have one, I have a PI. Sure, its overkill for this use case, but you can use it for all kinds of other things :D

Cheers, MacGruber