YUGO Update + Guide to make your own SWEAR ***!
Added 2024-10-13 06:26:42 +0000 UTCHow's it going everybody? Here are some exciting updates, a bit of behind the scenes and all some other small stuff. First and foremost - the YUGO is coming along super well! In fact, just the other night I got the car running for an extended period of time but more on that later. There won't be any big spoilers, so don't worry about that.
My incredibly talented friend has hand painted the YUGO for the upcoming Spotify & YouTube release of the DnB song you heard in the last episode. No time frames for when it's gonna be available but most likely a few days before the next YUGO episode.
Here's a little preview, the level of detail is INCREDIBLE -
Check out the custom made plaque by the way! It's supposed to include a lot of supporter names, including those who chose to support my projects a few weeks after the last YUGO video went live. I briefly featured it in one of the recent videos as well!
Thanks to your incredible support I was able to purchase welding equipment, as well as other parts necessary to fix a lot of major issues with the YUGO. My welds are bad but everyone starts somewhere. Most importantly, I did successfully sort out the stuff I was supposed to sort out.
In addition to the must-do welds I also discovered that the little section between exhaust manifold and the rest of the exhaust system had a rust hole in it, so the welding stuff came in with a massive clutch! (no pun intended)
Original hole preview -
I'm not gonna spoil anything but long story short - I was able to get the car to idle somewhat consistently for extended periods of time now.
The biggest roadblocks right now are :
#1. The actual tune of the car, as the holley EFI sniper system "auto tune" has been a mess
#2. My 3D printed design for the adapter plate has the melting point of 420f (aprox)
The issue with #1 is that I'm not qualified enough to create a base fuel map from scratch for a car like this, my knowledge is only good enough to troubleshoot existing stuff.
The solution - bring it to our tuner friend which takes time and towing.
The issue with #2 is that the engine design we built isn't very efficient with dissipating heat, as the intake manifold is in a kissing distance from the exhaust manifold.
If you're not a car person, in oversimplified terms - the part responsible for getting cold air in is right above the hottest part that's pushing the hot air out (over 1000 degrees 🇺🇸 / 650 celsius).
As you can imagine, the 3D print stands no chance against that. Yes, the fuel and other stuff will keep it cooler than the exhaust manifold temperatures but plastic gets soft way before it melts, so that's something to consider.
The solution(s) -
A) Custom order a metal material 3D print using a self-made design.
B) Replace Holley EFI system with something else.
Here's the new plate I printed btw -
We're most likely going to downsize the Holley EFI 2300 with 1100 one because it's more optimal for our use. It's gonna cost at least $900 and is not ideal but at the end of the day, I just want to get this car running on a regular road, so we can continue making entertaining series with all sorts of stuff. If by some miracle the future episodes of the YUGO series do well - we might be able to afford to build an even better engine. Don't get me wrong, the current engine we built is an actual race engine used in proper races but we did it on a budget and used a pretty dated design for the core and the head, which limits the amount of third party parts we can use. On a bright side, we can reused some of the forged components in other engine builds (ex expensive pistons).
I'm super optimistic and I'm expecting (but not promising) to be able to drive the car this Fall. I will also look into the idea of using the cannon for the next episode, as I'm sure you guys are excited to see it in action!
Also, the original orders should be all shipped now. The new orders are still on schedule to be shipped this Fall. We won't be restocking the hats until all of the existing orders are shipped.
The HARDHAT caps samples are amazing btw!
SWEAR ***
So, first of - I kinda have to call it "sentry" instead of a "swear gun" because the almighty algorithms on all popular platforms aren't advanced enough to differentiate the context and just flag everything, especially when it assumes that there's self harm involved if that makes sense.
I will still call it both "swear sentry" and (sometimes) "swear gun" but figured I'd give some context. Also, don't say "legalize asbestos" in your videos even as a joke - bad idea.
For obvious reasons, please don't do anything stupid and please don't put yourself at any risk. The swear gun was just a silly idea I had for years and simply wanted to try making it a reality.
I can't publish the code due to licensing reasons BUT you can make this work by using open source software and very minor tweaks.
Here are the parts you may need (amazon affiliate) -
1. The USB servo controller with great documentation (to control the servos)
2. Budget Servo motor (Servo itself)
Optional items:
1. Super fast & powerful alternative servo (optional servo upgrade)
2. Raspberry PI servo controller (if using pi)
3. Servo arms (You don't need them but they will make your life a lot easier)
You will also need something to run the actual code. From personal experience - a laptop or PC with nvidia gpu will yield the best all-around results. Doesn't need to be anything fancy.
The similar priced PC will outperform a laptop and the pi setup is more trouble than it's worth but it does work if latency isn't an issue but the form factor is.
Here's a summary from me for the sake of simplicity -
By using open source speech recognition, we are able to get quick transcripts via minimizing the chunks of audio that get processed. This is essential for minimizing the delay between a word being said and a word being recognized.
If the returned real-time transcription contains a word, that matches a word from a manually made "banned word list" it sends a signal to servo. The servo receives the coordinates inputs in a form of a sequence instructions, thus "pulling" the trigger of a nerf/airsoft, holding it for about a second and then going to the default "rest" position.
Other quirks like sound effects & angry faces are just part of the signal part.
Here's a more technical rundown from Alex who did the code part -
The project was made in Python 3.11
These are used to get voice and parse the audio to text for the software to take usage of:
This was used to be able to control the servo motors
This was used to make the funny smiley face seen on the laptop’s monitor in the background of the videos, in order to give it some “emotions”
Breakdown
First it establishes communication with the servo motor via the COM port. It scans the available ports and prompts to select one of them. This step was also possible to skip due to debugging, however once the COM port is selected, the system is then ready to send commands to the servo motor.
Configuration settings and the list of swear words are loaded from external files, providing flexibility and making it easy to modify behavior without editing the core code. The configuration file contains various settings related to servo movement and audio handling, while the swear words are loaded from a simple text file.
The system listens to incoming audio using the audio module. Once the audio is processed and converted to text, it is sanitized using regular expressions to remove unnecessary characters. The clean text is then split into individual words, which are checked against the list of loaded swear words. If a match is found, the system logs the swear word, triggers the motor, and plays a random audio file.
In addition to the trigger, the UI on the laptop changes, from a happy smiley face with a green background, to a sad face with a red background. This was implemented to give the laptop that is running the code, some “emotions” as you might see in the video, making it not seem like a boring terminal running in the background.
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Bottom line, the setup is actually relatively simple. If you decide to set this up yourself for educational purposes, make sure that EVERYTHING you may possibly need is updated, as driver version incompatibility cost us days of troubleshooting and I'd rather save you from that trouble.
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed the exciting news with this little patreon post. I try to not add any spoilers to the patreon posts, so if you want to ask something more specific about the YUGO - feel free to do it in our discord server!
I'm currently working on A LOT of videos again, as I'm way more available now. Sadly, the health issues come and go but I'm super excited about the upcoming projects and I can't wait for you all to see them!
I still edit the video on the main channel myself but I may open some potential editing gig positions for the second channel & other stuff, I'll keep you all posted on Discord about that.
Have a good rest of your weekend!
