I've been tracking down a bug in my stepper controller code that was causing drift. It was introduced after I added microstepping as a form of motion smoothing.
Finally I decided to take a break, eat something, and go wash my hair. While I was shampooing my hair the answer to where the drift was coming from popped into my head!
After I was all dry I ran upstairs and fixed the bug, and now it works great! I can wiggle the joystick all I want and it returns exactly to the home position! 🎉
@opsnlops Yes! That's exactly how it goes. For me it was usually when I was driving, which I did quite a lot when I was doing a lot of engineering. For my engineer partner, it was the shower. Solutions would come to him in the shower and sometimes he'd finish, head back out to his truck at midnight, and back to the lab.
There are various theories about this. There is no right/left brain dichotomy, or we don't think so, but for some it sure feels like it. For me it seems like I have two brains, one is intuitive, the other is sharply focused and reasons everything. The second is also the part that like to talk a lot (mentally). It feels to me like the intuitive part has far more compute power on tap, able to comfortably handle immensely complex problems, but it doesn't express itself very well in linear "speech" terms.
The sensory input of the shower on your skin or the monotony of driving seems to get the left brain to shut the hell up long enough that the right brain can present the solution it has. And there it is, poof, fully formed solution without any talking, diagrams, or arithmetic.
It's really fun when that happens.
@shuttersparks Yeah, driving used to do that for me, too! But now that I don't drive much... :)
Back when I was commuting to San Francisco every day I would usually think of the answer to a problem on the commute. It's amazing how many times I was able to solve a problem on the ferry.