These little tokens are made to look like the chests from Minecraft. I made a whole batch for someone as part of an incentive system, each token collected allows 5 minutes of play on Minecraft.
Northants Board Game convention is right around the corner and I'm exhibiting this year so I decided I needed a better business card holder to dish out my little business tchotchke. I found a file for a mimic box that I liked and modified it to come up with this little cutie. He's a very happy chappy, just be careful of your fingers when you're taking a card.
The RDC6442G controller from Ruida This is going to be quite an image heavy post describing the rewiring needed to convert between the Leetro controller and the Ruida controller. It is also pretty straight forward on the old Just Add Sharks laser cutters because all of the wires are clearly labelled. The controller was prepared in the previous step in order to make this conversion process as smooth as possible. The Leetro (Pad03) panel on the left and the Ruida panel on the right The view from inside the laser looking up at the control panel The control panel is an easy place to start, both panels have just a single cable that runs down to the controller, both panels are a very similar size, with the Ruida panel being slightly smaller underneath so it will fit in the hole left behind easily. The Pad03 panel clips into place so you'll need to reach up inside the machine to work the clips loose. The cable runs down the inside of the laser and is cable tied onto mounti...
We have buttons and LED's available to the system so it's probably time to introduce some element of movement. One of the cheapest and easiest ways to do this is with a servo, typically a small geared electric motor with it's own built in control circuitry. A single digital control line commands the servo to drive to a specific angle and the servo monitors it's own position as it attempts to move to that angle as quickly as possible. Servos are very versatile devices, you can get some basic 9g servos for only a few pounds each. Servos come in a range of standard rectangular sizes so they're easy to draw and have mounting points built into the plastic shells. If you require stronger/faster movement you can often buy a more expensive servo that fits into the same space and is controlled in exactly the same way so switching them over is incredibly easy. Most servos are controlled through a standard three wire connection, two wires for power and GND, the third wire car...