MSRaynsford

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.  

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...

The front panel of the puzzle box has some ' Nixie tubes ' to display numbers to the player, while it would have been lovely to put real tubes into, they're a bit impractical on this small scale. Instead I opted to use white OLED screens  sitting behind orange perspex to give them a distinctive glow. I can change the number simply by showing a different value on the screen and I'm technically not limited to just using numbers. The minor issue with this screen arrangement is that they need to be removed from the oversized pcb they are attached to. There is a super sticky foam pad which I cut through with a sharp blade, taking extra care not to flex the screen at all in case it shatters. Each box has four of these screens so cutting through forty of these sticky pads made for a very boring afternoon. I tested each screen was functional before beginning the procedure and tested them all again after but just displaying a simple digit on them. The next step is to rewire the ...

I have done more than a few paint infills before and I've had quite a lot of success using thinner airbrush paints and paint brushes to get the paint to flow into the gaps before wiping them off. This time I had thirty dials to make that were quite intricate in places so I thought I'd try some of my acrylic paint markers. Presumably the paint inside is already a bit thinner and the pen is the brush which made it super easy to apply. By pressing the nib to get the paint flowing you could see it creeping along the engraving and into all the corners.   This time around I let them all dry out completely before using a 600 grit sand paper to sand the excess paint off. Sandpaper is not advisable for a high gloss plastic but this is actually a frosted white acrylic so you really can't see a difference after it has been sanded. A quick blast of air from the compressor it it was all clean and ready to go. The colour is each segment was added with a bit of sharpie once all the paint...

This cute little robot found his way back to my workshop this afternoon. I made him about four years ago for a game at  One Way Out escape rooms in Oakham. This time he had a problem with slightly loose battery connection so I replaced it with a fully enclosed battery box (4xAA) so hopefully he'll be fine for a bit longer. It made me realise I'd never talked about the insides. He actually has a twin brother who occasionally visits too and they both get upgrades over time. The robot is put together during the game so the parts essentially hide inside a larger box. The main change would be in the arms of the device. They were originally phono connectors which on the surface appear pretty sturdy but after a couple of rushed attempts to assemble the parts while the time is running out on the clock those had a tendency to break off. The solution was to remove them entirely, the shoulder joints are now just metal pins that insert into appropriate sized holes. There's a magnet ri...

Having produced the knife switch housing and wiring it into the system I can now use it to form the basis of one of the games in the final puzzle box. It may be simple but this is the first of the puzzles/games that players find. The puzzle requires the player to take the radiator key  from the inside of the box, find and undo the screw, left the panel and flip the knife switch to the 'on' position.   The main purpose of this game is to subconsciously show the player that the box is now empty, once they have removed the radiator key from inside it. It also doubles as a handy on/off switch for the game. I could have hardwired the power to go through this switch but there are better things that can be done. If the power comes on at the start of the game then we can time how long it takes the player to solve the whole game. The other neat thing is one of my design philosophies for this box. I wanted this whole game to have as little reset required as possible. If the up positi...

  The knife switch is housed in one of the corner columns from the box, it builds upon the corner column framework . This is the most complex of the four corners because this one is locked at the start of the game and needs to be opened before the switch can be flipped. On the original box I guess I just glued some bits together until it fitted and worked, now that I'm building ten I actually had to take a bit of time to get my files in order and I also a redesign to make the geometries work out. There are lots of individual parts that go into this corner, captive nuts at the top and bottom to mount it in the box. Another captive nut for the locking key and all the separate fingers that go into the hinge joint. The fingers on the lid were cut from 2mm ply to allow plenty of space between the 3mm fingers of the box. Solder lugs were attached to the screws of the knife switch to provide an easy way to solder wires to the switch when required. The flap that closes over the knife switc...