MSRaynsford

I delved into the realms of a Cyberpunk LRP system this weekend just gone. It was good fun and there was lots of opportunity to make techy objects for the game. This game featured airsoft weaponry so strength is another issue to consider The first item is a shield unit, energy shields take an hour to recharge once they've served their purpose. This unit times the hour for you, leaving one less thing to remember while you're running around doing everything else. The unit is made from a mixture of acrylic and wood, the whole thing has been vacuum formed with a sheet of HIPS plastic to make it waterproof and robust to being shot. A large clip on the reverse makes it easy to attach to other pieces of kit (quite a lot of people wore military gear with lots of webbing/straps). The lower silver panel is actually a push button, it was intended to require a firm squeeze to operate to prevent it from being triggered accidentally.  A rotating ring of blue LED's shows

I took these strandbeest kits to EMF camp , I blogged about them coming soon  and I've been selling them at craft fairs and on my webstore . I just realised that I've never explicitly stated that they're available now. Get there while there is lots of time for Christmas, rather than two weeks before and we're all left hoping the postal service does it's job. The kit features the ESP8266 micro controller so it's a great little project for learning about those. The device starts it's own wifi network and then serves up a webpage to your browser which you can use to steer the walker around. It's open source software so you can modify it as you require, but the Wemos D1 is supplied, tested and programmed, so even if you don't know anything about software you can make it work. If you've already got a plastic kit then you can purchase the electronics on their own as an upgrade.

I've been doing a few craft fairs recently and wanted something a little bit more 'gifty'. These 'shut the box' games have turned out really well and have been a surprise hit with kids too. The concept of rolling a number on the dice and then flipping down a number of tabs equal to that total is very similar to the ' number bonds ' they are being taught at school (7=1+6 or 2+5 or 7+0). The tabs have little pins that sit into the vertical bars and the lid works the same way with the walls of the box. They're up in my etsy store now .