MSRaynsford

The NikolAI box come supplied in a wooden packing crate for safe transport so the first thing players need to do is lift the puzzle box clean out of the packing crate. For this purpose there needed to be a sturdy handle on the top of the box for lifting. I couldn't find anything even close to the right length so I made my own and hand stitched it. I'm very much regretting this choice now that I have to make ten more boxes but I'll survive. The handle is made from several layers, two pieces of leather sandwich some 0.8mm polypropylene. This gives the handle stiffness and strength. I used the laser to punch a line of holes around the edge of leather which I use to stitch along, it keeps the stitching straight and evenly spaced. Two wooden panels sandwich the leather to provide a nice flat handle section. This is screwed into place using countersunk screws so everything sits flush inside the handle  

  Right at the heart of the Nikol-AI box there is a Useless machine  hidden inside a secret compartment that appears at the very end of the game. I tried long and hard to make a standard machine fit in the space available but in the end I had to make the whole box skinnier by about 9mm. The useless machine drops into the box from it's compartment so I actually had to move the batteries inside the machine to ensure that it drops without flipping over. The new location has the weight of the batteries spread evenly across the width but also at the top of the box so the drop helps it slide out towards the front of the compartment. Chris was suitably impressed with the reveal  to the point where he had to explain that it wasn't just tv trickery.

In the last tutorial we covered how not to blink an LED , where I explained what was wrong with the most common blink example and showed a much more elegant solution. We now have an LED that switches between 'Off' and 'Blindingly Bright', there has to be another way that gives us more control over the LED, reduces the brightness (and therefore power consumption) and that could also give us a bit more 'character' for our lights. The answer is Pulse Width Modulation , or PWM for short. By switching the LED power on and off, imperceptibly quickly we can control the average amount of Voltage that is supplied to the LED, which in turn reduces the current and brightness of the LED. If we switch the power on and off faster than the LED can react, the LED will receive an average Voltage that is proportional to the ratio between on and off. If the LED is on for half the time and off for half the time it will receive half of the full voltage. It is possible to create the...

When I started building the NikolAI box I was determined that it shouldn't look like it had been laser cut (the same with all my puzzle boxes really). This means trying to avoid the typical finger joints and minimising the brown edges. I wanted to make a nice sturdy curve for the top edge of the box and decided the best method was to stack hundreds of layers. You can see all three layers of the ply which makes it look like three times as many layers were stacked.  Each segment has two small engraved areas, this reduces the height in those areas to 2.5mm. When the segments are stacked they form this little cassellated detail on the horizontal and vertical edges of the curve. Now I'm doing the remakes I'm almost regretting this choice. Each edge alone has 240mm of material stacked from 3mm sheets which is 80 layers. Times four sides, times five boxes which is 1600 segments, all press fitted onto the two rails that align them and hold them together. Even with the small segment...