MSRaynsford

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...