MSRaynsford

I wanted to make a little Baymax to go into Eli's birthday party invites. This is cut from 0.8mm white polypropylene. The details were coloured in with a black fine liner pen. ( svg here )

By request I made a medium sized Empire Map , it's pretty much the same deal as the big one but with a few tweaks. This map is intended to be taken too and from the events so it's a bit smaller at 1000mm x 900mm. It has some extra Otkodov regions at the top and also  the barrens  just to the right hand side. The regions are one of three different heights instead of four different heights. The main difference is that each region is removable, this was achieved by placing two pegs under each region. The regions line up and with the pegs and sit in the right places on the board. Finally I added a little celtic flourish in each corner, you might recognise these as the Celtic knot dice. It turns out that having the six basic sides of the dice allows me to quickly and easily construct flourishes for decoration.     

One of my 12 projects this year was/is going to be a retro gaming cabinet. While I was at the UK Maker Faire  I met Simon and I saw his awesome Clarkcade cabinets  and in particular 'the fighter'  which is exactly what I envisaged for my cabinet. These machines are top notch quality have all the right features and finishing touches, so I was keen to get some hints and tips. After a short discussion it turned out that Simon was keen to try getting a some parts laser cut which was very convenient, now just two weeks later I've cut my first cabinet for him and there will hopefully be many more on the horizon as we try to figure out the best way to laser these machines (such as yesterdays hidden joints ). My cabinet will still be put off till slightly later in the year but what a head start I'll have when I finally get round to it.

The weeks just fly by and it's weird because I was busy making things last week. I made a quick prototype for a hidden finger joint. The item in question is intended to be made from 12mm mdf which is something I can't cut on my 80W laser so the next best thing is to cut it in 2 pieces and stick them together. If the inner layer is hidden away though you can add these kinds of fingers to make the assembly really easy.

More Leather work  for Marcus. I was trying to align the etch to the middle of the leather that he sent me but it didn't really work. Clearly I should have used the laser to cut out the leather as well.

The new useless machines are a lot easier to assemble, this means I'm now happy to assemble them myself and sell them as finished units. This also means I'm happy to customise the machines by request. This one was coloured red before assembly and then had a name engraved on the lid.

I thought I would close out this month with another new product and finishing one of my monthly projects. This is the 3rd and final kit that I was calling Project #5: a complete revamp of my useless machines. This kit is a smart useless machine, there is an arduino inside the box which allows you to program in different behaviours based upon how many times you flick the switch (or anything else you can dream of). Currently the box gets miffed if you turn it on too many times. Full sample code is provided and being based around an arduino there are dozens of amazing libraries already written for all sorts of functions. There is a small power circuit which allows the arduino to turn it's own power on and off, the only power consumed in the off state is the leakage current of the transistor. In testing the circuit ran for a whole week (2-3 tests a day). Here are just a few ideas of things you could add: Add some character to your box, with a real time clock chip...