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...

The rebuild has to start somewhere and these seemed like simple parts to get built while waiting for other parts to arrive. To make the box easy to develop, I originally decided that the four side panels should be removable. The basic framework of the box then becomes a rotating base platform with four corner columns to hold the walls in place. These are the basic columns for each corner of the box. In theory I could have made them from solid material, but this framework style allowed me to house things inside the corners. The framework has a little bit of flexible twist at this stage, but it really firms up when the front and side facias are added. At the top and bottom of each column is a dual captive nut arrangement, by sandwiching a nut between several pieces of material I can bolt up directly through the base plate. Two nuts prevent from the column from rotating round on the base plate. These blocks have tabs to connect to the vertical materials, ensuring a nice strong joint. The ...

It is my intention to cover the whole depth of the coding that went into the NikolAI puzzle box  and I really didn't want to start with the 'Blink LED' project because everybody does that and it's been done a million times over but it's just too darn useful. I'm not going to cover setting up Arduino because even I've done that tutorial before. PinMode(2, OUTPUT); set up digital line 2 as an output to turn the LED on/off DigitalWrite(2, HIGH/LOW); actually turns the digital line 2 on/off, blinking an LED Delay(1000); creates a time delay of 1000 milliseconds between turning the line on/off So there it is, the simplest blink LED program. This can be found all over the internet and it does the job of blinking an LED and that's about it. There's actually a few issues with this as a program and you'd never use it in sensible program so I thought it would actually be much more useful for me to describe what's wrong with this example and lay ...

Last summer, I had the privilege of creating a puzzle box for Chris Ramsay , the Canadian Magician and Youtube Puzzler (Not the English comedian Chris Ramsey ). Like most projects of this nature I failed to take enough photos, I rushed to complete it in a good time and I didn't even write about it here. Thanks to some very keen collectors, I have an opportunity to rebuild the box this summer. This time around I am going to write about it, documenting the design choices and code that goes into such a creation. I've even found time to list it on my puzzle website should anyone be interesting in purchasing their own copy.  https://www.donteatpuzzles.com/nikolai The project was delivered in July 2024 and was filmed almost immediately by Chris and his team. I think it's fair to say that he loved it. Seeing all of my efforts being appreciated in this was is rather magical. I should just take this opportunity to thank everyone who supported me in making this, whether it was playte...