I have a wide variety of projects under way. Here is a sample.

I am building and extending the ball balancer by Aaed Musa. So far I have replicated his design and begun to modify it for continuous and interactive use at maker show cases. The biggest change has been to add a remote selector for different patterns. I have also enhanced the air flow, made the patterns a bit more reliable, and changed the look somewhat. It is good enough for public showing for now. In the future I plan to make it more interactive with additional controls and find a more eye-catching base to put it in.

Slightly less finished is the Vortex cannon I am building with a friend. It’s based on a 55 gallon plastic barrel, so it is about 3 feet long and 2 feet in diameter. Although not shown in the picture, I have a basic tilt and swivel stand for it. He is going to clean up the look and we will take it to the next Maker Faire. We will shoot fog rings out of it with a party fogger. I hope we don’t set off the fire alarm and cause an evacuation!

Lastly (for now), I have been working on the idea of a kind of electronic pet–something that is between plant and animal like with some alien thrown in. I have mostly focused on the electronics but recently started playing around with the look. It’s going to need a translucent skin (so the inevitable blinky lights will show through). I picked up some soft, clear TPU to experiment with (it will probably be silicon in the final version). Once this stuff is off the 3D printer you can soften in an oven (about 370f) and re-texture it.

As these things get more finished I will put more details into project posts.

I am leading a project of the robot builders guild at my local makerspace (It Begins in Brockport) to create a Mini Sumo Robot league. We will be supporting builders wherever we find them and hosting events local to us.

In robot sumo two autonomous robots compete in a head-to-head match following the basic system of traditional human sumo matches. Robots are allowed no weapons, and are not allowed to intentionally flip each other. The sole purpose is a pushing match between the two robots to force the other from the arena.

The project is still in early stages as of the spring of 2024. However I have created a project page on this site that provides details, including complete plans and assembly instructions for a reference example from our IBiB2040 class of mini sumo bots.

We will be hosting exhibitions and competitions starting at the Syracuse Maker Faire in May, 2024. Anyone interested in our assistance to build bots or establish events in their area should get in touch with me at bill@tinkerfarm.net

Having taught workshops for a beginners on a variety of development platforms, from Arduino, to ESP32, BBC Micro:bit, and Raspberry Pi Pico, I have moved on to a new one for the next round of turning people on to physical computing. The Maker Pi RP2040 doesn’t have an elegant name, but it’s a great platform for learning and experimentation.

The Maker Pi is very inexpensive, starting around $10 (through Newark). It has a RP2040 chip at its heart, so it can be programmed as a Raspberry Pi Pico. Thus no setup and easy Circuitpython or Micropython programming. It has onboard neopixels and a buzzer, a dual motor controller, user buttons, and breakouts for servos. It uses Grove connectors, which are much more secure than headers, but less permanent than soldering. The unit thoughtfully comes with 4 sets of Grove to jumper wire adapters, so you can use any commodity accessories as well as Grove-enabled ones. There are helpful status LEDs and on/off switches as well. You can power it with USB, Lipo (with a built in charger), or other power source using screw terminals.

It doesn’t have wireless communications but it is a cinch to add an external component for that.

I will be teaching a workshop on this board at the It Begins in Brockport maker space starting in October, 2023. I will post the workshop materials under the classes tab here once they are mature.

In the meantime check out the manufacturers site at: https://www.cytron.io/p-maker-pi-rp2040-simplifying-robotics-with-raspberry-pi-rp2040

I’ve been involved with a lot of makerspaces in a lot of roles, but it is always fun to dive into a new one.

My current project is to help get It Begins in Brockport off the ground. It Begins in Brockport (IBiB.us) is a maker place in the making currently located in Hart Gallery 27 in Brockport, NY. Operated by Brockport Original Builds, a nonprofit organization committed to the enhancement of professional development and creative play through digital technology, IBiB’s mission is to empower community innovation and learning through accessible digital fabrication.

I have been asked to join the board of Brockport Original Builds and am actively working with the crew at IBiB to get the organization up and running.

We held a preview event in early May, 2023 and started programming and memberships in June.

I recently completed this wall decoration for the lobby area of the Shore Foundation. Shore provides refurbished computers to non-profit organizations and recycles/reuses/recovers material from the computing equipment that is not up to standards. I volunteer there on a regular basis and we get a lot of old hard drives that have no real value (plus we are obliged to destroy them by the equipment donor). So here is one way to use them.

That’s 96 hard drives in various states of disassembly. These are usually taken all the way down to individual components for resource recovery. We have recently acquired access to a x-ray fluorescence machine and its pretty amazing to see how many metals are actually in some of the small parts.

Instead of XRF analysis I just needed lots of steel wire and some spacers to put this together. Since the strands are hanging from wire the shiny discs cause moving reflections when something brushes the front of this display. Which will be pretty cool until the wires break and the strand falls on someone’s foot.

After finishing my first table top game (Planetary Profiteers), I felt compelled to roll on into a second. I really wanted a cooperative game and I wanted to do something with a board that players move pawns through.

The experience with Profiteers has taught me that you really have to monitor costs on low production games using a service like The Game Crafter. The box alone for that one is $12.  The high costs are, of course, a matter of tiny print-on-demand production runs.

The new game, named LockSwap, aims to get the most out of a limited set of materials in a board-based cooperative game. It will be available on The Game Crafter after some final play testing.

I feel like it has accomplished my goal of a playable cooperative board game. It also plays extremely well with a single player, although there is a lot to keep track of!

Of course it didn’t spring into existence looking like the above. This game required a huge number of trial runs to set up a well functioning set of instruction cards, creating a pair of challenging mazes, and, mostly, setting the challenge (via a par system) for each variation. I’m still sorting out that last one and play testing finishes up.

After about a year of teaching an introduction to microcontrollers class using the Pi Pico I thought I would share all my workshop materials online. They can be found here.

The final version of the game is done. It’s on a crowd sale (the more orders, the cheaper the final price) until May 9, 2022. After that it will be available at thegamecrafter.com for single orders at the regular price

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/crowdsale/planetary-profiteers

The pandemic has led us all in different directions. I found myself developing an unexpected interest in creating a table top game — unexpected because I rarely play them. But like other maker projects, working though the stages of creation, testing, revision, and production are alluring.

At this point the game is completing the play testing phase and nearing being made available to the public in a crowd funding campaign. I will make an updated post when it is available.

Like most DIY projects I wanted to make something that I would enjoy. As someone who doesn’t enjoy unnecessary competition I wanted it to be a cooperative game where a team had to work together to solve a problem, and where team leadership rotated. In this case the theme was a space mission where the team had to negotiate with planets to join their confederation. What each planet needed to agree would be a puzzle to be solved and team members had to put together offers from hands of drawn cards.

The first physical prototype was stickers with some rudimentary clip art attached to poker cards (hard to shuffle!) and folded “planetary packets” that players would open the leaves of as they made offers in a series of rounds.

The first attempt at a play through (with friends) and some further reflection brought out three big problems.

1. I was definitely in over my head in trying to make a cooperative game the first time out. Something mildly competitive would be a must safer bet.
2. The planetary packets would be a nightmare. I would have to come up with a separate detailed and multilayered puzzle for each, and there would need to be a lot of them to keep the game fresh through several play-throughs. Moreover, there would be no way to get them professionally printed at a reasonable cost. They were essentially square envelopes with no glue and printed on both sides. I needed another way to bring variety to the playing experience.
3. I had no idea of how often a player would have a winning offer in their hand.

I tried to deal with the last by coming up with ways of calculating the odds of different hands using random number generators and math simulations but wasn’t very successful. I know many people use Tabletop Simulator to collect this kind of data but I didn’t feel the game was developed enough to be worth making a TTS version of it at this point.

Version 2 of the game addressed the first two issues. Now players competed for points but the game still required collaboration. It would take minor iterations of version 2 and version 3 to find a good balance between cooperation and competition. Secondly, dice were introduced to set what planets needed to get in a successful offer. This meant one simple tile could be printed for each planet and the dice would introduce sufficient variability.

Version 2 was still a handmade affair but with some ideas for the overall look that would be refined as it went forward. Limited play testing with several groups showed that it was a viable game as well as some areas that needed improvement.

As I moved forward with the third major version, I spent time viewing many play-throughs and reading reviews of popular card and dice games for guidance.

I also began researching short run printing houses for games and considering how I would bring a small run of the game into the market. Although there are several companies that will do this, I decided on The Game Crafter to print prototypes. Their capabilities and products also constrained (in a good way at this point) my options for producing a marketable project.

I purchased six prototypes of version 3 via The Game Crafter, with the game now titled Planetary Profiteers. These were sent out for more extensive play testing to distant contacts for honest feedback. The feedback is still coming in at this point but it has been useful enough for small and (hopefully final) revisions and positive enough for me to move forward with plans to finish this up and get it out there.

A final lesson I have learned so far is to start on the next one before the first one is done. I am in a bit of a lull as play testers take their time to get back to me and I am waiting on some new printed copies from Game Crafter. So in the meantime I am on to a paper and pencil test of an idea for a social puzzle. This one will be cooperative and less conventional.

Spiny hard drives and analog clocks are pretty much anachronisms. So why not mash up the two? Actually, I was asked to come up with some items made from junk parts to assist the promotion of the Shore Foundation, where I volunteer each week. We have _a lot_ of old mechanical hard drives around, which usually get crushed and then sent on for further processing for resource recovery.

Here are examples of three slightly different conversions of hard drives into desk clocks.

There are a couple of videos out there of how other people have done it, so I will only provide details that I find have been left out of other projects.

There are a wide variety of inexpensive clock movements available. The critical differences (other than the style of the hands) are the shaft length and hands length. I suggest disassembling and drilling the hard drive first before purchasing the clock mechanism. I wanted to keep the hands within the circle of the drive platter so finding short enough hands took some effort. Likewise, measuring the length of shaft needed to keep the hands just above the laptop function keys made for a better looking final product.

The obvious place to run the clock shaft is through the mount hole for the platter bearings and motor. The bearing/motor assembly can be pretty easily knocked out of the case and the mount hole drilled out of the aluminum case to accommodate the clock shaft. I originally wanted to include the bearing assembly without the motor core in the final clock. However the bearings are made of hardened steel and sit in hardened steel races. A home-workshop-level drill press was not going to drill out those pieces. So in the end I removed the motor windings and used those over the bare case hole.

The hard disk platters are made of unbelievably polished aluminum. As soon as you pop the cover (you need Torx drivers in the T4-T6 range for the screws) the disk will never be truly clean again. In particular, the fumes from the drying super glue gel used to mount the laptop keys clouded up the disks. This required significant cleaning with 100% alcohol to remove. Any other cleaner left a residue.

Mounting the clock mechanism to the back of the hard drive case does not have an obvious solution. Sanding of both surfaces to roughen them up and then copious amounts of hot melt glue was the best solution I could find.

This is not a particularly difficult project with those things in mind.