Stay tuned!

I’ve been working on my laptop on the couch quite a lot, and it’s started to cause me real problems. I’ve been getting intense ‘thunderclap’ headaches, and they appear to be a posture-related injury: slouching on the couch, looking at something in my lap has done something awful to my neck. To improve things, I’ve started spending my day working at Artisan’s Asylum, where I set up on one of the electronics shop benches. That’s better, but looking down at the screen is still aggravating my neck, so I put together a quick-and-dirty laptop stand out of yet more scrap wood and junk bin hardware.

The sides are part of an IKEA spice rack, and the other metal parts are server rack-mounting hardware. Thumbscrews on either side permit adjustment of both the height and the angle.

My neck is already feeling better.

GAMBY has officially launched! The first 20 kits have been packaged and are available for sale on tindie.com! Jimmie Rodgers is also selling them in his touring soldering workshop.

The GAMBY site is also live, featuring detailed assembly instructions, programming documentation, sample resources and tools. The libraries and sample code are all up on Github, too.

GAMBY is Games for Arduino, Made By You — an acronym that I totally didn’t make up retroactively to fit the name. I can’t wait to see what people do with it!

Since this is such a limited run, I’m doing all of the kit-packaging myself. Packing the kits is a bit tedious, but I came up with a fairly good system: I have one container for each part in the kit, so I just move down the line, assembly-line-style, taking one thing from each. The four identical buttons are in four separate bins. No counting (and miscounting) involved!

I’m sure this isn’t a novel invention, but it works very well.

My Xbox 360 unceremoniously died one night, leaving the fate of New Vegas and the whole of the Mojave Wasteland hanging. My initial attempt at reflowing the solder, despite using the proper equipment, was an abject failure. Admittedly, I didn’t try as hard as I could have; I’d been coveting a Kinect for a while, and I finally had an excuse to get one cheap as part of an Xbox bundle. Say what you will about Microsoft, but the Kinect is a cool piece of hardware.

I didn’t originally intend to use it as a video game controller, but since it would take some time before I got it set up for hacking, I wanted to try it out. That required finding a place to put it that was high enough and — to work in my narrow living room — also as far back as possible. If this were the olden days, I’d have put it on top of the TV; here, in the future where TVs are thinner than they are tall, that isn’t an option. I’d have to get more creative.

I ended up building a stand attached to the TV’s VESA mount, made from yet more aluminum channel stock (salvaged from a 1970s-era map/chart storage system), scrap wood, and leftover server rack-mounting hardware. Even though it was a quick and dirty job, something imprecisely thrown together in less than an hour, little thumbscrews allow for some fine adjustment to level the shelf.

In the end, however, my efforts were for naught: even after rolling away my coffee table, my living room is just too narrow to use the Kinect with the game system. At least it provides a nice place to store it when I’m not hacking around with it.

My coffee table has a history, or at least its top does. When he was half my age, my father worked in a department store; there, he picked up a nice piece of plywood from an old window display. It, as a coffee table, followed him through grad school and eventually to his first professorship in the Pioneer Valley where I was born. My mother used it (with a different base) as a slide for me as a baby. I remember first eating Chinese food for the first time off of it. When I was in junior high and high school, the surface (with another base) bore witness to many Dungeons explored, Dragons slain, and liters of Mountain Dew consumed. The table (with yet another base) was the first piece of furniture in my first place after college. hen I moved to the Boston area to continue my career in the game industry, it came with me.

But now, its base is disintegrating again. My living room is narrow, so I find myself moving the table frequently — something it really wasn’t built to do, hastening its demise. The new base needed to be movable. The narrowness of the living room also limits the available storage space, so I wanted to design something that addressed both of those issues.

I built the base using mostly materials I had on hand. The main structure is made from some premium 2x4s left over from building out my workspace at Artisan’s Asylum. The legs are pieces of aluminum channel stock, material salvaged from a 1970s map/chart storage system. The casters were leftovers from some piece of IKEA flatpack or another. Most of the hardware came from my junk bin, mostly odds and ends from rack-mount server hardware. The parts I ended up buying were some washers and a section of wire shelving. The latter was mounted underneath, providing a place to put various living room detritus — remotes, game controllers, coasters, magazines, et cetera.

Not bad for about six bucks.

I received this lumpy (and unsettlingly squishy) package from China. Inside were more than 500 fresh, clean GAMBY printed circuit boards!

This is pretty exciting. Prototypes are one thing, but this is something else. GAMBY is now, undeniably, a real thing.

More pictures after the cut!

All the images have notes; click the thumbnails to check them out on Flickr.

The new Artisan’s Asylum space is big. Very big. 31,000 square feet big.

The space maintains a fleet of Razor^tm kick-scooters. In a space the size of Artisan’s Asylum, they are actually quite useful; the space is the width of two city blocks, and it can take several minutes to walk from one end to the other. A scooter can make it in half the time. The only problem with the scooters is that you really can’t carry much of anything on one. I decided to remedy that.

One of the scooters has a ‘basket’ on the front, made from a square nail bucket. It’s very handy, good for moving small tools from shop to shop, but you can’t carry anything much larger or heavier than that. I decided to build a trailer hitch and trailer for handling bulkier cargo.

The hitch consists of a pair of rails that clamp onto the sides of the scooter deck. The rails extend behind the scooter far enough to provide enough room to kick (the image to the left shows the hitch in its ‘retracted’ state). The eye bolt, the hitch proper, is level with the deck, so the scooter can bank when it turns.

The hitch itself came out well, but the trailer I built was just a proof-of-concept, thrown together from scraps of wood. It was far too heavy, and it had a tendency to bounce off the hitch and travel in straight lines when the scooter and I turned. I dismantled it within a couple of days. I plan to eventually build a ‘real’ version, probably from welded aluminum, with scooter wheels and a clip hook instead of a peg.

With the wrap-up of the big Artisan’s Asylum buildout, I was finally able to outfit my own 100 square foot workspace and unpack the 64 cubic feet of stuff in my assigned gaylord*, everything shipped over from the old Willoughby & Baltic space on Joy Street.

The huge new Artisan’s Asylum space is part of the former Ames Safety Envelope factory on Tyler Street. The slim majority of the place has been divided into 50 and 100 square foot rental plots, separated by chest-high partitions. Even with wood, welding, machining, and electronics shops — each nearly as large as the entire space on Joy Street — there are more than 100 of these private spaces. My space is #7, directly behind the front desk. It’s also next to the electronics shop (E+R, for electronics and robotics) where I do most of my work.

I installed a built-in workbench, spanning the short end of the space and wrapping onto half of the longer wall to the left. It’s built from 2x4s with heavy, salvaged modular desk tops forming a smooth, durable work surface. Since I intend to do various types of work in the space, I built the workbench to be multi-purpose, with both a low area for seated work (e.g. computer stuff) and a larger, higher area for standing work (everything else).

* Yes, ‘gaylord‘ is the proper term; stop snickering.

I haven’t been updating the blog, but I have been working on things. Among them is GAMBY, my LCD/game shield for Arduino. I just had a second batch of six prototype boards manufactured, this time by Laenof DorkbotPDX.

Hopefully, this is close to the final design; there are a few minor changes to be made, but those shouldn’t impact the pinout, layout or components. I’ll assemble one today to verify that it works, and I’ll be modifying the existing code libraries to match the revisions made since the previous prototype.

The board designs are now in a public repository on GitHub: gamby.hardware. The code for the character editor (in Processing) and a sprite generation tool (in Python) have their own repo as well: gamby.tools. The libraries will go on line as soon as I think they’re ready for public consumption. Since the boards aren’t yet in production I don’t think the latter is yet a high priority.

<< Back to my projects blog.

Incidentally, do kids still write ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’ essays when they get back to school, or have they gone the way of Penmanship classes and Chisanbop?