I've let this blog languish too long...

I haven't worked on the box project in forever.  That's going to have to become, once again - for the second year, my winter project.  However, I don't want to let this blog die off.  It has lots of potential.  So let me tell you what content is to come:

There will be updates about what it was like to plan and perform the upcoming Ghost Patrol - Bust A 'Nother Ghost event.  The first of these I posted this morning.  I'll have to wait until the event has taken place to share details, however.

There will be videos of me playing the ukulele.  Okay, maybe that's not something you want to see or hear but I need to keep motivated so I'll keep practicing and I was thinking on my birthday that I should record myself doing a song a week.  That's a pretty heavy schedule so I will instead do a song a month.  The song for October will be a stylistic rendition of Jackie Wilson's "Higher and Higher".  Oh yes, this is going to be so rockin' the statue of liberty will shake her thing all over NYC.

There will be, finally, commercials and television reviews, complaints, criticisms, observations and angry howling rants.  :)

Stay tuned.

Game Control Lesson Learned / New Rule

If a copy or multiple copies of a puzzle is/are found to be defective during Production, they should be quarantined and discarded, not "fixed".


*Last night during our GP BANG - GC Meeting, I thought I should write down some lessons learned while GCing.  This first one may seem like overkill but if you have 90 copies of a Production heavy puzzle and one or two might be broken, well then it just seems sensible.

POSE(r)

 (This post was an email to my sister who has been POSE running as well as minimalist running - little in the way of shoes or none at all - and encouraged me to try it out.  I figured it made a pretty good blog post too so I copied most of it here.)

Rachel and I hit the fire trail this weekend.  We haven't been running and she's new to running anyway so usually when we run together I focus on form and strength rather than speed or distance.  I forgot to bring my Vffs out of force of habit.  I've been dying to try running in them but decided I could run the POSE way in my sneakers.  I did and it was awesome.  No kidding.  I have a tendency, in my daily life, to do things on the balls of my feet and by 'springing'.  I do it when I'm standing still, when I'm going up and down stairs.  I like walking around my house on my tiptoes or the balls of my feet.  I'm a weirdo.  But, I think that's given me a decent foundation for POSE because not only did I not get that tired, I seemed to be able to go faster for longer periods of time.  I mostly stuck with Rachel, but at the end she was burnt so I took off up the trail to the parking lot and then circled back for her.  It's funny, a woman had just gone by us and she was POSE running (it's easy to spot once you know what it looks like) and she was FAST.  Just zooming up the trail.  So I tried going fast and it was easy, not only was it easy but it kind of forced that instinct out of me to run like I was barefoot on grass.  I tried switching back to my regular run style but the muscles were engaged differently and it felt really crazy and clunky and slow and difficult, I'm sure because the proper muscles weren't warmed up.  Anyway, I think I'm hooked, if not on VFFs then on POSE style.  I think with some practice I can go faster with less pain than I can with a midfoot or heel strike.

Speaking of pain, I had very little after my run, if any.  My right knee was a little chuffed at having accidentally been over-extended at one point but other than that, nothing.  Totally cool.  However, the next day was excruciating.  It was as though I had never run before as every muscle in my lower leg seemed to scream out with every flex.  I'd been warned to not push it my first time out but I had not listened.  I used the stick for a while and was able to ride my bike around town but was still super sore.  Today is just as bad.  I decided to not even swim today just so I can sit here and not use my legs for anything.  I over did it.  I felt too good and didn't think how much I was tearing up the muscles in this new application.  I can't wait to get back out there and to do it some more.

Things that surprised me:

• How non-painful it is to land on the ball of the foot.  I thought this would be excruciating after a while and would bruise the ball of my foot.  Sure, I was wearing shoes but the shoes I favor are very... unfriendly in their padding. 
  
• How easy it is to control speed without upping my heart rate significantly.  I thought I'd be huffing and puffing a few hundred yards in but felt comfortable and speedy and light... until my calves started to tire and then I could feel my heel occasionally coming down and contacting the trail like I was extra heavy or something.
• How unnecessary it made my shoes.  Now, I'm not saying I'm about to go barefoot or even VFF for running.  I'm just saying that without a forefoot or heal strike, the extra technology in my shoe seemed superfluous.  I wasn't using any of it because I was catching and releasing my body weight just from the ball of my foot. 

I need to get better at falling forward and pulling my foot up from the ground rather than trying to catch with it.  I'm hooked, though, and convinced I can go fast like this.  It's renewing my interest in running and that's a good thing.  I think I want to get into and stick with trail running (exception made for H2C) and want to start trying the VFFs when I run.  The pounding of the pavement, I'm afraid, loses a lot of its allure as I grow older and don't recover as quickly as I once did.  It's amazing to be able to feel the differences in my physical abilities almost yearly since I've turned thirty.  But that's for another post.

Tar and Feather Gun

Going through my sketchbooks, I found plans for something truly dastardly (and potentially hilarious)!

Puzzle Ideas

I keep a couple of sketchbooks for my illustrations, poems, songs and puzzle ideas. This works well for everything except puzzle ideas. Puzzle ideas in my sketchbooks are rarely revisited. So I've decided to start archiving them here so I can easily access them later. Yes, I'm aware that this means others can access them. That's fine. If you see a puzzle idea here (or any idea here) and want to use it, feel free. This is an open source blog. :)

Okay, here's a good example. Apparently I had a puzzle idea last June that was so awesome I had to jot it down. Nearly a year later I have no idea what I was trying to communicate. If you can make any sense of this, please write this awesome puzzle!

At least with this one, despite having no supporting text to describe puzzle mechanics, I know what I was trying to get across. This would be an installation puzzle that would look like a campfire. It would use the popular illusion of fire created with strips of silk fabric, blown by a fan, lit be colored lamps. In this case, the campfire is haunted so the strips would have hobo symbols on them or something. I think the idea here is interaction. You could have sensors that trigger the lights and the fans. People would need to 'solve' how to activate the fire before 'solving' the fire itself. It's kind of a neat idea but I doubt I'll ever use it.

However, this idea for a puzzle mechanic is really cool and I really like it. I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel called "Weird or What?" and they were talking about the Voynich Manuscript and how easy it would be to create as a hoax by using a system that creates semi-random words and letter orderings. To achieve it you would draw your symbols/syllables out on a large grid and then move a "grill" with randomly cut holes in it to create words. Leaving blanks on the grid creates words of different lengths and adds spaces. The puzzle idea would be sort of the opposite. You'd first solve a puzzle on where to cut the holes in your grill. That initial puzzle could be built into the larger grid. Then you'd position your grill over the grid to pick out solve coding. Coding could be in letter or images or a mix. How about this: Teams get the grill and a large grid, the grill has letters and images on it that match a location on the grid, when placed on that location on the grid, the surrounding letters and images on the grid would tell the teams where to cut the holes in their grill, they'd then have to figure out how to navigate the grid with the grill for the rest of the solve. As I mentioned in the drawing, there is a lot of opportunity for solve layering with this mechanic.

So, yeah, I'm not good at writing the puzzle part of the puzzle but I think I have some pretty good ideas for puzzle mechanics that puzzlier people than myself could really run with.

My Triumphs, My Mistakes

Time to face facts. Well, really facts were faced days or weeks ago but for the sake of this blogpost, let's pretend like I'm facing facts today. Last weekend I finally broke down and told my friend, for whom I'm making the 5x5 box, that I was making it, failing at making it and that he wouldn't be getting it for his wedding. That took some weight off of me, especially because now I can share this blog and talk to other people about this no longer secret project.

Last weekend I made a big push. I went looking for supplies and I made do with what I could find. I salvaged some wire from old Ghost Patrol projects, which wasn't ideal to begin with, and I soldered that to the LCD I had to the pins I thought I'd need. I went down to The Shack and looked for header pins but they didn't even know what I was talking about. I also looked for some 5.7 ohm resistors so I could run the LCD backlight. I didn't know enough about resistors to find what I was looking for and neither did the sales people there. You know, it rarely occurs to me to use my phone to Google useful information in the moment. Anyway, the only thing I did find that I needed was a 10k potentiometer. Then I headed to the art supply store to look for an acceptable box or box substitute. I figured that I could at least find something acceptable to prototype on. I ended up buying a wooden box frame that people apparently use to paint. We used them to make the Ouija boards for Ghost Patrol and they worked great.

Here's what happened: I did some awful, awful soldering on the LCD. I used a super crappy Dremel rip off to try to drill and cut appropriate size holes in my wood box. It didn't work. I made one hole too close to the edge. I wrecked tons of bits on that awful machine and finally pretty much wrecked the machine itself. Wrong tool for the job. No doubt. I couldn't get the LCD to work at all. Not at all.

Here's what I learned: First, I remembered that power tools can be rented from the Berkeley Public Library. I could be using the right tools for the job. I also realized that if I wanted to really make this work, I had to go about it properly from the very beginning.

I went on SparkFun and ordered two new LCDs (I plan to make more boxes so...) and some header pins. I soldered the header pins to the LCDs. I also ordered some small breadboards but they only have 17 pins and the LCDs have 16 so I'll have to use them for something else as I'd really like to have the LCD, the potentiometer and the Polulu all on the same breadboard. Today I had my first modicum of success. I mounted one of my pinned up LCDs to the breadboard, used the tutorial I posted previously and voila, text!

I'm totally stoked just to have this minor success. I've ordered a beautiful wood box from a seller on Etsy and it should be here on Tuesday. I've devised, in my mind, an awesome self-latching system that requires no electrical bits to operate and can be opened just by sliding a credit card between the lid and the box. If I can make that work, that'll be super cool.

So I'm definitely going to keep working on this project until it reaches fruition. I had just about given up but now I have confidence I can eventually accomplish this and move on to another cool puzzle/project box idea.

You're Gonna Need This...

http://sites.google.com/site/mechatronicsguy/arduinocheatsheet

Okay, it's been a long time since I've updated this blog. The reason? Almost nothing interesting has happened in the world of me making things. I recently took up the Ukulele and that has been filling all of my creative outlet hours. But the problem is that I've made very little progress on the 5x5 Box. I tried to get the LCD display going a few weekends ago, to no avail. I am buying a proper box this week and hope to cut/drill all the hole I'll need in it on Saturday. Sunday will be a day filled with curses. Sunday I will try to get the box in as near of working order as possible. In order to do this, I am having to open myself up to the idea of de-scoping and re-scoping some of my ideas.

For instance:

• If I can't get the LCD to display properly, I may need to consider finding a way to use turning LEDs on and off the provide feedback.
• If I can't get the Arduino sketch I've worked on to create random sets, I may need to just program a set.
• If I can't get the Polulu to work, I may need to just put in an On/Off switch.
• If I can't get the servo idea to work, I may need to just find a way to tell the user how to open a combination lock or something, to retrieve their prize.
• If I can't get my sketch to work the way I want it to, I may need to create a puzzle to overlay on or include with the box. (That, actually, is a really good idea for a future puzzle box. It could have an overlay with an input on it. The input would tell the Arduino what sketch to run. Different overlays could run different sketches? I'll have to think on this more.)

So there are lots of options I'm willing to explore to deliver something that at least looks cool. I know that I won't be so willing to let go, though. If this doesn't work out exactly as I'd like, I could easily see a Mark 2 model coming in the future.