Tag: Toys

Castles

Those of you that know me will already know I have two young boys (and a third imminent), for those that don’t well, you do now. As a small, fun, afternoon project with some cardboard I recently built a castle with the eldest to replace the one that got wet that he built at school.

Which got me to thinking…

I have Inkscape. I have access to a Makerspace. It has a laser… to the drawing board.

After about a week of real time passing (and about 8hrs playing in Inkscape) I had design version 2.0 of my castle (if we assume that the cardboard was version 1.0).

It’s not bad, it needs a few tweaks and stuff but it came out quite well. A few hours with a pot of glue and a Stanley Knife for minor corrections (mostly tight fighting pegs) and it was all done.

The kids love it, and you can all have a look at some of the pictures of it below.

Now, will I have time to do a version 3.0? I think it needs a redesign from the ground up to be bigger 🙂

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A boy and his castle
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I even built little supports for the battlements
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It’s a ‘LAZ’R’
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45 minutes to cut 3 sheets of A3
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Towers and supports – roughly Lego Minifigure sizes
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The Gatehouse could be modified to have a drawbridge as well as a portcullis
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A whole bag of bits to assemble
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Hmmmm very church-esque

Bedside lighting

I am new to the whole hacking, making, playing, soldering and generally hands-on construction and so my time at the hackspace is always a steep learning curve.

One of the projects that I have been tinkering with was to take a couple of old, well toys really – but toys for me as an adult, and make them into something new. What i decided to do was build a bedside light with two switches, some ultra-bright LEDs and a blue LED. The toys were a Doctor (model of David Tennant’s doctor) and a TARDIS safe (that had stopped functioning).

I basically ripped the electronic guts out including the microchip board, added a bit of lego and Sugru’d LEGO in the TARDIS and to David’s feet so he would stand upright, and then made a board for the 5 lights in the doorway. A little tinkering with a drill got me the holes for two switches, a push button for the decorative lights and a two stage switch for the main ultra-brights, and we were done.

I have re-used something and made a useful light for my bedside. It is hardly on the same scale as the hacked sensors that have appeared on this blog in the last week, but I am still moderately pleased with the result.