In which I put a Haynes “retro game” into my recycling. Annoyingly, they’re currently sold out here but at least you can have a look at what the project was supposed to look like. Amazon and Waterstones do them, but at full price.

I’m not one for following instructions, and I’m rapidly running out of room to store all the projects I make, so one look at the box and the sheer amount of space inside that wasn’t being used, and I decided to downsize it. Given a choice of a jar, can, cereal box, or a plastic bottle, the bottle seemed easiest to use, although that turned out to be a bit of a mistake. See later.

So, step one, lay out the components and work out how they’ll fit. The original kit has a coin slot to start the game, but given the space constraints I changed it to a tactile switch. All it needs to do is send a signal to start the game, so I soldered two legs of it (the other two are essentially duplicates) to the points that would have had the coin detector (two bent bits of wire). Soldered all the rest as per the instruction booklet, having remembered to tin my soldering iron, unlike last time when I apparently made some duff joints.  It was straightforward, although I might have to get one of those third arm things.

Step two, test it. Worked fine straight off, so yay and woo!

Step three, make holes in the bottle to fit the controls through. I had initially planned on cutting a hole for the LED display to sit in, but once I figured that they were bright enough to show through the bottle I changed my mind. However, I’d already cut the hole so I lined up the battery holder with that on the back so there’s an easy way to change the batteries without having to take it all apart.

Making holes in thick plastic is harder than it sounds. I used an awl and scissors. Great mess and wonkiness. I tried my Dremel. Nope. Just melted the plastic and coated the tip. Power drill. This worked the best, but left scuffy bits of plastic hanging off. I got rid of them with some nail clippers (choice of tools limited to what I have) and FINALLY it was ready. In all the hassle, I forgot to take any photos.

Now, I do not have very small hands. Or even small hands. I have giant hands, which although great for spanning more than an octave on a piano, are terrible for fiddly jobs. Still managed to wedge the controls through, and only snapped one tactile switch cap in the process (a success for me).

All that was left to do was to put the caps on the potentiometers that serve as the controls, and then test it in-bottle. There was a squee.

SOME TECH BITS (mostly thanks to google)

If you’re interested, the board has an ATmega8 controller , two shift registers, the LEDs are laid out in a 10 x 12 matrix, and it runs for approximately 10 hours on 3 x AA batteries (4.5v). The linear potentiometers are 10kΩ.

The board also has an unused set of 8 ports, and a 6 pole ISP connection that you could use to reprogram it.

I’ve always been a fan of the Mad Max series, and also of great mean-looking cars. I recently went to Pi Wars, an event where Raspberry Pi computers are used to control robots to complete a number of tasks, and was inspired to make my own. Having not made a Pi powered robot before, I started with a kit from Coretec Robotics, which is the brainchild of Brian Corteil, and sold by Pimoroni.

The kit is so simple to put together (especially if you follow Emma’s instructions here) that it leaves you with a great deal of time to customise the project. Although the kit comes with a front piece to mount a camera on, I don’t have a camera yet so I left it off.

It swiftly became a glue gun frenzy after I’d made the robot chassis itself. Wooden barbeque skewers were my starting block, and then I glued plant markers on to make the sides. I used non slip matting for the “netting”, and a power brick from Poundland to run the pi and motors off. It was fun making fimo skulls and bones, which I threaded on to some strips cut off a chamois leather, and then used the rest of the chamois to make a dress for the doll.

Duffed everything up a bit with some matt black paint and some bronze plasticote, and then it was ready to roll.

To make your own, you’ll need a pound shop visit for Things To Glue On, a Raspberry Pi Zero W (wireless and bluetooth useful for remote controls), a Tiny 4WD kit, and a controller. I used a Rock Candy PS3 controller, as Brian has handily put the code for it on github, but I understand he’s now added blue dot control, which means you can use an existing smartphone or tablet to control it.

I’ll get right out there and say it. I love Eurovision. It’s one of my favourite televisual events of the year (right up there with Tom Hardy reading the cbeebies bedtime story). I decided to mark the occasion by making a visual excitement indicator. The tweets came later.

I wanted to show how excited I was about each song during the contest using bright shiny lights, and LOTS of them. I have been doing a lot of stuff with Flotilla, a bright and cheerful system from Pimoroni that supports up to 8 little modules running off a dock (which has an actual octopus printed on the back). One of those little modules, the Rainbow, is a stick with five lights on that you can change the colour of. Bingo. I would actually put seven of them on the crown, but I am a muppet and cut my cardboard too short, and am skilled in the art of being lazy.

So, in short, there are five light strips running off a dock connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero (a very small £5 computer), which is running a program that changes the amount of lights on each strip depending on what rating I give a song. I used the Dial module (another Flotilla part) to give a rating with. I can turn the dial to any of 1023 positions (yeah, I can’t tell, which is why the five lights around the edge come in useful) and a line of code takes this and makes it into an “out of five” rating. I can see the rating out of five light up on the dial, which tells me that (hopefully) the light strips are displaying that rating. As a nod to the rainbow glitter joy that is Eurovision, I chose a rainbow light pattern to cycle through, no matter how many lights are on.

In the centre of the crown is a Pimoroni ScrollPhatHD mounted to the second Pi Zero, which is a Pi Zero W (£10 tiny computer). The difference is because I need this one to connect to WiFi, because it is running a program that goes to twitter and looks for the hashtag #Eurovision2017, then takes the text from the tweet and adds it to a queue, which then displays as scrolling text across the ScrollPhat display. The code for the program was written by Glenn Jones and is available on github.

After I fixed up all the tech (with a fair amount of help from Sandy McDonald because I am a Python noob) I mounted it all on scrap cardboard using a combination of tape and M3 plastic screws, and glued everything shiny I could to it. My Christmas decorations box has taken a hammering. A bit of gold paint and glitter later, and we are complete.

Both Pi computers run off batteries, one is using a lithium rechargeable battery, and the other is using a £1 emergency phone charger that I got from Poundland. The batteries are mounted with tape and willpower behind the crown, so the entire rig is wearable and portable.

Have a great Eurovision, whether you’re watching it or not! After the song contest finishes I’ll probably change the hashtag in the program to whatever event I’m at, so look out for it at Maker Faires or RaspberryJams.