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Building a Zoltar Fortune Teller: Part One

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I have always thought the mechanical fortune teller machines where a thing of wonder and I've always wondered about making one myself.  I have previously experimented with making a proof of concept miniature version here but as I had some spare time on my hands I decided to scale up to a full sized cabinet. I started by rescuing an old wardrobe that was skipped and used the panels to put together the bottom half of the cabinet. The intention is to have the bottom half collecting the money and dispensing fortune cards, with the top half house Zoltar in a framed enclosure. I removed the insides of the miniature fortune teller and made sure they still work. A friend of mine gave me a nice 1d coin panel and I made sure that this worked with the existing coin acceptor. The brains of Zoltar runs off a simple Microbit . I love these little programmable boards, they're easy to use as well as cheap and are perfect for projects like this. The code is surprisingly simple too. The Microbi...
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Building a Ziggy Handheld

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Quantum Leap was an obsession of mine during the 90s and I'm still a huge fan of the show even now. As we'll be off to another comic con shortly, I wanted to try and make another prop to take along to the even and the Ziggy handheld that featured in the original series seemed a great ideas as it would be challenging to make but would be easy to carry around with me on the day. The short video below details how it was made with downloadable resources further down this page. The first thing I did was to pull up some reference material in the form of screenshots that clearly shows the handheld. There are also props that you can buy and the images they had on the various websites were a lot more detailed. From here I was able to build a simple model from within Tinkercad . I made sure I included the main blocks of the design and made up the more smaller components. I thought if I could achieve the general look and outline of the handheld, then it will be easily recognisable. I want...
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THE IKEA DRAWER ARCADE CABINET

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My son and I built a mini tabletop arcade machine. As luck would have it, the width of an old wooden IKEA drawer is the same width as a USB NES controller. It’s nice when things fit like that.    The brains of the operation sits a small Raspberry Pi Zero running  Retropie . Even without a knowledge of coding, setting up a retro gaming system using  Retropie  is really simple and I would definitely recommend giving it a try if you’re toying with the idea. Why stop there? Using the same ingredients you can then go on to build more interesting and creative gaming projects. One of my favourites has to be the retro gaming picture frame that I build a couple of years ago for an event.
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