Yves already posted a little about my community day project, so I thought I’d fully share it.
Every year, my office has a community day, to celebrate the community and diversity of our very, VERY large team. This year, I volunteered to help with my group’s table for this event, which included creating a light up game.
I decided to do all the parts with the glowforge. I first made the frame/base of the game, which would hold the top panel up, and hide the electronics.
The base was made with 1/8" maple pg ply. The size of the frame was 17"x20", so I could make the top in two panels. Unfortunately, just gluing it together made the frame pretty flimsy, so I also added 1/4" acrylic pg corner supports, to hold it all together. I plan to use this base for future games, so I will most likely add different supports soon.
The top was made with two panels of maple pg and has the word “thanks”, in multiple different languages. They were etched (each took quite a while…roughly an hour and a half for the darkest etch setting). I then primed each panel with grey primer (that’s the primer I had on hand…next time I will definitely get white primer as I think the colors would have popped better with white).
Next, I set up my airbrush and colored each of the words different neon colors.
I then peeled off the protective paper, and here’s the result!
I used the 1/4" acrylic pg to make “lenses” by etching half inch squares with circles that would pressure fit into the holes I made in the top frame.
Unfortunately, I had to actually work in between all this. I asked Yves to help me after work with wiring the electronics and programming the game. What I meant was “help me when I get stuck and make sure I’m not screwing this up” since I’m still new to soldering, wiring and programming. What he heard was “do my wiring and programming”. So, much to my surprise, I ended up coming home to this beautifully organized masterpiece:
Since we were also getting ready for Maker Faire, I was perfectly ok with this! I’ll just need to come up with a new electronics project so I can practice another time.
And here’s the final result!
Pretty easy concept for the game. You hit the red button, it selects one of the 18 languages, and if you guess the language correctly, you get a small prize!
So, I was very excited with how it turned out, and couldn’t wait to see the response for it on community day! Unfortunately, I had the community day dates mixed up, so I was in Cali when this bad boy was in action. From what I heard, though, everyone enjoyed it.
Cheers!
