A compilation of some side-project toys I’ve made.
Automated Glockenspiel
Sometimes, I like to show off a toy I made leading up to Christmas time in 2022. I posted some information on hackaday, but I always need to google to find the project.
Here is the hackaday link, and it has a video and fuller explanation of the project. But here’s some more media related to the project.
Mounting the solenoids to wood.
First test, fully assembled (Billy Joel, Piano Man).
Second test, solenoid heights adjusted (Billy Joel, Piano Man).
The hacky web interface:
Power Orb Grid
I’ve written some very small mobile apps in the past, but I’ve never published one. I’ve always wanted to. I thought of a board game years ago that I had always wanted to make, but the thought of the days I would need to put into it made me put it off a very long time (8 years or so). A few months ago, I build a machine for local LLM, and it has allowed me to do a lot of experiments, side projects, etc. I decided to put it to work on this game!
This game combines multiple rule types from different board games:
- Per-piece movement specialties and abilities as in chess
- Movement and piece capture as in checkers
- Matching as in candy crush
- Highest-sc0re-wins and intentional game delay to maximize score as in mancala.
I’m not a professional game designer, and so I suspect there’s a lot to nitpick. But it’s my first published app!
It is written in .NET MAUI.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/power-orb-grid/id6809225505
Conway’s Game of Life
I had wanted to write this for a while, and a couple years ago, I knocked it out in an afternoon to see what it’s like to tinker with. I wrote this in Python.
Kids’ Games
For each of my children, I wrote a small game for their interests at the time that I made the games.
The first game is a simple “connect the pipes” game that my oldest had a lot of fun with. She liked moving the red box with a Nintendo controller, seeing an image of a woman holding her nose when the “goo” did not make it to the right place, and getting a little trophy picture at the end of the game.
I made another game for my youngest, who was very interested in the English alphabet, spelling, and reading since about age 2. I made this game for him when he was 3. Each round is a picture, and you have to spell the word correctly to move on (you can type the letters in any order). For each letter you type incorrectly, it plays the “Price is Right” sad trumpet sound. For each word you get right, it plays a “Tah-Dah!” sound before advancing to the next image.
Traffic Light
A friend of the family somehow came to possess a traffic light. I don’t have any videos of this in action, but I cobbled together a gaming framework that I wrote by hand. The “games” were various ways to interact with the lights through an Android application on a phone on the same wifi network. Later, we converted this to run on a joystick to remove the need to power an external networking device.
The first “game” simply runs through the traffic light pattern in order. The second game I wrote is an actual game. The hand controller (a cheap Android phone) had 3 buttons, one for each color of the traffic light. This was used to play “Simon” with the light, where you had to echo back the pattern that it made. I had plans to add a second controller and make a quiz-style buzz-in for use in games with kids, but we “shipped” before I did so.
The source code is on github, and like all of my side projects, this is not an indication of my capabilities in writing clean and robust code 😉
Here’s an image, installed at a campground’s game room.
