#adventurebox

Title: Adventure Box - Doors Of Destination (Watery Floor) 

Five friends find themselves going through doors that to random places. What’s inside that door with question marks? 

Hello Internet!

It has been a long time since we have spoken about my project, so I have much to tell you!  The lack of updates is in part due to the physical end of the project winding down, and the marketing/branding end of the project starting up.  I have been hard at work with my co-conspirators on the project logo, website, artwork, and of  course toys.  One significant change is that we have finally picked a name for the box.  This first iteration shall be called Adventure Box!  That said I have been continuing to improve the insides of the box, and those improvements will be the focus of this post.

My efforts have been mostly concerned with two things in the latest rounds of changes.  One was the effort to simply clean the box up and make the connections more permanent.  I cut up the LED strips in the top and glued and soldered them flat on the bottom of the box, rather than sticking up on the sides as before.  I also laser cut a slot for the LCD screen and made some custom wiring that runs along the edges of the box giving the front panel a much cleaner look.  I also did this for some components within, giving the whole thing a much needed cleanup.

Secondly I was unhappy with the reliability of the detection.  I previously had one reader at the bottom of the capsule chute.  This worked very well for toys that allowed gravity to take over and bring the rfid chip to the bottom of the capsule.  But since many of the toys will not be made by myself, I really didn't want to limit the creativity of other makers to by having that be a requirement.  So I added two more readers on each side to add to the range and coverage.  However I soon discovered that readers in proximity interfere with each other and make nothing work whatsoever.  So after a little bit of despair, I realized that quickly turning each reader on and off in sequence, such that only one reader was on at a time, I could get full coverage with the readers very close to each other.  This has proven to be a much more flexible system than the previous one reader setup.

As always I have included some pictures below and one of our new Adventure Box logo!  And you can hear me talk about the project in my new video on youtube here.

Oh and lastly the project officially has its own site at www.adventureboxproject.com and this blog will be migrating there before long.  So check it out!