#physical computing

I’d like to introduce the world to the future of clicking: The Honey Clicker. Some of this process was documented in a twitter thread I posted as I made it, but I think it’s time to tell the whole story.

This is a functioning wireless mouse that is only capable of left clicking and which is suspended in honey. I made it for a Slideshare-Roulette party I was hosting. What’s Slideshare-Roulette? It’s where you get a bunch of friends together to take turns presenting slide decks from slideshare.net that they’ve never seen before. I called mine TUD Talks. And of course, my presenters needed a way to advance their slides, so I created the Honey Clicker.

This particular project started its life as a $12 wireless mouse and a google search to check if what I was planning was viable.

I pried it open and started taking the good stuff out of it.

I soldered wires to the negative and positive leads of the battery holder as well as soldering my own arcade button to the left click on the board. For the arcade button, I used plug connectors so I could easily connect or disconnect. I knew the rest of this thing was getting dipped in honey so I wanted to try and keep the button as non-sticky as possible before the big day.

Next up was putting the battery in the honey and testing that the mouse still functioned.

So far so good! I hit a small snag with the rest of the circuit board, though.

It was a little too wide, so I traced the red power lead to a different point on the board, resoldered the wire there and sawed off a chunk of the board.

Now we were in business and it was time for this board to take a dip!

I needed to drill a quick hole in the top to let the button poke out.

After that, everything fit in and remained functional!

That was a few days before the party. After testing, I took the equipment out so I could have fresh batteries for the big day. When TUD Talks came around, the only thing I hadn’t done was properly mount the button, so I got some sand paper and made the hole a snug fit.

The only snag I hit came with the battery. I dropped it in the honey as planned.

But it soon got disconnected and stuck in one of the rounded parts of the plastic. No big loss, though. I just pulled the wires out and attached another battery. I had to drain some honey out to fit everything, but having the extra battery in there wasn’t hurting anything.

Today Juno and I finally got to back to working on our physical arcade game, Circumnavigators!

Today we added an info holder at the top so we can try out different types of instructions, we redid the diffusion to have it fit snugly, and we even started integrating sounds using a board that Juno had been investigating.

We also caused a short circuit and burned out the teensy we use to run the game. Oops. We’ll have to replace that, but we still made a lot of progress!

Juno ordered two plexi circles, one with our credits etched onto it. The idea is to sandwich a paper rules sheet between the two pieces so we can test different ways of explaining the rules.

The info holder is is elevated by a set of stand-offs.

Next task after that was to peel off the old diffusion material so we could mount a new one. The plan was to use thick adhesive tape around the rim as a way to hold the material in place and also to push it far enough away form the rim that it would be out past the LEDs.

We got to enjoy the “naked” look of the game for a bit.

Going around the rim with the thick adhesive tape.

Juno’s partner Gabriel has steady, graphic-designer hands and they helped us immensely by confidently cutting the material.

They also helped us carefully apply the material. The tape was super sticky and it was important that the diffusion go up without wrinkles or pockets. Very careful with this part, but it came out great!

The new setup looks uniform because it is not bending at the top, and the tape creates very hard lines that clearly delineate the game space.

For reference, here’s how it looked at the Smithsonian event two weeks ago.

The last thing we did today was test out all of the work that Juno had done on audio. After some research she decided on the Wav Trigger board as a way to play sound effects for the game. She wrote up code to integrate it, but hadn’t been able to test until today. Luckily it went off without a hitch and our test sounds played without an issue.

And that’s when the problem came. We’re not sure if our existing board was on its way out or if we crossed some wires while setting up the sound player, but we caused a short circuit that took out our teensy. So we’ll need to replace that. We isolated it to that device at least; our LEDs and power supply seem fine.

RIP