Risk Game Board

I've made quite a few cork-board maps, in fact it probably makes up the majority of my machine's output.

So when me and a friend got talking about how long it was since we'd played Risk, I decided to put my expertise to use and cut my own Risk board out of cork.

For those who haven't heard of it 'Risk' (or 'Stratego') is a world domination board game, you have several units and use them to protect your own territories and attack others, the outcomes of these battles are decided by dice rolls. The goal is to expand your empire until you have defeated all the other players

I did a fair bit of research about all the different versions, and the standard game size, then began drawing up the parts as usual.

The pieces come out of the machine like this, I put vinyl over the areas where the text was engraved so that I could paint the letters. The machine cuts a stencil as it's engraving, although not perfect I've had quite good success with this technique before, but never with such small text.

To finish the pieces, I stencil the letters in black, add on any islands with stiff wire, and then stain the whole continent its proper colour. I think I would have preferred them left unstained, but once I'd done one I had to do the others as well.

I could have left it there and gone out and bought the other parts, but I got the idea in my head to make my own dice.

I have some scavenged door panels lying around that appeared to be made of solid mahogany, so I cut a strip off and began by machining a flat on both sides.

Once it was flat and laminar I measured it then had my mill cut out several perfect cubes.

This is my first attempt at multi sided machining, the main problem of which is lining your pieces up when you flip them over.
Seeing as I had 5 dice each with 6 sides I needed a way to perfectly line up each side and relatively quickly.

I decided to machine a hole the exact size of the dice, this way I just have to push each blank die into the slot and hit go, then I just switch to a new die nice and quickly and go again.

It still took me over an hour to do all the dice, but once they were finished I was really happy with them.

All that was left was to print out some cards, get some pieces. I'm using map pins, which I think is a significant improvement over the original because you're not always knocking your army over. I managed to find three different types of coloured pins to use as the 1, 5 and 10 units. But because they don't take up as much space you could easily just use lots of ones.

The cards were a rush job, thrown together with google images in InDesign. I would have liked to mill some lino prints and stamp the cards that way, but I doubt I'll get round to it now.

The actual game progressed as it always does, I overreach, then am quickly crushed into a small corner, where I hide while the other two duke it out. (I'm yellow, both figuratively and literally)

Overall I think it was a pretty successful game, the only complaint was that it was a bit awkward fishing around in the box of pins to find the right one, they asked for a subdivided box, but I though a scrap of cork on which you could organise your units would work just as well.

Next I fancy having a go at a settlers of Catan game, but whipping out all my old Warhammer scenery stuff to make the board.

Mini Japanese Bridge

This was a short project I did last summer.

My sister was putting together a Japanese inspired garden and asked me to build a small bridge to cross the pond we had just put in.

There are several Japanese styled bridges, but in such a small space I decided to build a small bridge with a slight curve to it

Like all good projects, it begins with a pile of raw wood.

These pegs will aid with the bending

Two timbers are laminated between 3 pegs

Meanwhile, I cut up and chamfer the edges of some planks

The two curved timbers are joined with baseplates

The base is staked into place and the planks start going on

Getting the gaps even

I'm using weather proof screws, so hopefully it'll last

The finished bridge

Hopefully it'll weather into the landscape after a while

Zippo Burglar Alarm

This is another old project that I originally posted over at Instructables. If you want to have a go at making one, check out the original posts.

... And this piece represents society's self destructive nature

This idea began with my obsession with Zippo lighters, and I suppose that all started with a childish fascination with fire (I still list burning things as one of my hobbies). 
But now it's more than that, I love the Zippo design because of it's simplicity, a wick petrol burner, the satisfying click of the cam hinge, the easily replaceable parts, rugged metal construction, all come together in a neat pocketable enclosure.
It's got ties with the army, it's a hollywood icon, not mention that they're just plain cool.

I used to carry a zippo all the time, but now it lives in my toolbox. These days my love of Zippos manifests itself as seeing what gadgets I can cram into them, and occasionally setting my trousers on fire.
Which brings us back to the Zippo burglar alarm.

A quick bit of googling set me up with the simple electronics knowledge I'd need to make an infra red proximity sensor, I mocked one up using a PicAxe chip to do the heavy lifting.

 | Warning! Poorly Explained Tech Stuff | 

A basic IR proximity sensor works by shining an IR LED at a receiver whose resistance will change depending on how much IR light is hitting it.

You can place the emitter and receiver on opposite sides of what you are trying to detect, but it is easier and more compact to use reflected light. I.E the led (clear part at top of image) sends out it's beam , if an object is with 20cm the light will reflect off of this object back to the sensor (black bit just to right of led) and trigger it.

For my project I'm actually using a digital sensor. The difference being that it will only trigger when it receives a very specific coded signal from the the LED.

This is much more secure and isn't subject to ambient light or other interference.

Generating the specific code is done by my chip. Then, when the sensor is set off, my chip will trigger the red LED and the piezo transducer. These gold discs are nice simple ways of making annoying noises (think pre-polyphonic ringtones).

The push button is just there to select the various different program modes I put on the chip.

 | Warning! Poorly Explained Tech Stuff | 

So now that my circuit was working on that breadboard the task would be squeezing it into such a small space.


First job was to plan out my circuit in extravagant, illustrated fashion.

Mock up of the main board

This battery board, occupies the Zippo lid.

Constructing the actual boards took an incredibly long time. One of the main problems being trying to insulate everything. Zippo cases are made of brass so I was afraid of shorts. I was insulating everything as I went along with clear epoxy, which was fine until I tested the circuit and it didn't work.

After a few hours with a multi-meter I found a short buried under a mass of epoxy where I had glued two boards together. After deciding that chipping away the epoxy would just cause more damage I decided to sever the connection and re-route it with some wire.

The battery board was mainly a pain just trying to fit 3 button cells under it and cram it into the lid.



I wanted to retain the classic snap action of the Zippo hinge and remaking it seemed tricky, so I opted to just hack up the insert.

Less one chimney.

Shorten significantly and relocate the spring.


I had all the pieces, now I just had to smoosh them together.

Piezos normally have special enclosures to increase volume. That would have taken too much space so I just expoxied it to the side of the case, which improved the output significantly.

I insert the main board, so that the LED pokes through this convenient hole.

Side note, those markings on the base of the Zippo indicate the year it was made. Turns out this one (£5 off eBay) was from 1984. If I'd known that I wouldn't have defaced it. 

The smaller board screws into the lid (securing the batteries) and what's left of the Zippo insert push fits to keep the rest of the guts in place.
I did make a little sleeve for the IR LED but it has a 30º beam angle so only reflected light will set off the sensor.   

You can see it working in this old video*

I made this as part of the Instructables.com gift exchange, so I no longer have the original. But now that I've got my CNC mill and can make nice neat circuit boards, I've added remaking this to my to do list, along with a million other 'zippo gadgets' .

R/C Zippo
Camera Zippo
Torch Zippo - Actually working on this.
MP3 Zippo
Infinity Mirror Zippo
Hermit Crab Zippo
Laser Pattern Zippo
USB Card Reader Zippo


Maybe someday I'll get around to building some of them.



* Please forgive the quality, I still haven't gotten the hang of making good videos but this one still makes me cringe watching.

Milling PCBs and Circuit Board Evolution

I've been dabbling in electronics for years. Most of the time this involves starting on a breadboard and then transferring your finished circuit onto stripboard.

More often than not I'm trying to squeeze far too much stuff into a tiny space, for example in my Zippo Burglar Alarm.
Which means that the resulting boards are an awful mess of wires and massive solder lumps.

For this post I'm going to use my Hellboy Corpse Locator light board as an example, because it's been through a fair few revisions.
It's a fairly simple piece, I needed a board to fit under the dial of my corpse locator prop, and make the dome light up red. A simple task electronically, but mechanically it's difficult to get everything to fit.

I started by using a tank cutter to cut disks out of stripboard.

I was surprised by how well this worked, it made it easier, not having to shape each board by hand, but each one still took about 10 minutes.

I wanted to use surface mount LEDs, they were on the copper side, meaning everything else was on the reverse side. Which left me trying to find a way to create a second battery contact on the reverse side of the board.

The most reliable solution I could come up with was stitching a grid with copper wire.

Again, at the time, I was proud of my little inovation, conductive paint had too much resistance, glueing foil to the board had been problematic, this wasn't perfect (some wide copper tape would have been good) but working with materials at hand it did the job.

Once everything else was attached, the board looked like this. 

After making about 10 of these I managed to get them quite neat. But it was very labour intensive, each one probably took over 3 hours of quite fiddly work. 

And due to the nature of cutting out the boards, each one was slightly different, in where the LEDs went and where the wires were routed.

Many months later, the dawn of my CNC machine, and obviously one of the first things I wanted to have a go at was milling PCBs. I drew up the design in Vectorworks (EagleCAD* is the proper tool) and bought some copper clad board and was very easily able to cut out a simple PCB.

Milled PCBs are different to proper manufactured PCBs, you start with a solid layer of copper and simply mill away 'isolation paths' to create your tracks.

The one on the left is my very first attempt, I just used a cheap V bit that I had and the result was some very rough looking paths, but an entirely functional board.
My second attempt (using a 0.8mm ball nose) was much neater, but after my PCB milling bits arrived from China I was able to cut really neat boards. These are 0.2mm isolation paths, so potentially I can mill some really complex boards with lots of tiny surface mount parts.

Designing for CNC always affects your design. For example I wanted to take advantage of the fact that the copper layer could act as my other battery contact (no more stitching) so that meant the board was flipped and everything was soldered on the back. 

This also meant I had to switch to normal 3mm LEDs and mount them upside down (poking through the board) I originally use smt LEDs to keep the board thin, but the limiting factor is always the battery thickness so this works out fine, and the 3mm leds are brighter.

The boards look really cool now, very neat and I can do cool stuff like engrave labels and my logo. But the main thing that makes these far better than their predecessors is the time they take to produce. Each one probably takes about 20 minutes of milling, because it requires several tool changes. But then only about 10 minutes of soldering and it's finished.

Also each one is identical, which means I can add matching screw holes to my plastic corpse locator parts. rather than the tedious task of lining up and drilling each individual part to match it's specific board.



* Eagle is a program which allows you to draw up circuit diagrams, as well as layout circuit board designs for sending off to have fabricated. With the proper add on you can also create Gcode to send to a CNC machine. It sounds like a fantastic tool, but when I had a go there was a lot to learn and, for such a simple circuit, with mostly through hole components it was just slowing me down.

CNC Mill Build - Enclosure

After finally getting the mill running it became obvious that I was nowhere near done.

Firstly, in their current position the electronics didn't give the machine enough room to move freely, so they would have to be relocated.

Also my current method of using drawing pins to hold down material wasn't going to be a permanent solution.


The first problem is easily fixable, I collected a bunch of connectors, then got out my calipers, cracked open Vectorworks* and began designing an enclosure. 
I cut all the pieces out of 3mm MDF and when assembled they looked like this.

From the front all you see is the name and power switch.

One side features a cut out for a fan.

The back has all the connections, A/C power in, parallel signals from the computer and five molex connectors, one for each motor and one for the limit switches.


I designed the box to be low profile so it would fit in the sliding drawer under my desk.

Here it's nice and out of the way but easily accessible if I need to fiddle with it.

Under the hood, you can see the power supply takes up most of the space. Main power is routed through the illuminated switch at the front. The 24V supply then gives power to the motors, it also drives a tiny 5V regulator for the logic power supply and the motor is supplied by a slightly larger 12V regulator (you can see it glued to wall on the right)

I found some little fuse holders and intend to put a small fuse in after the switch. There's also room at the back for adding more connections, for things like spindle control and an emergency stop button.



Being the first real thing I've made with my machine this taught me a lot. Firstly my machine is pretty damn accurate. 
The pieces just fit, I was expecting to have to sand things, but they actually fit great and I measured the pieces to be well within 0.2mm of what I intended, that's nowhere near what some CNC machines can achieve but with MDF it's more accuracy than I'll ever need.

Another thing to note is, always measure your material. I should have remembered this from when I designed stuff for laser cutting, but my 3mm MDF turned out to be 3.2mm, so my box joints aren't quite flush.

A lot of time designing this was spent on the engraving. The majority of fonts these days are solid blocks, you can turn them into outlines with a vector program, but the best results are achieved from single line fonts. You can see that the axis labels I engraved on the back of the box are a bit chunky, I didn't like that so I spent a while manually creating single line letters for my title font.

This was tedious but I'm happy with how the final thing came out.

The M⁶ for short

I'd like to make the lettering black so it pops more, but I can't think of a good way to do this, hand painting would be tricky, and detract from the nice clean finish.

The easiest solution is to mill all the way through a material and place black behind it.

I also installed a hold down table. Essentially this just involved sinking a bunch of t-nuts into the back of my board in a grid. I now have a grid of points where I can bolt things down to the table.

Above you can see me marking out holes, and a couple of nuts ready to insert.
The grid is now finished, I'll snap a proper picture next time I'm using it.

I've actually found that for most materials  double sided tape is a better solution, most of the time the clamping bolts just get in the way.


I've been happy with this set up for the past few weeks, I've had a go at milling a phone dock, pcbs, and at the moment I'm milling maps out of cork. :D

One thing I haven't really tried is milling plastic, I've got some chunks of acrylic on the way so that's next on my to do list.


*Vectorworks is my CAD program of choice, mainly because it's what I used during my architecture degree. However it seems that I'm in the minority using this program. Most people use AutoCad or SketchUp, or for simple 2D work, Inkscape.
Supposedly AutoCad was designed by engineers and Vectorworks by architects.
I've got a copy of Illustrator, but most of the time I get frustrated with the alien pen tool, give up and switch back to Vectorworks. 

CNC Mill Build - It Works!

Very quick update, I did finally sort out my electronics problem and was able to mill my first piece.

Behold the power of my machine:

When I shot this video my setup looked like this.

Already I'm not happy with it, the electronics are too close and don't allow the wires enough room so I can't use the full length of the Y axis, also they really need to be covered. 

I'm currently holding work down using push pins, not a great solution.
Already working on changing all that. But for now it works !



See my next stage of improvements here.

CNC Mill Build - eLectronics

The last post saw me putting the finishing touches to my machine build, by adding the belts. Unfortunately that's the easy part over, now I'm tackling electronics.


There are two stages to controlling a CNC machine. The first is a controller which will take a Gcode file* and turn it into step and direction pulses that tell each motor when to turn.
The second is a motor driver which takes these low voltage data signals and sends high power signals to actually drive the motor.

For the driver (the second part) I'm using pololu a4988 drivers along with a stepper shield. After finally sourcing all the parts this is what they look like.

The driver is quite small, you can see one of them in the top left. The rest is just capacitors, to even out power, and connectors, to attach all the motors.

This board is a 'sheild' which is intended to be used with an arduino. You can use an arduino as your controller, but I wanted to use a PC because it gives me more control and a  nice graphical interface.

Which means I had to build a separate board to make it so the signals to and from this shield could be sent via a parallel cable.

This is what I put together. Again not much going on here, the parallel cable is broken out and the signals sent to the right sockets (so they match up when the shield is plugged in on top).

There is also a 5v regulator to supply the logic voltage and all the connections are optically isolated. This means that the CNC motors and the computer aren't physically connected, this means any noise caused by the motors won't affect the computer.

Bart Dring, of Buildlog.net designed this board which does exactly what I want. But he doesn't sell them anymore. So what I did was buy the arduino version (also designed by Bart, but now made by Reactive Substance) and adding in the missing components so that it was functionally the same. It probably would have been easier to just build the whole thing myself from Bart's schematic. But the black boards help with heat dissipation  as well as matching the drivers I bought, and looking badass.
Edit: of course now that the M6 is finished, I could design a new PCB with everything on and mill it on my machine, how ever I'm unlikely to ever get round to this.

Now the shield carrying the stepper drivers, just plugs in on top. Each one of those drivers (now with large blue heat sinks on) controls one of the motors, each motor has 4 wires.

The large silver box off to the left is the 24V power supply, this is the power that is used to drive the motors, the 5V logic is supplied by a small regulator I put on the lower board.


That's most of the hardware set up, the other end is an old PC running Ubuntu, I'm using LinuxCNC to control my machine, it's a very powerful tool (probably overkill for this little thing) but nice all the same.

What came next was lots or testing tinkering and , to be honest, swearing as I tried to figure out why it wouldn't work.

(figured it out eventually WooHoo!)




*Gcode is the end result of designing on a computer, it's composed of simple lines of text that instruct the machine where to go using an absolute positioning system. E.g. g0 x10 y10 would tell the machine to move to that co-ordinate (g0 is just max speed) so kind of like playing Battleships.

Cardboard Boba Bucket - Range Finder

We're getting very close to the end of all my old progress pictures. I did get the helmet down the other day intending to do some more painting, but gave up before I'd even started, it's just so tedious, marking out all the shapes.




Originally Posted 27-Jul-2009


Next up is the rangefinder housing. If I remember correctly this part isn't detailed in either of Antman's threads 
(which I have been following fairly closely) So I'll try to show a bit more detail.

First of all print out a set of WoF's templates from the gallery.

I'm using 1mm thick mattboard (scavenged from an old sketch book)
So I then began to mark the various places I would have to trim 1mm off of to keep the correct shape.

The dotted lines show where I'm going to angle both edges at the corner rather than just trim one of them.

Here are the pieces cut out.

I began to angle some of the pieces with a knife and sandpaper. I also drilled out the LED holes using a 5mm wood bit.

Then I just began assembling all the pieces.

I had to be careful, trying to make sure the sides were square.

One of the pieces didn't quite fit, overtrimmed, but I'll sort that out later

After letting it dry a while I decided to paper mache' the inside, to cover the small cracks and strengthen it a bit.

Then I brought out my circuit and did a test fit, bending the LEDs into roughly the correct place.

The circuit fits easily into the housing. The only problem is that it infringes on the lens' space more than I would like. 
But I can't be bothered to move all the stuff onto a smaller board.