Pulling ideas together and buying materials

More software writing. The stickers that the visitors will be given depending on a win or loose need to be printed. I proved the concept that I could print to the thermal printer using serial communications from the Netduino earlier in the project. Now time to do it for real. I looked up the EPL language documentation that the thermal printer uses, something I'm familiar with already. The plan is to store the label format as stored layouts on the printer. These will be loaded to the printer when the project is powered up. Then when a print is required, the form can be called in a few short commands, making it quick and less prone to communication problems, due to the short message length.

I did a rough design and wrote the C# code required for the form formats to be stored on the SD card and loaded to the printer on start up. Also the code to allow that format to be called up when needed and printed, passing variables to the form if required. The variable is needed if I end up printing the number the visitor guessed to the sticker, which would be neat to do so as to prove no trickery over the printing element of the project.

I went on ebay and ordered what I hope will be the final bits for the project, the components seem a bit too cheap to be real, but hopefully will work well enough for what I'm up to.
I'm going to try the MAX7221 led display driver to start with to drive the LED matrix if I can manage it. Also ordered a few 8 bit bit shifter chips, to replace the 4097bit shifter I'm using to drive the LCD display. The display is bit banging and is too slow for my liking. The other issue is that I need to add these MAX chips to the SPI bus, however with the way the current arrangement is, it doesn't use the native SPI functionality built into the Netdunio. If I move it over to using SPI natively I can can then put multiple devices on the SPI bus and drive it at 10MHz allowing for some speedy LCD driving. - in theory... watch this space haha.

I think I have to go ahead any buy the MDF to build the project enclosure very soon too. I have to start that build as I'm not good at wood work, and want to not have to make it under pressure of time. Also for what I plan it would be good to get a good paint finish which also takes time.
I still have the table layout to think about. Laminated cards explaining the project elements. I have decided that keeping the project visible in a clear acrylic case is too difficult for me to build, so instead I'll breadboard some elements of the design for people to play with on the table, outside of the project.

I'm a bit nervous of the sensor board failing so might build a spare and show the spare? - not certain right now!