All the Makerfaire type events have their own “feel”, Derby is held in a listed silk mill and gets a good foot-fall. Derby holds on to a good mixture of craft and electronics, having screen printing, weaving, knitting and much more next to the microprocessors. Sticker Critter and the Cognitive

It was a pleasure to exhibit at Liverpool MakeFest last weekend. We were made to feel very welcome and the venue was amazing. The MakeFest took over the central library in Liverpool. The library has ultra modern architecture with floating walkways in the sky and an amazing roof terrace overlooking

Over the weekend it was great to get so much positive feedback from visitors and fellow makers! Finally we settled on Sticker Critter as the name of our little creation, and that is what the project will be renamed at future showings.

Now that I have a 3D printer and am better at CAD I can draw things up and print them. This is what I have done for a bracket to hold the micro switch to the millimetre above the end of the platform. The bracket has to reach over the

We looked on eBay for fur for the creature. We then toured local fabric and craft shops. Then we found this long orange fur. It really struck us this would catch peoples attention as they walked by. So we bought it. Our creation all of a sudden is looking nearly

Since the platform idea evolved, I’ve struggled with many ideas of how to hold the paper down into place when the visitor closes the drawer. It is essential the picture is held in EXACTLY the correct place on the platform and that the closing of the drawer does not

I printed a base for the Arduino Uno as shown above, and screwed it into the box. It was then rigged up to animate the eyes. I linked the Uno to the RPi via I2C so that the RPi could command the eyes to do sequences as a show controller.

Time to let on with our idea. The plain box as a scanner is plain boring, so we decided to give it a personality. To do this we were thinking of Moshi monsters. The box is getting a face on the front, the eyes are made from two cat food

We ended up at the craft shops looking at options. As stated earlier post, the outside need some sort of finish, this foam sheet craft material makes it really tidy. Also note that the display has moved down, We have an idea now for turning this uninteresting box into something

Here you can see things have moved on with the main scanner. The whole thing is undercoated, mainly to seal it. I’m not prepping this one like other projects as I don’t have the luxury of time. I enjoyed sanding, down and painting, sanding, painting, sanding on the

I’ve got the LCD screen though the post, just in time. Rigged it up tonight, driving it from the RPi 3 using Windows IoT. Worked first time. I ported over my library from .NET Microframework, had to make some changes to accommodate the way the Win IoT stuff works,

Here is the very cheap camera (only a few quid), screwed to a bit of skirting board. Then fitting it for height in the box. Trying to ensure the focus is good and position is good. This is critical to success, you can’t bodge things like physics and lenses.

The clock is ticking, a month to go, that is weeks now. Here you see the design starting to take shape. Playing with the rack slides, my first idea of mounting them under the platform just didn’t seem like a good plan as they have most strength in the