The Rusty Rocket

For a couple of years now, I have been experiementing with various ideas for solo games. Some have been overly complicated, some overly simple but every so often, an idea seems to hit the mark.  I like the idea of a 3D printable solo game and so I've been developing Step Count (working title). It's a travel puzzle game that can be easily 3D printed without any supports and played straight away. The idea uses randomisation, which is always good to factor into games, and forces the player to think ahead in order to complete the game. Have a watch of this short video to learn the simple rules of Step Count. If you would like to print out your own, the STL files can be downloaded here .

Towards the end of last year, I have been developing software to help me manage a radio station. The last update I posted was in December and it can be found here . I have since been developing the software further over the last couple of months and I now have it how I like it. It even allows me to host my radio station online with scheduled sets. I want to experiment with live sets too and I've been looking around for the best way to do this. After a great deal of searching, I'm going to use Mixcloud as this seems to be reasonably priced and handles all the copyrite licencing and royalties. But before I can even start live streaming, I first need a studio. I set about repurposing old projects I have in the workshop and starting assembling a little recording studio, complete with sound proofing sponge tiles that recently fell off the roof from the cinema at the bottom of the garden. The studio booth, made from parts of an old wardrobe was rather narrow, so installing my BT pa...

 This is part 2 of the " Getting AI to build a side hustle " project. Part 1 can be found here . After getting to know my interests, Gemini AI came up with a couple of really good suggestions on how to make a little bit of money on the side. The option I have decided to go with is the building of a doodle booth. A doodle booth, for those who don't know (and I was one of them until I started on this project) is a tabletop stand that mimics one of those passport photobooths. The idea is that the artist sits on one side and draws someone on the other whilst peering through a window. The finished drawing it usually fed through a slot at the front, in keeping with the whole photobooth feel. Now, I like to build things in the workshop and I had an old wooden stand I had built for an event. This saved me a great deal of time when building the framework of the drawing booth and the video below shows the progress I have made so far. The booth is all made from salvaged wood and oth...

I've seen projects like this before, I even gave it a little go a few years ago myself, where AI guides you in setting up a side hustle to help bring in a little bit of extra money alongside your day job. Now that AI systems are much more sophisticated compared to a couple of years ago, can this experiment be repeated with more favourable results? My preferred AI at the moment is Google's Gemini and so I set about working with it to first formulate an idea. My requirements were as follows: Must incorporate one or more of my interests Allow me to meet new people Helps me learn or improve on a skill (not a priority but a nice thing to have) I then worked with Gemini further to help it understand my hobbies and what I enjoyed doing. I was wanting to steer it away from any digital-based solution as I wanted to see where a more analogue route would take me and it actually came up with a couple of really interesting suggestions. The first was to sell vintage board game pieces. The i...

If you look back through this blog and through the videos on my YouTube channel, you'll come across many projects involving my interest in pirate radio and hacking little FM transmitters . My favourite project being this one here , that involves the BBC Microbit and got featured in a Microbit magazine. These were all purely for experimental purposes, you understand. Since those posts were written, I've also been looking at creating an online radio station and experiemented a bit with Number Station  in the past, where every Sunday I would hop online and scan the airwaves for shortwave transmissions and overlay them on top of an ambient backing track. This taught me a great deal about the process of getting a station online. I started looking around for software that would allow me to schedule shows but everything came at a price and the free solutions out there were either too complicated for my needs or didn't have what I wanted. So I'm writing my own. This project is...

I have been upgrading my Ziggy handheld prop from Quantum leap . This time I've been using ChatGPT to allow my to have a conversation with Ziggy. In my previous post here , (you can still download the free files to 3D print your own by the way) I got the prop lighting up and I then went on to use Amazon Alexa Blueprints to build trigger words and phrases to allow the handheld to respond. It worked but it wasn't the best. I've been trying to integrate ChatGPT into the project to allow me to communicate with Ziggy's handlink in a better way. Through the use of a cheap mini mixing desk thingy I got free from Wish years agao (after collecting enough points), I've also been able to recreate Ziggy's floaty, echoey voice too. Take a look at the video below to see it in action and to learn more about the build. The video also features another of my older builds. A few years ago now I worked on building my own telephone network that repurposed decommissioned BT publ...