Weeks of 5/26 and 6/2

This week (6/2) I worked on making a small wooden music box for fun. The box plays a few notes when a button is pressed.

This is the CAD file I made for the box. It's a little janky, but since this was such a small project, I didn't bother with organizing the CAD.

I decided to go with an interlocking design for the sides instead of a T slot. Not for any reason, I just wanted to try making something different.

The box also has a platform in the middle that you can put things on, so they will sit higher than the bottom of the box.

Then I made some simple code that plays a few notes when you press a button. I put this code into a metro mini with a piezo speaker. I might make a proper board to put the circuit inside the box, but this project is a little too unserious to warrant that.

This was the circuit I made. It's very simple, just a button and a Piezo speaker.

Here's what the box looks like completed. The blue square will pop up when the cover is removed.

week of 5/26

I spent last week working on a side project for fun, making a cipher that uses constellations to form glyphs.

This is a picture of what the cipher looks like on paper. Each of the glyphs represents a word, and each vertex; or star; of the glyphs are a letter. The three symbols shown translate to "helo you guys" with only one L because each glyph can only have one of each letter.

This is all the components I use to create each glyph, and I'll go over what each of them does one by one.

The cipher uses a small part of the Centaurus constellation, specifically the 26 stars that make up the Centaur.

This is an illustration of the Constellation, which each of the stars marked. This image is reversed, as if you were looking at the constellation from outside the universe.

Then, I marked all the important stars (the 26 for each letter of the alphabet) and numbered them 1-26. I then separated the star dots from the numbers and laser cut each onto a separate piece of acrylic. When the two pieces are overlapped correctly, the numbers will line up with each of the stars, allowing you to create glyphs by "connecting the dots" in different orders.

These are the two acrylic pieces you would use. putting one on top of the other will line up the stars and numbers.

So let's say you wanted to translate the phrase "How are you" into glyphs using this cipher.

First, you would take each letter in the phrase and change it into a value between 1 and 26, corresponding to its place in the alphabet.

H - 8

O - 15

W - 23

A - 1 R - 18

E - 5

Y - 25

O - 15

U - 21

We're now left with the following string: 8 15 23 / 1 18 5 / 25 15 21

Now we use the acrylic pieces from earlier to create three glyphs by connecting the stars in the order of each letter's value.

Now we can see the three glyphs that have been made by doing this.