This is just a small update because it’s the kind of thing I’m likely to forget in hindsight. I just spent about two and a half hours on the internet and on the Adafruit website figuring out a way to make my patches more visually appealing and provide more feedback. There’s still going to have to be some work to do to get all these wires to behave, but hopefully I can manage something compact and safe (I’ll be using lithium ion battery packs for part of this). I’m especially concerned about shielding the lithium ion batteries.

Generally speaking, my plan is to sandwich a few things together. I’m hoping to make a flora power neopixels and a small vibrational motor. I have to handle where to place the LEDs and the motor and where to run their respective wires, then where and how to shield the battery while maintaining access to the flora (maybe some kind of slit in the material). I also have neopixels that I want to shine through part of the material. Then, there’s the wire to actually turn the patches into buttons, which has to attach into the conductive thread at the back. It should work out fine but there may be some trial and error.

Meanwhile, the box is nearly done, though I may need to add holes to accommodate some of this hardware… We have to make lids for the inner boxes and assemble everything with the hardware. We also have to make a handle for one of the outside puzzles. From there, most of the puzzles are already done and ready to go except for this last one, which is more involved. I have some re-writing and adjustments to make to the prototype of the puzzle, which I plan to try and do today, and I have physical crafting and embroidering and arduino programming to do in addition to the program that will display all this text and cycle through it. I thought I would want to do this with a visual/WYSIWYG program like Construct 2, but it might be easier to just have the RPI boot up and start the program if it is javascript-based.

I’m off to try and rewrite the last puzzle to make it a bit more of a riddle! We’ll see how it goes!