Congratulations to nobble for Mini Gameboy Home Console: The Gamebox DMG Consolizer , Workshopshed for Jumbo LED , and dubbie for Tiny24hourMoBot ! You are the Winners of A Question of Scale competition from Project14! You win a $100 Shopping Cart
Congratulations to shabaz for Building a Miniature 300W Speaker Simulator ! You are Grand Prize Winner of A Question of Scale ! You win the grand prize of a mini NES plus a $100 Shopping Cart
"A mind that is stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions." ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and as Acting Chief Justice of the United States, noted for his long service, concise and pithy opinions, and deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices.
"I learned, and later had to unlearn in order to become a scientist myself, that science is simply measurement and the answers are in print." ~ George Gaylord Simpson, perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century.
When the idea of A Question of Scale was mentioned, the idea was to build a Jumbo Servo like Workshopshed or to blow something up or shrink it in scale such as a Giant Game Boy or make something real small like a handheld console. To make things a little more interesting, the Grand Prize was a mini NES portable. This theme had the promise of producing some fun projects and didn't disappoint. There wasn't a project in here that didn't question the way we looked at scale. Workshopshed returned with Jumbo LED and there was a mini LED tree from kk99 , nobble returned with his most exciting Gameboy build since Hack Like Heck - Elliot Goofe - Nobble - FUTUREBOY! THE MOST Advanced Gameboy Pi. Hack 2 The Future of Handheld Gaming , and from his followed up with another exciting gaming project after his last appearance in Hack Like Heck, and R2D2 returned in the smaller form than he was seen in The Making of R2D2 - The Force on Wheels by Sean_Miller when dougw brought R2 back in a smaller form factor with Size Matters Not - An R2D2 Story . Along the way, dubbie found a clever way to build a robot in 24 hours Tiny24hourMoBot and made it really, really small....
The Grand Prize winning project was Building a Miniature 300W Speaker Simulator from shabaz . It was inspired by a project from our Test Instrumentation competition. He returned his own version of Working Prototype of a Kelvin (4-Wire) Milliohm Meter with one of his own in Building Frank's Milliohm Meter. He then took that project and used it for a Project14 entry of his own! In the end, A Question of Scale proved this guy's point:
Without further adieu here are your winners...
The Grand Prize
Building a Miniature 300W Speaker Simulator by shabaz:
shabaz recently had the pleasure of Building Frank's Milliohm Meter which was based on Working Prototype of a Kelvin (4-Wire) Milliohm Meter by fmilburn. He thought it would be nice to use Frank’s Project14 project, to build his Project14 project Enter the miniature speaker simulator It is a really easy-to-assemble project. It is basically a dummy load, that can take the place of a real speaker when testing hi-fi or car stereo amplifiers. It saves having to blast out loud music each time you want to test.
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"A professional looking load box with a high quality build and great attention to detail on the finished product. A neat and tidy solution to the problem that could be utilised for many more tasks requiring a load." - - Community Member Judge
"What an amazing build! This was a clean and functional project that showcased some very important lessons in fabrication." - Community Member Judge
- Cyclops-1000: An Electronic Eye for Rotational Speed Measurement in DIY Test Equipment
- Building a Fluxgate Magnetometer based Current Probe in DIY Test Equipment
- Building a Solar Charger in Solar Powered Yard Gadget
First Place Winners
Mini Gameboy Home Console: The Gamebox DMG Consolizer by nobble:
Most people know Nobble from his custom handheld’s and unique video game mods, a few may remember him from his Hack Like Heck project. A fan since he was a kid, Ben Heck was the main source of inspiration for his projects and ideas for custom builds. The theme is "A Question of Scale" and the idea is to shrink or grow a project. The idea of portablizing a video game console or making a giant handheld device seemed too cliché. He decided to turn a small handheld into an even smaller home console? He could morph one of my favorite portable systems into a full-fledged Big Screen device thus playing off of both the "Shrink" AND "Grow" theme.
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"This was a great project with an interesting, detailed blog and video giving a clear view of the design and build process. The end result was a very neat design that definitely rescaled the original." - Community Member Judge
"Mini Game Boy, great writeup, good walk through of design, and a solid build" - Community Member Judge
Jumbo LED by Workshopshed:
Jumbo Servo by Workshopshed was part of the inspiration behind the theme for A Question of Scale. Since creating the Jumbo Servo he’s been thinking about what else he could make in a jumbo size. The LED seemed the obvious choice. After looking at pictures of LEDs up close he went to his local IKEA store for some glass domes. There he found a plastic dome with some LED lights, it had a close height to width ratio so he swapped my glass one for that. He also ordered some 10W LEDs and some gold and silver filament. He waited until those LEDs had arrived before committing to the project. The electronics for this project are exceedingly simple. Just a 3W Red LED, resistor and a 12v power supply. He used copper wire from some "twin and earth" to replicate the tiny wires you see going from the semiconductor to the legs.
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"A fun and creative project that definitely brought the upsizing of an LED to the competition. Further enhanced by upsizing the resistor to keep up the theme." - Community Member Judge
"As a follow-up to his jumbo servo, Andy builds a great looking jumbo LED. His motto must be 'Supersize mine please'" - Community Member Judge
Also on Project14 by Workshopshed
- Voice activated torch using a Rube Goldberg Machine in Wacky Automation Devices
- Train Repair in Simple Electronic Repairs
- A lightweight robot platform in Robots with Wheels
- Mini Logic Probe with display in DIY Test Equipment
- Old fashioned Japanese Music Box in Simple Music Maker
- Beaglebone plays the blues in Simple Music Maker
- Jumbo Servo in Movers and Shakers
- Tiny light cluster in Clustered MCUs
- UV Exposure Badge in Wearable Tech
Tiny24MoBot by dubbie:
- Tiny24hourMoBot #1 : Starting
- Tiny24hourMoBot #2 : 5 Hours in
- Tiny24hourMoBot #3 : 13 hours have passed
- Tiny24hourMoBot #4 : The 24 hours is almost up
- Tiny24hourMoBot #5 : Post Script - Making it even Tinier
Five hours after starting his 24 hour design of a Tiny Mobile Robot (tiny24hourmobot) Dubbie managed to 3D print a rectangular band that will hold two continuous rotation servo motors. He thought of using the DC motors from inside two broken micro servo motors but thought they would be rotating too fast, plus he would have had to include a dual H bridge DC motor drive as well. He has one but it seemed an unnecessary complication when he could just use two continuous rotation servo motors. He did check that the two servos would fit inside the red spray can top he intended to use before printing the rectangular holder. Unfortunately he forgot to include the diameter of the wheels. The micro servo motors come with 24 mm diameter circular fixings which he thought would make great wheels and save me 3D printing them. Unfortunately this makes the motor - wheel combination 51.5 mm wide at its widest point, whereas the inside diameter of the spray can top is only 50.0 mm wide. He could try reducing the diameter of the wheels by a couple of mm but then there might not be enough clearance between the bottom of the servo motor and the ground.
A little over half way through the 24 hours Dubbie has allowed himself for the Tiny Mobile Robot, he sort of has a working prototype. He 3D printed a cylinder slightly wider than the widest part of the two motors which also had a mounting bar at the bottom. He carefully used self-tapping screws to fix the motor unit to the mounting bar. It is stable but could easily break if knocked - so hopefully he will not knock it. He has programmed the Arduino Nano to simply move both wheels together so that the whole mobile robot moves backwards and forwards in a straight line as he needed repeatability while he stuff everything inside the cylinder. As it is a mobile robot it needed to have some sort of sensor and as he had a HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor he decided to use that. The HC-SR04 is a simple to use sensor as all you need to do is to add power, a trigger signal of at least 10 microseconds length and then measure the length in time of the echo pulse detected. Dividing the length of the detected echo by 58 converts time into distance in centimetres. At the moment it is not making use of the data from the sensor but it is all working
Although he managed to create a just about working Tiny Mobile Robot in 24 hours Dubbie did not quite achieve my initial aim of getting to fit inside some read shiny spray can tops that he has been collecting. Having looked at the design to see if it was ever possible to get it to fit in he decided to have a go at redesigning the motor assembly part to see if it could be made smaller. Obviously it could, as it is nearly always possible to improve on something that already exists. He identified that he could make the servo motor band holding the two motors together smaller and reduced it from 10 mm wide to 6 mm wide. By cutting off the mounting tags on the servo motors I was also able to reduce the wheel size from 24 mm to 20 mm. This might not seem very much but the combined effect is to reduce the motor unit diameter from 55 mm to 48 mm which is just enough so that it fits into the spray can can.
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"I liked how this project continually evolved throughout the blogs building on the design and the competition theme as time went by. A mixture of bespoke parts and parts salvaged from around the house, pulled together to produce a tiny little bot with a shopping trolley mentality." - Community Member Judge
"Tiny24MoBot, great writeup, good design with plenty of pictures and video to follow along." - Community Member Judge
"For a quick turn project, there was a lot of interesting lessons on how to shrink your robot." - Community Member Judge
- Not RoboBobLet in Robots with Wheels
- RoboBobLet in Robots with Wheels
- TinyDVM in Test Instrumentation
- JackBox in Merry Boxes & LEDs
Runners Up
The following projects received votes from the judges...
Size Matters Not - An R2D2 Story by dougw:
R2D2 is a monumental icon regardless of its physical size - that has meaning for a large number of people - one of the most popular characters who has no speech. Doug has been planning for quite a while to build an R2D2, but every time he took a concrete step towards that goal it seemed to look harder to achieve something reasonable. This entry is using A Question of Scale as an excuse to move this mini R2D2 project out of the planning stage and into a build phase. It is great to finally get around to another project from my bucket list. This is definitely a scaled down version of R2D2.
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"What an amazing and highly detailed 3D print. It is projects like this that inspire me to print more and more things." - Community Member Judge
- Sparky the Power Chick in Techno Toys
- Geeked Out Business Cards in Geeky Gadgets
- Purple Panic Button in Wacky Automation Devices
- The Magic Tool Kit in Portable Electronics Kit
- Cyber Chicklet in Open Arduino
- µBOSS .... Test Instrumentation ... micro:bit in Test Instrumentation
- Tube Amp on a PCB in Back to Analog
Remote Home Monitoring with Raspberry Pi and Hologram Nova - Full Instructions by luislabmo :
The Remote Home Monitor will encourage you to upgrade your home to a smarter and more secure one, offering safety measures, protection, monitoring and key indicators for later improvement using the Nova Cellular USB Modem and a Raspberry Pi. This project is not about just turning ON/OFF a light from a smart phone. It is focused on integrating a network of sensors, nicely presenting the data in a dashboard, monitoring and controlling all the features with a simple and friendly user interface, accessible from a web browser or a touch screen console at home.
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"Remote Home Monitor, good writeup and design, but did not include a video of working project." - Community Member Judge
What's Happening Now
There's always stuff going on in the community and the best ideas always come from you. Suggest your idea in the Monthly Poll! and vote on the themes you want to do projects on. You can experience the Force for yourself with the Electromagnetism project competition or build a Home Automation project to give your habitat a personality!
Thank you for continued support of Project14 !
Keep warm! Spring is coming soon!
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