Parents action figures

Welp... Now he has 3d printed versions of his parents...

Hopefully he goes easy on us lol.

3D scanned action figure head

 I was testing some new AI models, and put together some tools that let me create 3d models from photos. This is "less accurate" than photogrammetry, but more realistic... basically it "fudges the details" in typical ai-slot fashion.

I'm using ReconViaGen Pixal3D and TRELLIS.2-4B along with Qwen3.8-27B as an agent with hermes-agent

Before we even had our son, I told my wife that I had one requirement before we had a kid... That before he was old enough to appreciate it, we had to get a 3d printer...

There are many reasons, but the biggest for me, was that I wanted to print custom action figures for "future child".

Being able to 3d scan his face, add compatible sockets to make it compatible with the other action figures I print for him so  I could make a "personalized action figure" the same scale as all his other Fortnite action figures... is amazing...

Can you imagine having an action figure of yourself to play and fight with all your other favorite super heroes and villains?

I can't wait for when he's old enough to understand how insane this is... lol for now its just normal, and that's how it should be, IMO.

Springtrap DIY Halloween costume

My Son wanted to make this own costume this year. He wanted to be springtrap from fnaf. So we bought some foam, let him pick the outside fabric, and I started "vibe-crafting" with no real plan.

Here is the reference material:

And here is what we ended up with:

Last minute (literally the night before Halloween) I threw together some Led glasses (I knew he wouldn't be able to wear the mask at school, they don't let you cover your face, so the glasses would let him have SOMETHING on his face)

The suit is held together with random wires I ripped out of electronics I salvaged, and everything velcros in the back so he was able to put this on himself at school.

All in all, Im pretty happy with how it turned out.

More custom action figures

 When your son wants an action figure that doesn't exist... You 3d print it!

Here is what it looks like in the game.

And here is what I made.

I intentionally didn't paint it all the way, I figured it'd be fun for him to weather it himself.

Hacking a 3ds to add parental controls

 

The 3ds is an amazing piece of hardware. Especially if you hack it to add homebrew/emulators.

My son has been enjoying a bit of "free time" before bed, and playing with a generic "mini arcade" game system. The games are all generic knock offs, and I figured he'd love to play with my hacked 3ds which has thousands of high quality games...

The problem is, the 3ds doesn't have "screen time" controls to encourage him to put it down after X minutes so he gets some sleep. So I decided to download the source for the custom firmware I was using (https://github.com/LumaTeam/Luma3DS) and add the controls myself.

Because I wanted the parental controls to pause the game, and allow "sleep" to save his game, I had to add my code to the firmware itself. This lets me spawn a thread that is running in the background, even when a game is running to keep track of time, and screen time limits. I added the ability to call out to my website with the current game he's playing (so in the future if we want to have certain educational games count for less time, we can)

The basic logic is this: Every few seconds it sends the current game he's playing to my sever, which responds with the screen time limit. In order for this to work "offline" if we are not at home/near internet, it has a built in "default" time of 15 minutes. It then writes to a local file every second to keep track of actual screen time usage. Then if the current screen time usage is over the screen time limit, it pauses the OS, and pops up a screen telling him that his screen time is up.

It also has a hint on how to add more screen time (he's learning to read, so if he figures this out on his own, he deserves the bonus screen time) This is also a way for us to add more time if we need locally. We can add screen time via my server as well.

So far its working great, and just about ready for "prime time" (had some issues with the 3ds getting stuck in sleep mode, but I'm just about done with that.

Once I am finished with the code, I'll upload it all to GitHub so other parents can enjoy :)

Code is gross, but functional. I'll be adding more features as I need them. 
https://github.com/spiffomatic64/Luma3DS

Tonie Weather

 So my son loves his tonie so much for listening to his favorite shows: blog post about that project here

I thought it would be cool to make one of his tonies tell him the weather for the day. So I threw this script together to generate a "text to speech" weather forecast for the day, and clothing recommendations for him to dress himself.

It runs every day to get the current weather, and uses the hourly high/lows and precipitation data to recommend what to wear. He wakes up in the morning, puts the yeti tonie on the box, and then knows exactly what to wear for the day.

He loves it.

Here is the code: https://github.com/spiffomatic64/tonie_sync/blob/master/tonie_weather.py

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from noaa_sdk import NOAA import json from gtts import gTTS import shutil from pprint import pprint from datetime import datetime, timedelta def get_temp(temp, low): temps = {100: "Very hot, Wear a Tshirt and shorts", 85: "Hot, Wear a Tshirt and shorts", 75: "Warm, Wear a Tshirt and shorts", 65: "Nice, Wear a Tshirt and shorts", 50: "Cool, Wear a Tshirt and pants", 40: "Cold, Wear a Long Sleeves shirt and pants", 30: "Very Cold, Wear a Long Sleeves shirt and pants"} for t in temps: if temp > t: if low < 65: temp_data = temps[t].replace("shorts","pants") return temp_data def get_forcast(forecast_data, hourly_data): json_formatted_str = json.dumps(forecast_data, indent=2) print(json_formatted_str) tomorrow = datetime.now() + timedelta(1) tomorrow_string = tomorrow.strftime("%Y-%m-%d") # print(tomorrow_string) max = 0 min = 100 for hour_data in hourly_data: if hour_data['startTime'][:10] == tomorrow_string: hour = int(hour_data['startTime'][11:13]) if hour > 6 and hour < 17: # print(hour) if hour_data['temperature'] > max: max = hour_data['temperature'] if hour_data['temperature'] < min: min = hour_data['temperature'] print(f"High: {max} Low: {min}") temp = get_temp(forecast_data['temperature'], min) forcast_string = (f"{forecast_data['name']} will be {temp}. " + f"The forecast is {forecast_data['detailedForecast']} " + f"The Low will be {min}") return forcast_string n = NOAA() res = n.get_forecasts('19067', 'US', type="forecast") res2 = n.get_forecasts('19067', 'US', type="forecastHourly") forecast = get_forcast(res[2], res2) print(forecast) myobj = gTTS(text=forecast, lang="en", slow=True) # Saving the converted audio in a mp3 file named # welcome path = "I:\\audio\\weather" filename = "weather" ext = "mp3" myobj.save(f"{path}\\{filename}0.{ext}") for num in range(1, 3): shutil.copy(f"{path}\\{filename}0.{ext}", f"{path}\\{filename}{num}.{ext}")

Halloween costume

 My son wanted to be Iron Spider for Halloween this year. 

(The photo is from our trunk or treat this year. I literally googled "spiderman trunk or treat" found an idea, and just copied it cutting out pieces from colored plastic table clothes)

Here is what iron spider looks like for reference.

We got an Iron Spider costume, but it obviously didn't come with the arms... So I started thinking how I could make the arms without also having him maim other kids walking down the street.

Then I remembered a last minute Halloween costume by Adam Savage from the Mythbusters,

So I got some 1/4" aluminum armature wire, and the insulation with adhesive on one side you use to insulate door jams. I stuck the insulation to itself on either side of the wire, then shaped it with some scissors, and spray painted it gold.

My wife then got an old backpack from a friend, cut everything off but the back pad, and the straps. She the cut a piece of wood to size, and drilled some holes with a jig to hold the arms in place. We fit the wood to the backpack with some screws (flat on the side that would be touching his back) then used colored duct tape to cover everything and fit with his costume.

He was pretty happy with how it turned out. 

Halloween 2023

I love making these interactive "games" for kids on Halloween. 

This year I used the "skibidi" battle from the game I just made and slapped a kinect plugin onto it. Kids LOVED it.

Biggest 3d print

 I love printing the "lucky13" action figures for my son, so I decided to try and print a 500% version. 

He loves it.

Plunger Game

 A little while ago, I went to a party for a 2 year old, and an older kid noticed my zelda tshirt. We started talking about games, and I mentioned that I like to make games for kids to practice using the Unreal Engine.

I asked if he could make any game in the world, what would he make. He said he'd make a plunger shooter.

This kid had no idea what type of game design I could do, so I figured I'd have fun a pull the rug out from him a few times. The first level is a simple looking cartoon 2d side scroller game, when you get to the end, you "fall through the world" into a Playstation 1 style 3rd person plunger shooter. When you get to the end of this level, you fall through again (this is a reference to the next level, which is inspired from a very popular "meme" video for kids his age named "the backrooms")

The last level is a first person plunger shooter with monkey's that throw poop at you. If you wander around, and follow the arrows on the walls, you find the boss, which is another popular meme for kids his age "skibidi toilet".

Here is the Plunger Game. (All of the assets/art are from other gamedevs, I just quick kitbashed this together in a couple days to make a kids idea reality.

Fully modeled prints

 This is the next level in progress, I took just the joints from the lucky13 action figure model and grafted on the real in-game model from five nights at freddys. This is the only version of this action figure, as I made it, and painted it custom myself. (using thew fancy paint pens I found recently "posca markers")

Im pretty proud of this one and how it came out. 

Painting prints

 My son has been asking for modified action figures that look like his favorite five nights at Freddy's characters. (Hes 5 so he hasn't played the game, he just likes how they look)

So I downloaded the models, sculpted them onto the existing action figures, and got some acrylic markers to paint them.

This is the base model all the other characters are built on. I just used blender to bolt on other models, or sculpt into shape.

My first attempt, I basically just copy pasted the characters' head (his name is Monty) onto the original robot. I also added a guitar from another model.

He loved it, but asked if I could make the legs and arms rounded on the next one. So I used blender and manually moved vertices to make the corners more rounded. This is Freddy.

This was great, but not rounded enough... So my next model, I basically just modeled from scratch and only kept the original joints so it would still work as an action figure. This one is called Puppet

Now these are starting to look better...

Here is what puppet looks like in the actual game: 

Next was a character with similar rounded arms, but he had baggy pants for legs, so I sculpted these from scratch as well.

This character has an "alternate" personality that I made a second version for as well.

I really like this process not only because I'm getting better, but also specifically because I'm getting better in front of him. He gets to see each version getting better and better, and it's showing him that anyone who is good at something, started way worse than where they are now, and its a slow process you have to keep up with.

Sharing prints

 We went to a diner close by, and the waitress was admiring a 3d printed toy Declan was playing with, so Declan then offered "My dad could make one for you" 

This has been one of my goals from the beginning with Declan... Instead of being proud of the talents me or Halley have, wanting to share them with others...

The waitress said if we did make them, they'd need to be the same so her sons wouldn't fight over them. 

So here they are.
 

We'll drop them off the next time we go there.

More multi-color 3d prints

They take longer (separating the model into parts, printing them separately, gluing together)
But they look so much better. (He's been really into Mario lately because of the new movie)

And I always love when friends come over, and I can print things for their kids (They loved the collapsible sword, so I asked their favorite colors and printed one for each kid)

Multi-color 3d print

 Biggest 3d print I've done for him so far: (the bowser)

The gem/crystal is printed in a multi-color filament.

Tonie randomizer

 So recently my son has been asking for new audio on his TonieBox. Most of the time he falls asleep before the 2nd/3rd/4th chapter/audio play, so I decided to make an automated tonie-shuffle script.

A toniebox is basically an mp3 player, that lets you pick what audio you want by using little action figures (it uses rfid similar to amiibo like the switch). You can also upload your own audio with special creative tonies. I use these tonies to upload audio from his favorite tv shows.

This batch script rips the audio from "totally legally" obtained tv shows.

If there is interest (comment or contact me irl/elsewhere) I could hack together a easier to use web-version, maybe even make it take youtube videos/playlists/spotify/etc)

1	for /r %%i in (*.mkv) do ffmpeg -y -err_detect ignore_err -i "%%i" -map 0:a:0 -c copy -c:a aac "%%~ni.m4a"

This python script gets all the tonies, wipes them, and associates each creative tonie with a specific folder. Then gets all the audio files in that folder, shuffles them, and keeps adding them until the tonie is full.

Simple script, but should provide a bunch of fresh bedtime "stories" for him to fall asleep with.

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import os import logging import random import ffmpeg from tonie_api import TonieAPI //dictionary of toniename, to sub-folder to associate specific tonies with specific shows my_tonies = {'Blue': 'sonic prime', 'Blue Hero': 'ultimate spiderman', 'Gray': 'octonauts', 'Green': 'teen titans go', 'Pink': 'miraculous', 'Pink Hero': 'spectacular spiderman', 'Pirate': 'tmnt', 'Vampire': 'marvels spiderman' } path = "folder containing audio" dry_run = True def get_all(path): files = [] count = 0 for (dirpath, dirnames, filenames) in os.walk(path): for filename in filenames: full_path = os.path.join(dirpath, filename) files.append(full_path) print("") return files # set up detailed logging logging.basicConfig() logging.getLogger().setLevel(logging.INFO) api = TonieAPI('your@email.com, 'password') # update all housholds, returns IDs of households households = api.households_update() for household in households: if households[household] == 'HOUSEHOLD NAME': our_household = household print(f"Our HousedholdID: {our_household}") # update all creative tonies, returns IDs of creative tonies tonies = api.households[our_household].creativetonies_update() print(tonies) for tonie in tonies: print(f"\nTonie Id: {tonie} Name: {tonies[tonie]} Audio: {my_tonies[tonies[tonie]]}") audio_folder = f"{path}\\{my_tonies[tonies[tonie]]}" time_left = 5400 if os.path.exists(audio_folder): if not dry_run: api.households[our_household].creativetonies[tonie].remove_all_chapters() print(f"Cleared tonie: {tonie}") files = get_all(audio_folder) random.shuffle(files) for file in files: info = ffmpeg.probe(file) duration = float(info['format']['duration']) if duration < time_left: time_left = time_left - duration filename = os.path.split(file)[1] print(f"Uploading: {filename} duration:{duration} left: {time_left}") if not dry_run: api.households[our_household].creativetonies[tonie].upload(file, filename) else: print("Skipping...")

More 3d printing stuffs

A buddy of mine recommended that I try printing this candy dispenser, its definitely a hit.

xmas light sculpture 2, electric boogaloo

  This year my son is into mermaids... so we're turning this into a tradition...

Next year Im thinking of using ws2815's and making it animate :)

Personalized action figure

 Im still learning how to make "real" action figure joints (ball/swivel/hinge/etc) But in the meantime, Ive had "make an action figure that looks like my son" on my bucket list for a while.

I used the iphone X face scanner and em3d to scan his face, then put it on a "flexi" robot model https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/art/flexi-print-in-place-fokobot-2-0

Heres the result:

I used blender, and its built in "3d print" module to make the scan manifold, and joined the models.

Knex

 My son has gotten into knex recently, and likes making robots out of them... So I figured I'd stoke/seed his creativity a bit by making custom knex pieces that have robot kitbash components on them (random panels/weapons/etc)

This is an example of the type of kitbashes I used:

I took the knex set here: https://www.printables.com/model/143840-knex-parts-customizable and added some of the kitbash pieces to male/female connectors.

And here is an example of something my son made tonight:

He REALLY likes them, I think I'm gonna make the kitbash parts a bit bigger, but the "prototype" idea phase has definitely gone well.