Powerwheels project

 My friend Jeremy got his daughter a powerwheels for christmas, but it came missing some parts. Instead of sending him the parts, they just sent a whole new car. He knew I love fixing/modding things, so he gave us the car. 

Here is the before picture of the car.

Our son has no issue with pink, but I decided a fun mod for the car would be to paint it with blackboard paint, so he could draw on it (to encourage art/creativity/etc)

So once I got a battery for it, and spliced some wires to make a custom connector, I started taping.

After it was all painted, you are supposed to "condition" the paint by coloring over the whole surface with white chalk.

After this was done, I decided to use a projector and draw some of his favorite characters on the car as a fun surprise to show that its chalkboard and he can do whatever he wants on it.

Hes been talking a lot about an imaginary movie that involves sonic and paw patrol working together (I'll be making the game adoption of this soon lol)

Ive got some more projects planned for the car, but wanted to let him enjoy it "as is" for a bit, so he can appreciate the mods I'll be adding (tablet mount/animated lights/music system/gps/etc)

Sonic light sculpture

 

So after seeing a local christmas light show, my son asked if we could make a sonic light sculpture, so here we are.

Started with a rough sketch based on a picture I found.

Then we started bending some random wire we got from home depot.

Next we started electrical taping some blue lights to it.

Then we added some white lights.

Then I gave up on swapping colors, and just use sharpie to color the nose/shoes/buckles.

As I was hanging it, someone with their dog jokingly said to their dog "look, its sonic!". 

My son loved it as well, and asked if we could make it move next year... which we will.

3d Printer

 Projects have definitely slowed down as I was moved to a team that has a bit too much on its plate (as well as being asked to be a temporary Product owner for the team) anyway I'll stop crying because its fun either way.

I got my old 3d printer back up and running (replaced the hot-end with e3dv6, and used 3d printed parts to make the conversion). I printed a bunch of toys for my son, his friends, and for his birthday, I printed a customized articulated octopus for every kid in his class (with their name on the back)

Unfortunately it turns out the teachers just randomly gave out the octopi to kids, so the personalization was a bit lost lol... oh well, next time....

Hacking class

 I gave another hacking class to a group of high schoolers that I have taught previously.

Sing Hero

 A game I made for a friends daughter. She asked for a game where you play as Elsa and sing let it go. Its a mix of "guitar hero" and pong. (the more notes you miss, the lower in volume the vocal track goes. 

The notes are being read in realtime from a midi file that has just the melody, so their height and positioning is "mostly" correct (its hard to sync midi and analog when they weren't made by the same person lol)

Hero Side Runner

 A simple infinite side scroller (Similar to the TweetyRunner) But made for my son who loves metal, and super heros. 

You can pick between a bunch of his favorites, and the super heros all have the same two powers: Laser and fire blast.

Tweety Runner

 A game I made for my friends daughter, who really loves a show called "ruff ruff tweet and dave".

I found a mobile game the show made, downloaded a copy, extracted the binaries, ripped the assets, and converted to unreal. 

The game is a simple infinite side scroller, once you get 100 banana's Dave shows up and tells you he loves bananas.