Although they are both very good, I thought that an ultra flexible device such as the Gadgeteer deserved an equally flexible place to play and so the Playground module was born!
I took a Plano Stowaway 3860 (actually two of them) that I got from Walmart for around $10 and covered the outside of the lid with the “loop” (soft) part of Velcro in the design of the Gadgeteer logo. I used a white paint marker to add the circles. The modules will all have pieces of “hook” vecro added to the bottom of their standoffs as soon as the correct size screws arrive.
This design allows me to easily do impromptu demos starting from a blank slate and not have to worry about modules flopping around. The Stowaway system is especially neat because two of these boxes snap together and can easily be separated. The compartments inside are perfectly sized to have one compartment that can hold a couple of Spiders or Hydras in each side along with up to 15 additional small compartments to hold modules, wires, or whatever. This is going to work very well for demos as well as storage of my Gadgeteer goodies.
It should be obvious how to build your own but feel free to ask questions if you have any.
I actually inquired with a supplier of Vecro and Veltex to see if they could do custom prints in this design. So far no takers. If I could get it done, I was going to propose to Gus to offer it up with the kits. For what it would cost with me doing one at a time using 3/4" velcro, no one would be interested…
You could but with that size of logo, you would mess up a lot of your Velcro. The paint glues the fibers together and makes it less effective. Also, it would wear off in time. Because the logo is so uniform in size and has no curves, it’s not very difficult to do just using 3/4" black & white velcro strips. I used some 3" wide black strips on the side but if I had it to do all over again I would have just bought all 3/4" to save some money. On the first one I used a subtractive process where I covered the whole thing in 3" black Velcro and then cut out for the logo and inserted the white strips. On the second one, I started by creating the logo in the center first and then filled in around it. The second method is alot easier and yields much cleaner results.
I actually considered that but decided it was a bad idea because all the ferrous metal and magnets would interfere with some modules (i.e. magnetometer, gyro, etc.). Plus you add risk of damaging your boards having them stuck to a big conductive plate. Thirdly, I wanted it attached to my case for easy transportation and the best options in cases were plastic. I have considered making a stand-alone version on a thin sheet of plastic to keep on my desk.
I might just be stupid here, but I can’t view the images and lets be honest this is what brings the awe factor for posts like this. Could there be a reason I cant view any images on any posts.
I am very eager to build myself a nice platform to “play” with my spider and need ideas etc.
Could anyone please advise me as to enable showing of pictures in forum posts?
Let me rephrase that, on any forum posts i can’t see any of the attached pictures, like on this thread the first couple of posts in this thread sounds like there should be pictures attached. I just cant see them.
Guys, TinyCLR changed its forum software recently, and one of the glitches in that transition is losing pics from old posts that were posted with the old software. It’s not the fault of Chrome.
Thanks I thought as much but after trying everything I was sure I was missing some odd little check box or something to enable it, was just trying to make sure its not just me.
Hehe. Sorry for hijacking the thread, a bit more on topic; would there be a way for me to still see the images? I feel so bad for the spider every time I push a button and the spider along with all modules plugged in, moves around on the table, not to mention my fear of shorting it all out on each other!
