Chris this week, spending more time than is reasonable working out how to keep the 90s TV references going..

Little by little the constituent parts of the next batch of Museum in a Box are turning up at HQ. We’ll know it’s Christmas here when the shelves are full of new stock. Thanks to the good folk at Pimoroni the cases are here and ready for assembly. We have a bag of bespoke standoffs, that needed more than a bit of head scratching to calculate how many factions of an inch we needed. As soon as the PCB’s arrive from Glasgow we’ll be in the workshop assembling, it’s not yet clear if elf costumes will be required.

While the boards are being assembled I’m still trying to get the UI updates finished off in time, the clock is ticking. It’d be great to have this tested ready for the new batch but the battle with web sockets in the ESP-idf continues and may yet go to a penalty shoot out.

Another parcel we received this week was from the British Library. They have a large number of Museums in a Box across the country, one had been in an unfortunate accident. It was returned to us packed in a nest of shredded cardboard to see if we could save it. A little bit of soldering, some new lasercut box pieces and it’s ready to go back out to the library.

A yellow Museum in a Box in a nest of shredded cardboard packaging in for repair. The front and side of the box are detached and there are signs of snapped acrylic. Nothing we couldn't fix but certainly indications of having had a difficult run in with an immovable object

Adrian has earwormed himself with Neil Diamond this week, as he’s finished off the heart light he’d started on last week.

He continued the repurposing waste theme, harvesting a small rechargeable li-ion battery from a disposable vape and wiring it up with a small toggle switch from the DoES Liverpool parts bin.

The partially disassembled Heartlight sits on a cutting mat. The base is 3D printed in grey plastic and is open at the moment, with a small cylindrical battery, resistor, charging pins and toggle switch pulled out so they're more visible. The components are connected on a small piece of veroboard and there are two wires coming off that which feed through the plastic base to the LED noodle that's wrapped round a wire frame on the other side

The finished unit makes a nice bright pink heart to sit atop of the transmitter for the lead soundsystem bike on our group rides, so the chasing receiver bike can keep track of it and make sure they’re in range.

We're in a dimly-lit room looking through the window onto a grey rainy street as the light fades. Being held in front of the window is a selfie stick with a wireless transmitter clamped to the top of it and the Heartlight screwed on the end and lit up in shocking pink

He also spent some time in FreeCAD designing a mount for a bike light for the ligra projector he showed last week. In the end the bike ride he was building it for was postponed due to the weather, so hopefully there’ll be a photo of it when that’s rescheduled.

And wrapping his week up, he went along to the Liverpool Synth Meeup on Saturday and worked out how to get an ESP32C3 hooked up to a small I2S DAC and amp, and then get it to make sounds from some Circuit Python code. There might be more on that in the future, but it’s something of a back-burner R&D project.