A Light Box in Heavy Times

What a perfectly delightful post in all respects.

> I am starting to think of interesting software for the Light Box that does respond exclusively to human input.

When I think of responsive software that gives me with delight without wresting any control from me, I think of programs that magnify my input in some way.

One simple idea that would well for this is a kaleidoscope. Press a button and not only does it change, but so do corresponding mirrored or rotated buttons around the box from it. A hex grid is great for this because then you can do 3-fold or 6-fold symmetry around the center button in addition to simple reflection symmetry.

That is awesome! The retro box is fantastic.

I discovered that my son (17 months old at the time) loves to mess with stereo controls. So I bought a few rotary encoders and neo-pixel rings - build a wooden enclosure with a plastic faceplate, and wrote some code to generate fancy light and audio effects when he turns/clicks the knobs. He loved it. We call it the "Max Distractor".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtE8oE9GOsM

Inside it's just a RPi. One of these days I really need to make it do something more fancy.

>I decided that I would make him something with buttons

Wow that brings back memories. My dad did the same thing. Wooden box with all sorts of switches & dials & slider and things in it.

None of them did anything (maybe a random light?), but this was back when switches/dials were made to last. So just the mechanical action had some heft to it & was interesting to a toddler.

In case anyone missed the reference, the "boit diabloique" (devils box) is a reference to the TV show "Look around you". The show presents itself as educational programming while slowly desending into madness. In the episode on music we are informed to never press the forbidden keys on the piano (the ones that are locked in the boit diabloique next to the normal keys). A presenter calmly demonstrates pressing one of these keys and promptly starts bleeding from the ear. While he is casually having his brain leak out we are instructed on screen to "write that down in your copy book now".

It's a very cute box, and I particularly enjoy that this small blog reflects a microcosm of development, fixing bugs for a product, and making it usable for a "customer". That said, games for the author's child remind me of the MIDI Fighter 64 as used by Shawn Wasabi [0], which while a MIDI controller, has reactive patterns to button-presses while being used to play music.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xof7PkoggbM

This is perhaps my favorite blog post to ever just “happen upon”.

I don’t have the time to write up as much as I might like, but it’s safe to safe I enjoyed every dimension of what made this project awesome.

What about a program that just toggles the state of the nearest neighbors? That way it can be a game, but it is not timing based nor computer controlled. The game can be to turn everything off or on and can also be used to try to create interesting patterns.

I once ran into a similar problem with trying to make a regular grid with hexagons, except that I was trying to do a hex grid wrapped around a sphere.

Here's what I came up with:

https://wiki.haskell.org/IcoGrid

I treated the sphere as an icosahedron where each "side" is a triangular hex grid. At each vertex is a pentagonal cell. To get the sides to fit together nicely, I had to rotate them a little bit.

There may be a simpler way to do it, but it worked.

Lights out seems like the ideal human-powered game, though probably a bit advanced for a two-year-old. But it would be interesting to see what a hex-based variant of it looks like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_Out_(game)

Lovely blog post, thanks for this.

That last video was just lovely

Beautiful project. Beautiful philosophy. Beautifully written. Thank you.

Beautiful and inspiring. Thank you for making and sharing!

So beautiful, thank you.

Skinner box.