Not a lot of time to write because there are two big projects eating up most of my time. But here are some quick photos of what we have been up to in the shop.

First of all, we have some big plans for our friend Zard Wizguy. What started as a project to make a couple simple gifs, has turned into a stop motion short film. Here you can see Zard sitting on some new furniture I made him. Sorry for the bad lighting, he is hiding in a display case to keep the dust off of him while me make a mess in the shop.

Here is a larger view of the set we are building for the film. Jeanna cast each one of those tiles out of dental stone, and Peri hand made a tiny oil painting of the Sun King and Moon Queen (two maybe not so nice characters in Bonkyrs) to put on the wall. I modeled the wainscotting in CAD, then cut it on the CNC with some scrap walnut. The walls are lathered in the same material we used for the tiles since it is effectively fancy plaster.

We have also been hard at work building a fully functional fortune teller on top of our open source penny arcade machine framework (read more about that here). This prototype is built with cheap MDF, giving us the opportunity to make sure everything fits together right before we bust out the fancy hardwood. The fortune teller can talk, move his arm, accept a coin to start a play and will even dispense a card at the end. We are working with a fantastic local artist to draw up our own custom fortune cards. I'm hoping to have some indie web specific cards in the future as well, and maybe set up some kind of live fortune teller stream with cards delivered by mail or something.

Here is a shot of the guts of the machine. I guess I better not show this off too much, the RAM on that raspberry pi is worth more than my house these days.