This year, I had the good fortune to visit GenCon after a 2 year hiatus. Not much has changed, although I was surprised at the number of KickStarted projects on the show floor. There were a lot of really interesting independently funded games, including a few print-and-play games. Print-and-play has been around forever, but with the advent of the MakerBot, and the rising popularity of 3D printing, both at home and for contract, I am surprised at the lack of 3D-print-and-play games.

Chris and I finally finished Mind Over Melon! For anyone who hasn’t heard us talk about this, this is a device that allows the user to explode watermelons with his/her mind! We took it out to Bernheim Forest for Bernheim CONNECT, and let 40 people blow up 40 melons. It was immensely popular! Special thanks to Bernheim for fronting the cost of the melons. 40 melons is a whole lot to fit in the back of a small hatchback!

My friend Jon has been working on Laser Taser tag, modifying perfectly ordinary toy laser guns to provide an electric shock when you get hit. As he was working on this game for Makerfaire Detroit 2012, I noticed that these guns are really freaking cool****. 10 years ago, I paid good teenage summer job money to play laser tag, and it wasn’t as good as this. You can now buy a $30 toy that rivals the fanciest laser tag equipment of the previous decade.

By now, almost everyone’s managed to acquire a bajillion cheap ARM dev boards, and there are always more coming. As these chips get cheaper, and available in more hacker-friendly packages, they’re going to overtake chips and boards like the AVR and the Arduino, it’s just a matter of time. Unfortunately, the ARM ecosystem isn’t as simple to work with as the AVR or PIC ecosystem. With both of these 8-bitters, you’re working in the manufacturer’s walled garden.

Get the code here: https://github.com/Zuph/AVRQueue Introducing the Arduino Simple Task Scheduler. This is part of the balloon flight computer code I wrote for White Star, with some more polish. This library allows you to create a schedule queue of functions to be executed at specified times, on specified intervals. For example, say you’re trying to log some sensor data and update a display in the same program. With the task scheduler, you can simply write a function to gather sensor data, write a function to update the display, add them to your queue, and let the library handle the rest.