Thoughtophone

One of my daughters friends has a fidget spinner. On the weekend, she and I went looking through the options on Thingiverse. She had something specific in mind. Because of space limitations in my shed, I've deciding painting models is the easiest way to have access to lots of colours. The result is: It takes a long time to finish something: Filler then spray on primer, then 2 coats of colour then two coats of lacquer. Not single coat takes long to do on something small, it's just a matter of doing a bit each morning and night. My daughter does seem to like it, and it'll do her good if she's patient enough to master it. I might try and find some more ergonomic bearing caps though. I'm actually yet to see another spinner to compare it too.

I first thought of building this, because I printed a quad-copter frame, and bought a flight controller, motors and propeller to go with it. I thought I would connect a Wemos D1 mini to the flight controller. Then if I wanted to fly it, I'd need a WiFi remote control. I had two thumb joysticks and Spark-fun breakout boards I bought a long time ago, and never used, so I set about designing something. I also had various ESP 8266 modules to choose from. Having designed and printed something around a NodeMCU V2, I realised I'd made a silly mistake: There's only one analog in. You can often work around this by connecting and disconnecting the power from the various inputs, but that's not possible with these breakout boards. I got a cheap ADS1015 breakout board, and squeezed it in the corner of the box. It's all a bit of a squeeze: I should have made the box a bit bigger. I always underestimate how much room wires take up. I also thought I'd made it for 30mm s

I bought a circuit playground from Pimoroni. I'd like to give something physical to my daughter to experiment with programming. Then I realised my first mistake: There's a newer version that has support for graphical programming. Anyway, maybe I didn't want something Microsoft: I have android tablets, and I'm much more likely to hack on something built with Blockly . Perhaps something else will do in the meantime? Ardublockly  compiles to Arduino. Circuit Payground Scratch Computing , although it's not easy to run flash on a tablet any more... This thread provides some starting points for defining your own code generator. It seems like the thing to do is define an interpreter for 'native' Blockly that runs in a micro-controller. I can have a wire encoding for that using canonical s-expressions. Having come this far, I'm suddenly wondering if any of this is a good idea. I don't even think writing a loop is a good way to control things, so I