Who Ya Gonna Call?

My wife and I have been invited to a 50th birthday party in February, but it's fancy dress....Movie Style. And she wants to go as a Ghostbuster.

This does of course mean that I'm going to have to make us a proton pack each:

Now I could buy a kit, but these start at around £500.

So, it's time to fire up the 3D printer and the CAD system.
There are excellent plans available online at the GBFans website. But these are traditional 2D drawings, and not suitable for 3D printing.

There are some partial parts available on Thingiverse...

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:302576 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:95635

But none of these are either full kits, or have the 'difficult' parts missing. So I decided that I'd have a go at making a fully 3D printable kit. The first thing was to make a CAD model of the pack from the 2D drawings.

From this I made each part printable. For example, the Crank Generator is split into top and bottom sections as it is a wide, tall part that would be rather wasteful of plastic if printed in one piece:

This is one of the largest parts I have printed. It came out pretty good in white ABS in my heated print chamber:

Another interesting part is the 'spinner' on top of the crank generator. These are large potentiometer style knobs from the '70s with the part number MS91528-3S2G.

Almost totally unavailable in the UK. So from limited 2D drawings online, I modelled and printed it:

Another old part is this PH25 can style resistor:

And after printing:

This is still a work in progress, and there are several more parts before it will be complete. I'm putting all the parts onto thingiverse as I go along.

All the parts are available here.

Retro Heaven

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Just got back from PlayExpo at Manchester's EventCity. This is an annual event for modern and retro gaming + Cosplay.

My son had been asked to go with a friend, and he suggested I come along too. Fantastic idea!

There were tables and tables of Sega Megadrives, Master systems, Atari 2600/800XL, C64, Intellivision, Vectrex etc etc. on free play.

My favourite was the retro arcade section. They had brought in loads of old arcade machines to play:

Defender, a personal favourite of mine:

My oldest checking out a classic:

And a modern silliness, virtual horse racing with Oculus Rift:

More retro goodness, Crystal Castles:

I had the chance to have a brief chat with Jeff Minter, I met him in the mid 80's when I was freelancing for Red Rat Software. I remember him as being a really nice guy then, and the years have not changed him. He took time to talk to me about the old 8 bit days of software development. Compulsory (unflattering) selfie:

And some not quite retro-retro:

'er indoors....

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She really does have to tolerate me sometimes...and she does...mostly.....