Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Making Fun: Kids Room Spacecraft”.
To help my sons play space together, i built them a spaceship to go with their mission control desk. The ship is mostly wood and wood products. The main engine is a basic trapezoid with a sturdy inner frame. I recessed the bottom edge to accommodate a strand of hacked led christmas lights. The crew compartment holds astronauts laying down with the lowered section at one end, to hold the control panel, where my four-year-old can reach it and a raised section at the other end to accommodate my knees.
When i fold myself in there for testing a base shaker hides in the floor of the compartment for added realism during rocket firings and explosions, i hid the joints with trim strips and neat rows of evenly spaced fasteners aluminum pop rivets turned out to do a decent Job of securing these thin fiberboard panels, the boys helped too mostly putting washers on screws. Handing me tools and making ridiculous feature requests. I made the top of the spacecraft at a scrap 1×2 and thin. Fiberboard inside is a platform to hold a robot arm behind the hatch operated by a semi-automated winch.
Since the cargo bay is out of sight of the astronaut, a tiny camera sends live video to a viewing screen inside the crew compartment for paint. I went with high gloss high durability, white after priming. Of course, i glued my custom control panel designs to thin fiberboard and fired up the drill press to drill the holes. I finished the rectangular cutouts, with my scroll saw i painted the panels and glued on labels that i printed on.
Inkjet transparencies. The panels are populated with many different inputs and outputs, including toggle switches, rocker switches, push button switches, rotary switches, rotary potentiometers, leds, seven segment, numerical leds bar graph leds and an lcd screen. I invented a cheap way to make a cool status panel from scraps of aluminum and plastic, with a kitchen cutting board for an led diffuser, and the transparency for a label panel is attached to a frame for ease of wiring at my workbench, with several spreadsheets to Track all the connections i spent a while soldering everything together. There are 38 switches and 291 leds for control. The instrument panel and arduino handles inputs and outputs, while a raspberry pi plays, sounds and handles logic. I built the panel separately from the ship and slid it in when it was ready using a familiar pattern. I riveted together four thrusters and made a pod to hold them out of mdf. I put an led in each thruster.
A cheap moving blanket gives the crew compartment just the right spaceship. Look. The ship also contains a panel that can be removed by the astronaut to reveal some fun valves, hoses and connectors. Every sci-fi space film has a scene where the mission is saved by removing a panel and reconfiguring some parts.
The best feature of our whole space program is the intercom that lets our astronaut work together with our mission controller mission control. This is apollo 11.. What do i do next? Deploy the payload? Get you home safely, ready just in time for dinner.
There is a secret trigger that starts. A simulation of the apollo 12 lightning strike that caused telemetry to go haywire until sce was switched to auxiliary power s-e to ox, and i think we all know what happened during apollo 13., we started to cry: okay, [ Applause, ]. The rest of the cryogenics panel has some fun but less exciting noises.
The rocket sounds linked to the booster panel. Are a lovely mix of whooshing and bassy rumble. The bass shaker under your back nicely conveys the point that you’re riding a barely controlled explosion.
The joystick handles lights and sounds for the main engine and the thruster pod, providing control over the led brightness and the sound volume i put in an iphone dock for future expansion for now. It’Ll just play video from nasa, but in the future i plan to have some homemade satellites to monitor the panel marked control operates a few of the ship’s mechanical systems. I think we can all guess which is my four-year-old’s favorite.
It’S master frisky. I programmed the bar graphs on the ecom panel to have different colored zones to signify severity. The pyrotechnics panel is one of the bits closest to an actual nasa part.
Each switch controls, something that requires an explosion to get started. The switches are covered for safety, as these things are irreversible. The payload panel contains the hatch winch control, as well as a screen that shows the video feed from the payload compartment in the payload bay.
The robot arm awaits the astronaut’s command below the panel of the video screen is the controller for the arm. Payloads such as this hubble space telescope can be deployed into space. It’S not actual outer space. Just a bit of fishing line hung from the ceiling with a length of wire wrapped around the end. I stuck a magnet in the hubble to allow it to be attached to and removed from its ceiling mounted orbit. I already have plans to expand our satellite program with new orbits and new capabilities.
I did not design the spaceship in the mission control desk as games that could be won or lost. Instead, i made them as mere props for creative play between my boys. I’M excited to see where they’ll go with them. I intend to keep modifying these toys to suit them, and i look forward to the day that my boys learn the skills to start making modifying and programming such things themselves.
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