New Puzzle Box Kickoff

Started work on a new puzzle box over the weekend. This time it’ll be for my nephews and niece at Christmas. The general theme is plugging cubes into different sockets. I think it’ll be a spaceship-themed one where they have to insert “power cells” into the correct sockets to re-start the engine. I built the base cube sockets, the cubes themselves (minus the acrylic boxes around them) and did most of the wiring over the weekend. The sockets and cubes connect via magnets (kinda like Apple’s Magsafe) and the ESP32 can detect which cube is where with variable resistors in each one which is read by the microcontroller.

Here’s a quick demo of a “put the power cells in the correct sockets” stage of the puzzle I have in mind:

And some footage of my new 3D printer (!) churning out the base plates: