The puzzle is finally done! It was a wild ride but so much fun and I learnt a lot.
I’ve taken it out for testing a few times now and that was crazy; just transporting it on the train was a scary experience. Protecting it with my life…
Time to reflect on what I’d do differently and what I was happy with…
Power Management
The elephant in the room is probably my slightly questionable power setup (check out the details in “Power & Portability”).
Honestly, this is an ambitious project in terms of its components… In total there’s around 20 active LEDs, 2 servos and an OLED display draining power. There was never going to be a perfect setup with this small a footprint that didn’t use USB power.
I think I could’ve tried a bit a harder to source a better boost converter (even though I did get the best spec one I could!) but ultimately, the battery has to die at some point anyway.
If I made this again… I don’t really think I would change much! I was delighted with how tidy the wago connectors made things so I’m absolutely going to use them again in future projects.
Time Management
The original plan was to complete the puzzle in time for the trip back to Belfast for Christmas 2025. It gave me about 2 months to complete things. But early December, it was looking tight to complete this thing in time and although it would have been possible to do, the quality would’ve been much less; fewer puzzles, no paint or branding, too little polish etc. At the same time, having a deadline on it was adding stress that was kinda ruining the exciting build-up to a holiday.
So I decided to park the project and come back to it in the new year.
January 2026 swings around and I started back on things. Actually, at this point, the narrative for the project was completely different. The idea at that point was the puzzle was the console of a spaceship and the cubes were fuel cells the player had to “align”, “charge”, “stabilize” etc. But when I started to have ideas around decoration and how that could play into the puzzles, I pivoted to a theme where the box was a device for contacting aliens as that just opened up the possibilities for interesting narratives and puzzles more.
All of these decisions and changes pushed things back a lot and I could’ve been better managing feature creep but as soon as I missed the Christmas deadline, it was a lot more relaxed to just do it at my own pace and it’s a lot better than it was before.