This week on Maker Update, crowdsourcing hospital equipment repair, lessons from Josef Prusa’s medical shield manufacturing, and the games we never got to play at Alt.Ctrl GDC.

++Show Notes++

-=News=-

Help Us Crowdsource Repair Information for Hospital Equipment
https://www.ifixit.com/News/36354/help-us-crowdsource-repair-information-for-hospital-equipment

From Design to Mass 3D printing of Medical Shields in Three Days
https://blog.prusaprinters.org/from-design-to-mass-3d-printing-of-medical-shields-in-three-days/

-=Alt.Ctrl Games=-

All Alt.Ctrl GDC 2020 Games
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/355554/Check_out_the_20_unique_games_youll_play_at_GDC_2020s_altctrlGDC_showcase.php

Neck ‘n’ Neck
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/358653/ALTCTRLGDC_Showcase_Neck_n_Neck.php

Buy! Sell!
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/358594/ALTCTRLGDC_Showcase_Mouse__the_Billionaires_Buy_Sell.php

Ready? Set. Haiya!
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/358587/ALTCTRLGDC_Showcase_Geeky_Panda_Studios_Ready_Set_Haiya.php

Milk! That! Cow!
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/356922/ALTCTRLGDC_Showcase_Milk_That_Cow.php

Guilty Smells
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/357922/ALTCTRLGDC_Showcase_Guilty_Smells.php

-=Tips=-

Learn Unity for Free
https://learn.unity.com/

Doodle Studio 95!
https://fernandoramallo.itch.io/doodle-studio-95

-=Digi-Key Spotlight=-

Makey Makey Classic Kit
https://www.digikey.com/short/zjp35n

Makey Makey Project Ideas
https://makeymakey.com/pages/how-to

Transcript

This week on Maker Update, crowdsourcing hospital equipment repair, lessons from Josef Prusa’s medical shield manufacturing, and the games we never got to play at Alt.Ctrl GDC.

Hey I’m Donald Bell, back again with another Maker Update. You’ve probably noticed that events and conferences are being cancelled everywhere until who knows when. One of those cancelled events that would have taken place last week was the Alt Control Showcase at GDC. It’s an event I’ve been covering since 2018 where indie game developers show off the fun, crazy control interfaces for their one-off games. 

But even though I can’t play them this year, we can still talk about them and geek out over what they did. So that’s what we’re doing in this episode, but first let’s catch up with some news.

There’s lots of inspiring stories right now with makers and maker-run businesses finding ways to help solve problems we’re facing with the Coronavirus pandemic. There’s two I want to highlight real quick.

First, iFixit is working to crowdsource repair information for hospital equipment. It turns out that repair information for a lot of these machines can be difficult to find and with hospital techs stretched thin and the machines pushed to their limits, it’s important to make repair information as accessible as possible. 

Anyone can help by tracking down repair manuals, as well as reworking the technical manual information into a more user-friendly format that non-engineers can use. You can find a link in the description to learn more.

On the Prusa Printers blog, Josef Prusa has a post about how his team was able to get a face-shield from design to production in 3 days. 

It’s an impressive feat, and you can find two variations of the design on their website that you can download and print yourself. 

But what I really appreciated about this post is that he points out many of the hazards that we need to consider in our rush to be helpful with DIY medical equipment. Not only do we need to really understand how to make and keep things sterile, but also acknowledge that the 3D printed objects are porous, and may become a breeding ground for germs over time. 

If you’re thinking at all about making or donating homemade medical devices, be sure to give this post a full read. It’s both inspiring and full of practical information.

Alright, now let’s start in on some of the games and controllers that would have been showcased at Alt.Ctrl. You can find a full list of them down in the description.

Neck n’ Neck is a game developed by a team from the department of Game Design at Uppsala University. It’s a racing game where two players, riding toy giraffes, dodge obstacles by physically moving their giraffe’s neck up and down. You can also make the giraffe jump by reaching back and pulling on its tail.

The game is entirely made in Unity. For the hardware, aside from the wood and foam used to make the giraffes, the tail is a rope tied to a block that pushes into an arcade button when you pull it all the way up. 

The neck is a little bit of a mystery, but since there’s this continuous calculation of the neck height — not just up or down — I have to assume there’s a type of distance sensor in here somewhere figuring out how far up the neck has been pulled.

Another game that looks like fun is Buy! Sell! This was created by a team at the ATLAS Institute at CU Boulder. 

You’re a stock trader making trades on an 80’s style stock exchange, watching as the markets go up and down on crazy, overwhelming dashboard. To influence the game, you pick up the phone and say buy or sell to try to time the market changes.

The game itself was designed in Unity. To turn the old phones into controller input, they used Arduino-based Teensy boards. In an interview with Gamasutra they talk about the difficulty of working with old phones because often even identical looking phones will have different wiring and circuitry on the inside. 

Another idea they explored early on was using Watson AI to handle voice recognition and determine whether players were saying buy or sell. To keep it simple, though, they just used mics in the receiver to detect any kind of shouting. 

With the markets only going up or down, it’s safe to assume that every request will be the opposite of the last one. It’s like you’re flipping a switch. 

Ready? Set. Haiya! is a rhythm-based combat game developed by Geeky Panda Studios. 

To me it sorta seems like a cross between Street Fighter and Dance Dance Revolution. A sequence of different strike patterns scroll across the bottom of the screen. Not only do you need to make those hits on a life-size dummy in front of you, but you need to get the timing right for it to work.

The game was developed in — you guessed it — Unity. The dummy is made from PVC pipe and plywood. An Arduino inside takes readings from the sensors in each of the strike zones and sends that to Unity over USB. 

The sensors are nothing fancy, just copper tape, neoprene, velostat and some yarn. Maybe not a great long-term solution, but easy enough to repair on the fly.

If you think punching a dummy is awkward, try milking a cow. That’s the idea behind Milk! That! Cow!, a game designed by Gary O’Reilly and his team.

Using the Milkinator 5000, teams of two engage in competitive milking, with one person on the milking simulator and another using an analog stick to balance the bucket needed to catch the milk.

Despite how it looks, the controller here is actually a very familiar 2-buttons and a joystick. The udders, which are just sewn pink fabric, don’t actually do anything. It’s the buttons underneath them that actually register each pull. 

The bucket balance stick is literally a wooden spoon handle with a painted shot glass stuck on the top, all attached to an analog joystick. 

This time I’m going to let you guess the software used to make this game.

Finally, in the spirit of potentially gross animal simulation games, check out Guilty Smells by Heather Kelley and Paolo Pedercini. You’re a dog living in a dystopian future where foreign food is illegal. Your goal is to bust consumers of Mexican, Middle Eastern, and Chinese food while leaving McDonald’s consumers alone.

To do this, you use a game controller to approach people and then press a button to smell them. An Arduino will then trigger fans which blow air towards you through tubes and over scented materials. You then have to decide whether the person has been eating illegal food. If they are, a SWAT team comes and takes them away.

Now, if the idea of learning how to develop your own funny game is something you think you might be into, it’s hard to ignore the fact that all of these games were made in Unity. So for this week’s Tip, check out Unity. 

Not only is it free to download and works on both Mac and PC, but Unity has just announced that they’re opening up 3 months of free access to learn Unity Premium. If you’ve been curious to see what it’s about, now’s a great time. 

While reading through how Guilty Smells was created I learned about a $45 plug-in for Unity called Doodle Studio 95. It lets you just hand doodle designs and animations right into Unity. If you like the hand-drawn style and this is a process that makes more sense to you, it’s worth a look.

For this week’s Digi-Key spotlight, it’s my yearly reminder that experimental hardware interfaces like these can be prototyped quickly using a Makey Makey. 

Available as a $50 kit from Digi-Key, with all the cables and alligator clips you need, the Makey Makey connects up to your computer over USB and turns connected objects into keypresses, with no code required.

Conductive tape, aluminum foil, spoons, bananas, can all be converted into arrow keys and space bar, and used to control games on your computer or even custom programs you can create using MIT’s Scratch software. Great for kids, but I also see these in tons of hardware prototypes for quick proof of concept stuff. Check it out.

And that does it for this week’s show, be sure to subscribe, leave a comment, or leave a thumbs up. Let me know what you think about this whole Alt.Ctrl game scene. What kind of game would you make? Let’s talk about it.

You can also sign-up for the Maker Update newsletter. A big thanks to my patrons on Patreon and to Digi-Key Electronics for making this show possible. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.