Unfortunately, I was rejected from the Machine of Death anthology. But I still liked my stories a lot, and decided that I would use their existence and an opportunity to learn about the Amazon Kindle self-publishing option. It was a very smooth process and I will definitely be using them again in the future with my other pieces.

Check them out on Amazon, or if you would rather just read them for free, the Google docs are here and here.

This is the realization of an idea I had a few months back while thinking about what kind of cool stuff you could make with acrylic plastic and a laser cutter. When you punch touch the bottom, it toggles between on and off and plays the “coin” sound effect. Except for once in a while, when you get something… extra.

The walls of the lamp are made of two layers of acrylic glued together to give the different color patterns and still have a completely smooth exterior. The bottom of the lamp conceals a capacitive touch sensor as a switch.

Inside, there’s a pile of really, really bright LEDs to light the whole thing up, a tiny speaker to play the sound effects, and a microcontroller to make everything work. It also features a custom-milled printed circuit board to simplify all the wiring.

I was really pleased to be able to use an ATTiny85 microncontroller for everything – far cheaper and simpler than a full-on Arduino! It even plays all the sounds without any extra components. I’ll definitely be using more ATTinys in the future.

A big shout-out goes to my new buddy Adam Ellsworth for being the guy with his hands on all the big cutting tools. Great work, Adam!

Update: We’re planning to make more of these, but I listed the first one on Etsy. Have a look!

Update 2: For the DIY crowd out there, would you be interested in a kit version of this? Trying to gauge interest in this.