As I mentioned in this blog’s first post, a few years ago I built myself a replica of the Pip-Boy 3000 from the game Fallout 3 – mainly crafted from card, glue, expanding-foam and spraypaint:
I used my Iphone for the screen, which allowed me to simulate the in-game interface by playing videos – animated scanlines and background humming noise added to the authenticity.
The screen was flat – unlike the slightly-rounded CRT of the in-game model… plus the prop was about 20% bigger than the “real” Pip-Boy, because I’d scaled the model to fit the phone.
Oh well, nothing I could do about that – even if I could find a super-thin CRT, I don’t think that’d fit into my limited budget, and I wouldn’t want to strap it too my arm!
Flash forward a few years… I saw a link to Zachariah Perry’s Pip-Boy build, showing off a cleverly-faked curved screen – ahah, very clever!
His version, based on a cast of the official Limited Edition alarm-clock, has a screen taken from a digital photo-frame, seen through a rectangular lens taken from an old slide-viewer.
This got me thinking… I was waiting on the 3D printer I had ordered/funded last year, so I might as well start reworking my old Pip-Boy 3D model, and get it ready for printing in plastic…
But this time I’d do it to a more accurate scale, and build it around a nice fake-CRT screen.
Since I still expected to wait a while until the printer was ready, I would concentrate on working on the internals first, in order to work out exactly how much I needed to fit inside.
I now had experience with the Raspberry Pi and Teensy boards, and had seen pictures of Ryan Grieve’s Raspberry Pipboy build, so I thought I might as well make this a fully-working prop too!
Ok, that’s where I started out, many months ago – now I can get onto writing some more detailed and (hopefully) useful posts: I’ve learned a lot about electronics and stuff while working on this project, and hope to share some of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way!
(BTW, my Makibox is currently en-route, via a slow boat from Hong Kong; Soon, sooon…)
this is my science fair project