bradgrier.com

Category: Doing

  • Looks like we’re doomed

    Picked up Gloom­haven. Think of it as D&D as a boardgame. It’s the num­ber one game on BoardGameGeek, so it’ll likely be pretty good. Also, the reviews like it. We set up and star­ted get­ting famil­i­ar with it last night. Con­sider it Ses­sion Zero in D&D parlance. Can­’t wait for Ses­sion One!

  • NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Three: Getting Rid of the Dirty

    NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Three: Getting Rid of the Dirty

    Wel­come back to part three of my res­tor­a­tion and adven­tures with an NEC PC-8201a vin­tage com­puter circa. 1983. Let’s get to it! Stripping Down It’s actu­ally not that grungy to look at. Sure, a minor scuff or two, but from the looks of it, this unit is actu­ally quite clean. So, let’s get it apart and get…

  • NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Two: Rebuilding the NiCad Battery Pack

    NEC PC-8201a Adventures – Part Two: Rebuilding the NiCad Battery Pack

    These were great batteries, 40 years ago. This was a good task to start on. It’d been years since I’ve done any ser­i­ous elec­tron­ics work, and my pre­vi­ous Ardu­ino pro­ject, while suc­cess­ful, reminded me just how much I’d for­got­ten about elec­tron­ics over the years. And my skills had mostly van­ished too. So a nice easy pro­ject was…

  • NEC PC-8201a Adventures — Part One: It’s here, now what?

    NEC PC-8201a Adventures — Part One: It’s here, now what?

    Back in the early-to-mid ’80s, per­son­al com­put­ing was find­ing it’s way. Desktop com­puters were becom­ing more vis­ible in smal­ler busi­nesses, but the work of com­put­ing still had to be done at the work­place. Port­able com­puters were really just shrunken down desktops — they were called lug­gables at the time. Then came the revolu­tion, as they say. …

  • Instructable: Arduino Keyboard Joystick Extender Box and Sound Controller Thing Using Deej

    Instructable: Arduino Keyboard Joystick Extender Box and Sound Controller Thing Using Deej

    Update Jan. 23, 2021: Looks like the Joystick circuit has failed as it no longer toggles the Mute function. Well, I wasn’t too happy with the initial wiring job so this may be an opportunity to update that. A while ago I developed an interest in Ardu­ino micro­con­trol­lers, and this is my first ‘actu­al’ project.…

  • For 3d Printing, Levelling the Bed is Finicky

    So a week or so ago I tweaked some­thing on my print­er. Maybe it was ini­tial lay­er height. Maybe I adjus­ted a bed screw. Not sure, but all of a sud­den my prints would­n’t stick to the bed properly. Using the ‘paper drag’ meth­od of bed lev­el­ling ‘sort of’ worked. But it really was tri­al…

  • 3d printing small board game accessories

    I’m really happy when I can com­bine two of my hob­bies. This time it’s Boardgam­ing and 3d Printing. Often, many games have tokens or chits that are pooled for play­ers to take at dif­fer­ent times dur­ing play.  Usu­ally, these sit in piles around the main game area. On Thingi­verse, swholmstead shared this neat design — which I…

  • 3d Printing Terrain for tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons

    Pretty cool what a little time, 3d Print­ing tech­no­logy, some cre­at­ive design work, and a spool of PLA will get you. I’ve been test­ing vari­ous dun­geon com­pon­ents to see how well they’ll work with our play style. And how good they’ll look once painted and finished. The crates above have yet to be fin­ished. Usu­ally, I…

  • 3d Printing some feet to display photos on my desktop

    We had these ugly plate-stand style photo stands for some alu­min­um photo prints. Had that ‘wrought-iron’ look. Totally not suit­able for a very white shot of our dogs. 3d Print­ing to the rescue. Then I found these simple ‘feet’ on Thingi­verse — a per­fect solution. I prin­ted off one batch, but had a bit of a flash­ing…

  • More progress on painting Alien Frontiers Field Generators

    Work in progress, painting Alien Frontiers game components.

  • Alien Frontiers — Colony paint complete

    Well, I fin­ished paint­ing the colony com­pon­ents. Look­ing at the pho­tos, they kinda look messy. Note to self, don’t rush, even if you have 40 of the little bug­gers to paint. Ah well, on the game board at nor­mal view­ing dis­tances they look ok. I did­n’t want to paint the ori­gin­als that came with the game so…

  • Painting the components of Alien Frontiers

    Recently I’ve become aware of a trend to paint the often gar­ishly-col­oured mini­atures and game com­pon­ents you find in mod­ern board games. My first attempt was with Mice and Mys­tics, and now I’m work­ing on Ali­en Frontiers. This time, I decided to pro­to­type my  col­our schemes digit­ally. To do this, pho­to­graphed the com­pon­ents just after prim­ing, so…