Interactive tabletop playing surface (Space Hulk Hobby Challenge)

With the hardware built and tested, the long, arduous task of building the accompanying app is ongoing. Coding doesn’t make for much of a spectator sport – it’s just screenfuls and screenfuls of gibberish (unless you, yourself, are a coder, then it’s full of dodgy functions and routines that “aren’t how I would have done it”).

But while the coding is ongoing, there’s still plenty to do on the tabletop.

The hall sensor array can detect neodymium magnets from a distance of about 5mm – 8mm away. As the sensors are placed on the underside of some 1.5mm thick mdf, when the whole board is flipped the right way up, it means we can detect playing pieces when they are placed on the board, up to around 6mm away.

This means that we can place not just a printed sheet of paper or card, to represent our playing area, but actual terrain too!

I’ve had a selection of Hirst Arts moulds for a number of years and a few bags of dental plaster (Whitestone) left over from some product prototyping a while back. It didn’t take long to cast up and knock out a few different types of walls for some sci-fi terrain.

I decided that floor tiles might be a little thick, so mounted the wall pieces onto some 1mm thick “mountboard” (the kind of card used by picture framers to mount an image in a frame) and primed in black.

The Hirst Arts pieces are built for a 1″ square grid, and my sensors are placed at 1.5″ centres – but many of the wall pieces are half-an-inch thick, meaning they can be placed at the end of a one-inch section to create 1.5″ pieces.

Alternatively, three Hirst Arts pieces placed next to each other create a 3″ section – the width of exactly two of my sensor squares.

Determined to get the pieces completed this side of Xmas, I favoured a quick drybrush and picked out just a few panels on the wall sections.

Floor panels are to be laser cut from some 300gsm card, drybrushed and glued to the floor of each terrain section.

It’ll be a couple of days before I can fire up the laser cutter, so until then, it’s back to the computer, to get coding…..