Sibling rivalry........nearly

You may have gathered that I live in the UK,

I have, however, a very close friend who is American and lives in the state of Georgia. We have been friends for so long, it almost seems like forever and as we also share many interests it sometimes happens that a bit of rivalry creeps into our relationship. Just before Christmas 2019 I received a parcel with a little electronic gift that Todd had made for me.

Based on a Raspberry Pi Zero, it has a small screen that plays a series of photos of our last holiday with him interpolated with  inspiring messages.

It was really great and I kept showing it to family and friends all through Christmas.

In fact, the only minor problem was that Todd had needed to use a case from another project to build it into for safety and looks. And looks were not brilliant as he was at great pains to tell me.

Well, it didn't bother me but I knew I had my Prusa on the way. I also had some fairly extensive knowledge of using Neo-Pixels and that's when it all got a bit competitive.

My idea was to build a very small version of the Christmas display and make it shine through a non transparent case so that, when not switched on, it just looked like a block of white plastic. Making something that small should be a doddle after making power supplies. Well it wasn't. I realised about two days in that I was becoming a bit of a perfectionist. Added to which, I had begun to learn a lot of useful stuff about 3D printing and coding for Arduinos. It took nearly three weeks to come up with the final design but it was worth it as the final product looks very elegant and simple. I shudder to think about the wasted filament but told myself it was all about learning how to do things properly. And then along came Ann and gave me a challenge. "Can you build me a Tesseract?