Mike Brinker

Lord of the Things: Spinner

I'm currently taking Chris and Tracy's 488 game design course and am working on some of the periphs for our final game project. It is affectionately titled "Lord of the Things". It's a board game about controlling lots of objects using the principles of magnetic attraction and the creation of sets. My job was to construct the game board, set cheat sheet and the spinner. The spinner was something that I didn't want to cheap out on, and finding that most spinner constructions annoyed the hell out of me as well as had poor functionality, I had quite the task ahead of me.

So I got to thinking (albeit late at night), what spins really well? Hmmmm, lets think. Fans spin, but they would be hard to pull apart. I have a few small cpu fans lying around, but thought the better of it as I would just want to hook it up to batteries. That sorta cheapens the feel of actually flicking or spinning things with your own two hands. Hmm, motors spin. Have two but would be hard to power just right, one is a stepper. Hmm, hard drives spin. I have two of those damn things lieing around that are no good (come talk to me about hard drives sometime). Hmmmmmmmmmmm....hard drive....I have an old one that is virtually useless....let's take it apart! Here's a pic of an old 120 megabyte (yup, thats right!) Seagate IDE hdd. I think this came out of an old old old 286 or 386 IBM back in the day.

So I tore it apart. Proved a little difficult trying to unscrew star and hex shaped heads with a regular flat head drive, but after much twisting and grunting, I managed to get things apart.

Here's a pic with the drive gutted and the main rotor shaft flipped upside down and mounted. Here's the rest of the parts that I scavenged from inside (don't mind the wire junk behind it). Note the large swing arm.

And some more things, note the machined aluminum spacers and 3 hdd platters. Totally old school for only 120 meg of data! The drive is also twice as thick as regular internal HDD's for desktops.

So, time to make the spinner. I flipped the drive over and mounted the main hdd motor crank shaft upside down, so that the bulk of it stuck out of the bottom of the drive. The huge hdd caseing made for a wonderful solid base. I took both the spacers and placed them on the crank shaft first, then placed 2 hdd platters on top of each other ontop of that. I started playing around with where the swing arm should go and used a blank plastic cd in place of the paper to test things. The cd was too small in the end, heres a few blurry pictures.



Now for the paper. Good ol photoshop! All I needed was a choice between 4 different colors. Quite a lot of work for just choosing between the 4, but I wanted to nail this one and I know I can add more paper inserts later (totally customizable).

And here's a pic of the final design that I went for. Notice the placement of the third platter on top of the color wheel. This gives someplace for people to put their grimey fingers in order to spin the thing. Works REALLY well.

Take a look at the video! I love the retro feel. It looks like a futuristic record player, but digital, but not...kinda sorta. It just really tweaks me in all the right ways. Sorta looks like it belongs in a museum or an art gallery. Sorry it's an AVI, to late for me to change it right now.

Download AVI file