As mentioned in the project's details, this project has been "cooking on the back burner" as it were for the better part of the last 5 years. It all started when my then girlfriend, Maggie (now my wife), got a job in early 2012 as the Art Room Director and Graphic Designer at a little known production company called Bad Robot. A designer myself, as well as a storyteller and super nerd, you can imagine I was just a liiiittle jealous of her at the time... Everyday after work was another day of torture as she excitedly recounted the happenings at Bad Robot to me over dinner. After a couple months of working at Bad Robot Maggie started agreeing with me that I should definitely be working there too...

A huge fan of JJ, and all he does, I knew I'd have to do something big to get his attention and prove I belonged at Bad Robot. As a child of the 80's, I innately understood the well JJ is drawing from, and quickly came up with the perfect project to get his attention, a mystery puzzle box/micro arcade cabinet that referenced 80's pop culture (think Indiana Jones meets The Last Star Fighter meets War Games with a dash of The Goonies, The Monster Squad, The Explorers and A Christmas Story thrown in for good measure)! I knew I was onto something when Maggie (who I jokingly refer to as the "why person" in my life) didn't ask me "why?" a million billion times.

Sure of myself, I started researching potential solutions to the problem I'd created for myself, and quickly came to the following conclusions:

1. This project would take a lot of energy, time, and most importantly money to develop into a working prototype (much less a finished product)
2. It was a pithy and self serving reason to do all of this just for another job when every other piece of personal work I'd made up to that point had included some sort of social-action underpinning
3. This idea was bigger than a one off promo piece

Don't get me wrong, at the time I really really REALLY wanted to work at Bad Robot, but once I started doing my research for this project I quickly realized that I was largely doing it because I was jealous of Maggie and her new job... Further exacerbating the situation was the job I had at the time (which I hated with every fiber of my being). It also didn't help that I was hitting my mid 30's and was kind of going through a third life crisis... With all of this in mind it quickly struck me as a waste of the limited free time I had outside of work to spend all of my time working on something like this, especially when I could be using my free time to create something that mattered. In hindsight, I think this is why Maggie never asked me the "whys?" she's so prone to ask me a million kajillion times whenever I decide to tackle one of my new projects. I think she knew I'd come to this conclusion on my own...

Anywho, with all of that said I put it in the "pile" with the the other dozen or so half baked ideas I have swirling around in the back of my head at any given time.... yet, this idea WOULD NOT DIE. The "mystery puzzle box/micro arcade cabinet idea" continued to live on just under my consciousness, ready to breach the veil between my subconsciousness and consciousness should I let my brain go idle long enough. So it was after years of constantly talking about my "mystery puzzle box/micro arcade cabinet idea" that Maggie finally told me to shut-up, and challenged me to "find a kit, and put it together" before trying to make something this complicated from scratch. I think she did this because she:

1. Was tired of hearing me talk about this project
2. Thought I'd see how hard my project idea was to execute after building a premade kit
3. Thought I'd tire myself out chasing my own tail while trying to figure out how to go from a premade kit to the proposed project

A prodigious Lego and model kit maker as a kid, mechanic in a past life (I was a shipboard engineer while in the Army), part-time film production/environmental designer, competent artist+designer in my own right, and lifelong tinkerer I foolishly accepted her challenge. if anyone could make this I thought, "I COULD!" After some research I found 2 kits online that I could buy and build. The first kit I found was the Adafruit Cupcade kit (this kit was by far the easier of the two to get and build, and is sold by Adafruit online in their store. As a Adafruit kit it also came with everything needed to build it), the second was a Micro Raspberry-Pi Arcade Cabinet Instructable made by a user called diygizmo (this kit was harder to get and assemble, requiring me to buy the parts needed to build it from multiple online sources. It also seemed like it was designed with a more intermediate user/maker in mind, requiring a greater deal of experience and skill to build than the Cupcade). Subsequently, I took note of the joystick and switches used by diygizmo in his build, and bought myself a Adafruit Cupcade kit. Over a weekend in the Winter of 2014 I built my Cupcade!

While I felt accomplished, I also felt really tired after a long weekend of working outside of my comfort zone (primarily in the command line, while trying to get Raspbian up and running on a RPi B+. A programmer/software engineer I am not...). Maggie was right, again. I'd built a micro arcade from a premade kit, and had finally managed to get the cabinet out of my system, for the time being... You see, shortly after assembling my Cupcade kit I started planning my marriage proposal to Maggie, and started spending all of my free time through the spring of the following year planning and then executing it. After the proposal, we then started working on a ambitious VR PSA we'd written and designed to get girls into STEM, designed and built two 800 sq ft trade show booths for a client, planned our wedding, got married in the Fall of 2016, and then moved...

After the move we turned our full attention to the 2016 Presidential Election. Without getting too political here, let me just say that we're both of mixed descent (specifically, we're both partially Mexican), live in Southern California, and tend to fall on the Democratic side of the political spectrum. Let me just further say that we were/are not impressed by Donald Trump, his rhetoric, his platform, and most importantly his political inclinations and campaign to attain the highest office in the land. To say we were both horrified by the election night results would be an understatement. We were shocked, deeply saddened and very upset by his election day win. Moving on...

The aforementioned justification and call-to-action needed to make this project didn't crystallize until after the New Year. Alarmed by Trump's continued rhetoric around and after his swearing in, followed by an immediate sense of hope thanks to participation in the LA Women's March, quickly followed by anger thanks to Trump's announced plans to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcast at the end of January I finally knew why I had to make the cabinet.

Cue Maggie's "Whys?"...

Long story short, I needed to prove to Maggie I could make something like this to begin with! Like any other project I've previously worked on, it all started with sketches...

Then it was onto foam core for prototyping. While I'll usually mock something like this up in cardboard (because it's free and abundantly available), in this instance I didn't want to have to deal with the problems cardboard introduces to a mock-up of this size while trying to make something I'm going to be basing my final measurements off of. So, instead I went straight to foam core resulting in the quick mock-up pictured below. I made this mock-up with a small trophy/bottle of wine in mind. I targeted this size because I want the cabinet's recipients to keep the cabinet on their desks!

With the cabinet's approximate proportions and dimensions figured out, I then made a more detailed mock-up with a functional hidden drawer and two secret compartments that actually opened! Below you'll find photos of the V2 foam core mock-up I made to walk people through the proposed user experience.

With V2 of the foam core mock-up complete I then wrote out a "wireframe" detailing my designed user experience and presented it to my teammates to give them an idea of what the final experience would look and feel like. Once I'd shown it to Maggie, Stefan, Josh, Bernie and Jean (the team) I had the buy-in that I needed! More importantly they finally had a full understanding of the project I'd been talking about building for the last 5 years!

In late January, on a lark really, Stefan and I decided to go to the January Hackaday.io meetup at the SupplyFrame DesignLab in Pasadena California to see what kind of help and support we could drum up for this project. After a quick conversation with the Lab's Resident Engineer, Dan, I found out we could submit this project for consideration at the residency program!

I promise I'm not even a quarter as evil as I look in this photo...

The dream team talking about making stuff (left to right: Stefan, me and Jean)!

I then scheduled a time the next day to come by and present my V2 foam core mock-up to Dan. I made my case to him, and per his instructions, submitted this project for consideration to the DesignLab Lab Residency program! After a month of deliberation (by the SupplyFrame staff) we were told we'd been accepted into the residency program!...

... conditionally, pending a review of our progress at the end of March...