Minecraft Electronics - Part 1 - Design

My nephew enjoys Minecraft and collecting rocks/minerals/geodes. So I am designing and building a Minecraft themed rock/mineral/geode display shelf! 

I had made these Minecraft blocks for him a couple years ago and this build will play off of the scale and style of those pieces.

I've always wanted to try working with electronics and figured what better way to get started then to integrate a custom electronic solution to the project.

This shelving system would make use of LED lights to cause the Minecraft mineral blocks to glow, the furnace to change color and flicker, and the lava to appear to move and change brightness.

All in all it turned out to be very successful.

I began designing the shelf system with the mindset that I wanted to created the smallest most interesting scene that I could while creating opportunities to create shelves to make it functional. I did this by modeling the entire thing in Sketchup and went as far as to texture all of the faces. This helped me keep track of how many images I would need to assemble and print. It also helped me identify how I could break the thing into parts to help expedite the process. I created some dimensioned plan views and printed them out as templates. 

1 Design / 2 Electronics / 3 Woodworking / 4 Decoupage / 5 Electronic Build / 6 Final