The effort kicked off after the duo acquired a secondhand laptop and a donated robot kit at the MIT Swapfest, initially using the robot's display to host a game titled Space Trash. As the pair aimed to enclose the system within a metal container, the 12-year-old son managed all the 3D printing and CAD work while adapting to tighter internal constraints. Multiple revisions required swapping out failing hardware, fixing broken wires, and buying a new Adafruit display alongside a higher-quality soldering iron. The fifth and final design successfully sealed the electronics with thin 30 AWG wiring and preserved enough space for a small pouch of mints.
Key points
Five distinct iterations were required to shrink the components enough for the metal lid…: Five distinct iterations were required to shrink the components enough for the metal lid to shut properly.
Ultra-fine 30 AWG wiring and hot glue secured the final electronic assembly within the mi…: Ultra-fine 30 AWG wiring and hot glue secured the final electronic assembly within the mint tin's lid.
Not a single original electronic component from the initial prototype remained in the fin…: Not a single original electronic component from the initial prototype remained in the final working build.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
My 12-year-old son and I spent about two months on, what we call, the Altoids project. Here is the final product (video):
It all started when I took him to MIT Swapfest for the first time. We saw an assembled robot from a couple’s booth; later we learned that it was from a kit. It was built by their daughter many years ago. After realizing I had come with my son, they gave us the robot for free. We also picked up a used ThinkPad laptop at a very reasonable price, which we used for the project.
As any curious mind would, we disassembled the robot. Noticing that we were missing the control, we wanted to see which parts we could reuse. We took the 128x64 display off. But we couldn’t find the pinout for the display. We tried using AI, but it hallucinated so badly that it gave us a 20-pin pinout when the display only has 10 pins.
After hours of searching around, we found the exact schematic posted on Arduino’s forum by a stranger on the Internet.…
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