My trial run using a Canary cardboard cutter was far more successful than I had expected, resulting in a little cardboard companion minion perched on my shoulder. I was extremely happy and joined this month's (Virtual) Wearables Wednesdays event at CRASHSpace to show off my minion as a wearable electronic project. And also to thank Barb (who usually attends the event) for telling me about the Canary cutter.

Barb immediately (and correctly) recognized the minion's eye as the Adafruit HalloWing default program. She had several sets of similar eyes on hand, some incorporated into projects, but all the units within reach came as pairs so there were no immediate advice on how to get my two units to synchronize. But by now I didn't really want to synchronize them anyway, because that would mean taking apart my minion which I'm not ready to do just yet.

So I asked the attendees what I should do with the other eye. People started brainstorming and tossing out ideas. They were fine ideas but they didn't capture me as much as when Liz said "Mike Wazowski". I said "Yes!" and got started immediately while the meeting was still underway. This is falling back on old patterns, as it is pretty typical for work to happen during non-virtual Wearables Wednesdays meet.

I found a picture of Mike Wazowski on the internet and traced out a rough outline on cardboard. For the minion I wanted to keep the eyehole small so none of the electronics are visible. For Mike I thought I'd explore how things looked if the eye hole was larger.

Once I had Mike cut out and popped my second HalloWing into the eyehole, I decided I did not like how it looked. I much preferred the minion approach where the circuit board was hidden. If I wanted to build a Mike Wazowski with a properly obscured HalloWing eye hole while still maintaining proportions, I will need to cut a smaller Mike. There's also a second reason to want a smaller Mike: this one is too wide to sit properly on my shoulder. Maybe someone with much broader shoulders can pull it off, but this Mike's butt is too wide for me to carry around.

I will abandon this cardboard cutout and stick "try again with smaller Mike" on the to-do list. This is the beauty of experimenting with cardboard: cost of failure is low, and speed of iteration is fast. I could very quickly follow up this abandoned project with an absurd project.