Whee, ten cents!

[onigame]

I thought I saw a quarter inside the little slit on the back of the SHaRC, but Jesse told me afterwards that it actually was a dime, which was being used as the positive terminal for the batteries.

[Jesse-GC]

Yeah I needed a flat piece of metal.  I found some battery terminals that looked like they might work but they weren't cheaper, and were harder for me to envision how to design the case around them.

I think that probably at least third of the SHaRC problems were power related, which I think basically comes down to lack of industrial design experience.   The negative terminals were also not very good (they were proper battery springs but there wasn't really a suitable way to attach them to the housing).

The main reason I didn't want the SHaRCs back is if we ever need them again, I'd like build them again using the considerable amount I've learned along the way.

[brent]

Is there any way to turn the SHaRC on/off to preserve the battery? Sorry if this has been covered elsewhere...

[Jesse-GC]

You can slip a little piece of plastic in that slot in the back and wedge it in there.  However by the end party I think most peoples SHaRC's batteries had gotten low enough that the GPS will no longer work.

If you're up for more involved surgery you could take off the grip tape and probably put new C cells in there; if you're lucky you can get away without even reglueing anything.

[Rachel-XX]

Hey, Jesse,

You'll be pleased to know that our SHaRC was pretty resilient. We dropped it about the middle of the game at Fisherman's Wharf (despite the warnings). Well, the whole thing split open, but we put it together, wrapped some tape around like a bandage and it worked fantastically the rest of the game Awesome job with those!

Rachel

[Jesse-GC]

Yikes!  Glad you were able to fix it!

I had much better plans on how to attach the two halves together than just glueing, but I didn't know what I was doing well enough to make it work.  So: Glue!

[Matt-GC]

Jesse, you might be surprised to know that one of the spare SHaRCs was working the next morning and we were able to lock on to the Split Spiritus.  We then took it to breakfast and to our attempted retrieval of the temporary tattoos puzzle and it told us how far we were from David's the whole time.

Rachel, we actually had a playtest team drop their SHaRC in Chinatown during the full-length playtest and it too split open and some of the casing shattered.  I stuffed everything back inside, wrapped it in scotch tape very similar to how you had done and it continued to work for the rest of the test.  Kudos to Jesse!