Sometimes a box is just a box. Sometimes things escalate.

In passing the stage manager of the local string puppet theater mentioned she still has to order a donation box before their summer party. Surely we can help here and laser cut a nice box - may be with the logo engraved.

(Un)fortunately my wife and I had a bit of time at our hand to brain storm how such a box should look like. It really needs a string puppet. And the string puppet actually needs to bow when money is entered. May be have a lever that needs to be pulled and if some money has been inserted that could then make the puppet bow. But what about bank notes.... and sound... and light...? If we needs some contraption that makes the string puppet bow we need a stage to attach the strings to. But then we need lights and then we need power and then we can just use a micro controller... right?

Luckily there were a few other donation boxes build in our hackerspace at the same time for the "kontakt" festival. These look very different from what we had in mind. They were boxy with an acrylic front and a lot of blinking LEDs - which is fine for a music festival. But the electronics looked promising: ESP32 with a light barrier for the money slot, LED stripes and rings for light and a MP3 module for sounds. That not only meant we already had a prototype for the electronics but we could also "borrow" most of the components from the people building the festival donation boxes. Having a micro controller also means movement can be easily done with a small servo.

With a good idea on the electronics  it was time to decide on the shape of the donation box. It as very clear early on that a puppet would need a stage. And the stage could only be THE stage. A model of the about 200 year old original stage that the theater is still using. The stage that is the reason the theater even exists:

So we visited and took pictures from the stage two sets of scenery. Yes, the stage has multiple layers of scenery that will be changed between scenes and even slots for special effects like flame paper - although we were not going to replicate those. It also has an orchestra in multiple rows, even if the musicians are only static cutouts.

So we need a box where we can put the scenery in. Luckily there just was one added to Boxes.py recently: The NightLightBox by ojensen5115. It needed some minor adjustments for this to work but it could be used mostly as is with a bit unusual settings.

The NightLightBox of course doesn't have room for money to be inserted. I refrained from creating a purpose built box generator but decided to just combine existing boxes. For the money box the SlidingDrawer was an obvious choice. Just adding a mail box lock and a slit on top was all that was needed besides the electronics. For the electronics there is the *surprise* *surprise* ElectronicsBox this time without mounting tabs and just clued underneath the stage. A second box fills the remaining space on the bottom and offers storage for a power bank.

Making the string puppet bow turned out to be  a bit more difficult. While there is a special bow string (not this kind of bow string) it is just to hold the bottom of the puppet up. There is still a string for the head and two wires for the shoulders that need to move. Then there are the strings for the hands that might need handling, too. Otherwise the arms just hang down from the shoulders which doesn't looks very graceful.

But if everything you have is a hammer everything looks like a ... box. So I created a box that represents the torso of the puppet and all strings can be attached to the corresponding places. Then just tilting the box at the "hip" makes the puppet bow. The strings for the arms can just be fixed in place so the arms stay on the side of the torso. The stiffness of the fabric even makes them move outwards a bit which looks ... intended.

To gain a bit of height and make assembly and testing easier the box was put into another box that sticks through the roof of the stage while still being hidden by the front.

In action:

And finally at the theater: