Altoids Project

The Altoids project is a father-son engineering effort completed over roughly two months, in which a 12-year-old and his father built a tiny computer inside an Altoids tin after receiving a free assembled robot at MIT Swapfest and pairing it with a used ThinkPad laptop. The team salvaged a 128x64 display from the robot, overcame a missing pinout—after AI tools hallucinated a 20-pin schematic for a 10-pin display—by locating the correct schematic on Arduino's forum, and ran the Space Trash game from the U8g2 library. Iterating through four versions, they downsized from an Arduino Nano, added LiPo batteries and a PowerBoost power supply, and handled CAD and 3D printing by the son, while hardware setbacks included a destroyed display pad during desoldering, a replacement ordered from Adafruit, and a new soldering iron that resolved uneven heating. Version 4 finally closed the lid, though two wires broke the next day, prompting further hacks. The project matters as a hands-on STEM example of open-source hardware communities, AI limitations, and iterative prototyping; what to watch next is whether the father-son team documents v5 fixes and shares schematics for others to replicate.