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Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a fun party game for iOS and Android that presents players with the challenge of cooperatively defusing a virtual bomb. It is a bit like those “no, cut the blue wire!” scenes in movies, because only one player can see the bomb. The other player(s) has access to information about the bomb and good communication is necessary to guide the first player through the disarming process. Inspired by that game, Heath Paddock built this physical escape room-in-a-box for his friends that looks like a blast to play.

This self-contained escape room works almost exactly like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, but lets the player in charge of defusing interact with a physical “bomb.” If they wait too long or mess up the disarming process three times, the bomb explodes and the players lose.

As with Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, this device has several modules that each act as distinct puzzles. For example, one module has an LED matrix “maze” that the defuser must guide a dot through. But they can’t see the walls of the maze, so they have to rely on instructions from the “expert” player that has access to the documentation.

One Arduino oversees the whole game, tallying failed attempts and counting down until detonation. And each module also has its own dedicated Arduino to read the inputs and set the outputs (such as LEDs and displays) for that specific puzzle.

To keep everything in sync, Paddock developed his own communication protocol. It allows any Arduino to send a message to the central Arduino by passing it along a serial chain that goes through every Arduino in the box. That chain forms a big loop, so every message will eventually reach its destination.

This project is a delight to see in action and looks like a lot of fun. It takes the proven gameplay of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes and adds tactility to enhance the experience.

The post This escape room-in-a-box looks like a blast appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Alien is an icon of the sci-fi horror genre and it owes its status to the legendary design work of H. R. Giger. He was responsible for the very original xenomorph and much of the set design throughout franchise. Alien and its sequels have a distinct visual aesthetic that inspired Redditor Wired_Workshop to build this escape room puzzle.

Wired_Workshop attended the Maker Alliance Summer Camp event in Kentucky and was tasked with contributing a puzzle to that event’s ’80s-themed escape room. Being a massive Alien fan, Wired_Workshop chose to borrow the design aesthetic and some of the effects from that franchise. The puzzle itself takes sequences from the films and even has a Predator Easter egg, since both franchises exist within the same cinematic universe.

This project required several different fabrication techniques, including 3D printing, CNC routing, and welding. An Arduino Mega 2560 board controls LEDs and monitors user input through a keypad, a huge switch lever, and glowing canisters that the player must lift. There’s also a fog machine to produce a smoke effect, driven by an Arduino Nano. Because this is a puzzle, the player has to complete those in the right order by following the available clues. And because this is just one part of an escape room, solving this puzzle provides a clue for the next puzzle developed by another attendee.

Be sure to watch Wired_Workshop’s full video on this project to learn about all the details and to see the various Alien references. Eagle-eyed viewers should be able to spot some homages to specific scenes and props from the films.

The post A gorgeous escape room puzzle with an Alien theme appeared first on Arduino Blog.

A diagram showing an LED on the left, a lever-style plumbing valve in the center, and an Arduino Uno on the right.

Input devices that can handle rough and tumble environments aren’t nearly as varied as their more fragile siblings. [Alastair Aitchison] has devised a brilliant way of detecting inputs from plumbing valves that opens up another option. (YouTube) [via Arduino Blog]

While [Aitchison] could’ve run the plumbing valves with water inside and detected flow, he decided the more elegant solution would be to use photosensors and an LED to simplify the system. This avoids the added cost of a pump and flow sensors as well as the questionable proposition of mixing electronics and water. By analyzing the change in light intensity as the valve closes or opens, you can take input for a range of values or set a threshold for an on/off condition.

[Aitchison] designed these for an escape room, but we can see them being great for museums, amusement parks, or even for (train) simulators. He says one of the main reasons he picked plumbing valves was for their aesthetics. Industrial switches and arcade buttons have their place, but certainly aren’t the best fit in some situations, especially if you’re going for a period feel. Plus, since the sensor itself doesn’t have any moving parts, these analog inputs will be easy to repair should anything happen to the valve itself.

If you’re looking for more unusual inputs, check out the winners of our Odd Inputs and Peculiar Peripherals contest or this typewriter that runs Linux.

No spooky mansion is complete without a secret passage accessed through a book shelf — or so Hollywood has taught us. What works as a cliché in movies works equally well in an escape room, and whenever there’s escape rooms paired with technology, [Alastair Aitchison] isn’t far. His latest creation: you guessed it, is a secret bookcase door.

For this tutorial, he took a regular book shelf and mounted it onto a wooden door, with the door itself functioning as the shelf’s back panel, and using the door hinges as primary moving mechanism. Knowing how heavy it would become once it’s filled with books, he added some caster wheels hidden in the bottom as support. As for the (un)locking mechanism, [Alastair] did consider a mechanical lock attached on the door’s back side, pulled by a wire attached to a book. But with safety as one of his main concerns, he wanted to keep the risk of anyone getting locked in without an emergency exit at a minimum. A fail-safe magnetic lock hooked up to an Arduino, along with a kill switch served as solution instead.

Since his main target is an escape room, using an Arduino allows also for a whole lot more variety of integrating the secret door into its puzzles, as well as ways to actually unlock it. How about by solving a Rubik’s Cube or with the right touch on a plasma globe?

The trick to a fun escape room is layers. For [doktorinjh]’s Spacecase, you start with an enigmatic aluminum briefcase and a NASA drawstring backpack. A gamemaster reads the intro speech to set the mood, and you’re ready to start your escape from the planet. The first layer is the backpack with puzzles you need to solve to get into the briefcase. In there, you discover a hidden compartment and enough sci-fi references to put goofy smiles on our faces. We love to see tools reused as they are in one early puzzle, you use a UV LED to reveal a hidden message, but that light also illuminates puzzle clues later.

All the tech in Spacecase makes it a wonder of mixed media. The physical layer has laser engraved wood featuring the font from the 1975 NASA logo, buttons, knobs, LEDs, toggle switches, and a servo. Beneath the visible faceplate is an RGB sensor, audio player, speaker, and at the center is an Arduino MEGA. We’d love to get our hands on Spacecase for a game, and we’re inspired to pull out all the stops and build games with our personal touches. Maybe something with a mousetrap.

This isn’t the first escape room hardware we’ve seen and [doktorinjh] similarly made a bomb diffusing game.

Escape rooms can be a lot of fun, though with today’s conditions, you may instead be staying at home. As seen in the video below, the Spacecase gives you the best of both worlds as an entirely portable escape “room” in a box.

The Spacecase consists of only a hard suitcase, along with a NASA tote bag. Each of these contain different elements that allow you to “repair your spaceship and escape before you and your crew run out of oxygen.”

Inside the bag is an emergency power module, which must be opened to reveal the key to the suitcase, and plugged in to power it. Hidden within the suitcase is about 20 puzzles that are solved interactively via the Arduino Mega-based electronics under the control panel.

The build features voice feedback, as well as a variety of knobs, LEDs, switches, and more, providing what looks like a fun and challenging puzzle to get your spaceship off the ground!

Escape rooms are awesome for people who like to solve puzzles, see how things work, or enjoy a mystery. Everyone reading this falls into at least one of those categories. We enjoy puzzles and mysteries, but we have a fondness for seeing how things work. To this end, we direct your attention to [doktorinjh]’s “Bomb Disarming Puzzle in a Suitcase” Game, which is a mysterious puzzle box he built himself. I guess the mystery is mostly in the gameplay, which you can watch below because he shows us his build photos and describes the hardware inside.

At its heart is an Arduino Mega, a wise choice since our back-of-the-napkin estimation puts his I/O count over forty-five and the Mega can handle them all with a few pins to spare. Working inside the confines of a briefcase came with its own challenges, but we adore the way he used the hexagon theme in the top panel to allow for knob clearance. It was so subtle that we almost missed it.

The escape room theme is delightful, and we appreciate the mix of games, aesthetics, and techno-trickery in many forms.

To experience an escape room, you normally need a rather large dedicated space. This project, however, by creator Jason R, takes this physical clue-solving concept and shrinks it down to fit within a small suitcase!

To play, participants have to work their way through a series of problems, supplied in the ‘TOP SECRET’ documentation attached to and inside the device, connecting jumpers, flipping switches, and turning knobs as needed. 

A computerized voice guides you along the way, with LEDs and an LCD panel providing visual output as you save the day. The game is controlled via an Arduino Mega, while power supplied by a rechargeable USB power bank.

I created an “escape room-esque” game that is contained within a small suitcase. In total, there are about 15-20 puzzles and sub-puzzles that need to be solved in order to disarm the “explosives”. Players are given 60 minutes to arrange puzzles, decipher clues hidden in QR codes, connect cities in maps to form numbers, decode morse signals, and other similar things. 

If you like solving puzzles out in the real world, you’ve probably been to an escape room before, or are at least familiar with its concept of getting (voluntarily) locked inside a place and searching for clues that will eventually lead to a key or door lock combination that gets you out again. And while there are plenty of analog options available to implement this, the chances are you will come across more and more electronics-infused puzzles nowadays, especially if it fits the escape room’s theme itself. [Alastair Aitchison] likes to create such puzzles and recently discovered how he can utilize a USB powered plasma globe as a momentary switch in one of his installations.

The concept is pretty straightforward, [Alastair] noticed the plasma globe will draw significantly more current when it’s being touched compared to its idle state, which he measures using an INA219 current shunt connected to an Arduino. As a demo setup in his video, he uses two globes that will trigger a linear actuator when touched at the same time, making it an ideal multiplayer installation. Whether the amount of fingers, their position on the globe, or movement make enough of a reliable difference in the current consumption to implement a more-dimensional switch is unfortunately not clear, but definitely something worth experimenting with.

In case you’re planning to build your own escape room and are going for the Mad Scientist Laboratory theme, you’ll obviously need at least one of those plasma globes sparking in a corner anyway, so this will definitely come in handy — maybe even accompanied by something slightly larger? And for all other themes, you can always resort to an RFID-based solution instead.

If you’ve ever been to an escape room, you’ve undoubtedly had to deal with a wide variety of puzzles that you have to solve in order to get out of the “prison” that you’ve willingly thrown yourself into. Beyond the puzzle that you’re trying to decode, the mechanisms used can be extremely clever, and coming up with a new device to use in these scenarios was a perfect challenge for this team of Belgian college students.

Based on the project requirements, they created a Roomba-like circular robot controlled by an Arduino Uno and motor shield that drives a pair of DC motors. The idea, while not fully implemented due to time constraints, is that it can be remotely operated only after solving a riddle and within a certain time period, then drive itself back to a designated spot once the game is over. 

Here is a summary of what happens in the robot:

– The non-autonomous part: a remote controller is linked to Arduino through a receiver. Players control the remote and therefore control the Arduino which controls the motors. The Arduino is turned on before the game starts, but it enters the main function when players solve a riddle on the remote controller. An IR wireless camera is already turned on (turned on at the same time as the “whole” (controlled by the Arduino) when switch on/off turned on). Players guide the car with remote controller: they control the speed and the direction. When the timer that starts when the main function is entered is equal to 30 minutes, the control from the controller is disabled.

– The autonomous part: the control is then managed by the Arduino. After 30 minutes, the IR line tracker sensor starts following a line on the ground to finish the parcours.

For inspiration on building your own, check out the team’s write-up (including code) and a clip of the prototype below.



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