Posts with «mesh network» label

Don’t Panic: a Cooperative Bomb Defusing Game

[Heath Paddock] wanted to confound his friends with a game that mimics an escape room in a box. About six months after starting, he had this glorious thing completed. It’s a hardware version of a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes where players have five minutes to defuse a suitcase bomb. This implementation requires at least two players, one with the box-bomb itself, and one who holds all the knowledge but can’t see the box-bomb to defuse it.

The wiring of the Mastermind module.

[Heath]’s version has twice as many modules as the original game, each hand-wired one driven by an Arduino. One of the modules is an LED maze. There are two green anchor LEDs in one of six configurations, and and blue and a red LED.

The object is to move the blue LED next to the red one without touching any walls. Of course, the box-holder can’t see the walls and must describe the configuration of the anchor LEDs to their partner in order to get started.

All of the modules are quite different, which likely makes for an extremely fun and challenging five minutes. [Heath] reports that getting inter-module communication down was a long road. Eventually, [Heath] settled on a mesh network configuration and connected everything in a big loop. Be sure to check out the walk-through video after the break.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a hardware implementation of this game. Here’s one that uses a Raspberry Pi.

THP Entry: Cut Energy Consumption by 30 percent with this WiFi XBee Setup

Let’s be honest. Paying electricity bills sucks. The amount paid is always too much, and the temperatures in the building are rarely set at a comfortable level. But now, with the help of this DIY Climate Control system, power-users can finally rejoice knowing that the heating and cooling process of their home (or commercial space) can be easily controlled through the utilization of an XBee Remote Kit and a process called zoning.

The team behind the project is [Doug], [Benjamin] and [Lucas]. They hope to solve the inconsistent temperature problems, which are caused by a moving sun, by open-sourcing their work into the community.

Their XBee system runs on a mesh network making it a perfect tool for sensing and communicating which areas in the house are too hot or too cold. Once the data is collected, XBee modules route the information wirelessly to each other until it reaches a central Arduino gatekeeper; which then decides if it wants to heat, ventilate, or air condition the room.

Not to mention all the added benefits posted below:

For one, you can hook-up temperature ICs like the TMP36 (PDF) without the need to buy extra parts. Better yet, the XBee can be programmed to fall asleep thus saving battery life. This means that the whole module can run on rechargeable AAA batteries.

Even further, it can be coded at its various ports to read other devices. This is great because it gives the setup the potential to turn on and off devices that are hooked to the module, transforming it into a networked hub of interconnected devices.

This approach not only allows you to be involved in saving the planet, but it keeps your home, warehouse, or office building at a much more comfortable level in the process, a real win-win.


The project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.


Filed under: home hacks, The Hackaday Prize