One of the projects that my work as been involved with is at a University in Glasgow which puts on a Cyber Defence Exercise each year when university IT teams compete to defend websites against ethical hackers from commercial companies. It’s a tough, gruelling exercise which runs over an entire weekend 24/7, and I was asked if I would help by providing a fun break for them to exercise their skills, but lightheartedly in the middle of the weekend.

To this end we devised a escape room project with lots of fun puzzles, but nothing too strenuous and lots of fun. This post covers the build of just one of those puzzles and it’s not really a puzzle at all, more of a dare or consequences.

The trick here is to put your hand into the tube at the top of the box and reach down with all the cat noises happening as you reach further into the box o’ doom and pick up what is at the bottom of the box. The inside of the box was spray painted matt black so it would be difficult to see what lay at the bottom of the box and the original plan was to have a flat padlock key to be laying there which would be a little difficult to get hold of to pull out. All the which you were doing this small plastic feelers would be stroking your arm and hand using Passive infra-red detector (PIR) to note where your arm was and servos to move the feelers and touch your arm and hand. It’s a bit like a small version of a ghost train ride.

I had put together a video to show the Office team how I had put the whole thing together so I can show you that here.

Originally there was planned to be four zones with each one getting increasing noisy and with each getting increasing violent in it’s touching and stoking of your hand or arm. In the end I realised that I had only provided for four opening for the four pillars of support which meant that there would only be three servos and one PIR detector per zone, so twelve servos in all. This was no problem as the pca9685 card would support up to 16 servos and this just needed a change in the java code to make sure that the program skipped the remaining servo in the zone so there were no strange pauses in the program.

For those interested in the programming, both for the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi, all code can be found on Github in a public project which you can fork at https://github.com/ksimes/BoxODoom. Have lots of fun with it.