Plumbing Valves as Heavy Duty Analog Inputs

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 …read more Continue reading Plumbing Valves as Heavy Duty Analog Inputs

In Case you Cannot Make it to an Escape Room

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 …read more

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Plasma Globe Reveals Your Next Clue

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 …read more

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Car Hacking at DEF CON 26

A great place to get your feet wet with the data-network-wonderland that is modern-day automobiles is the Car Hacking Village at DEF CON. I stopped by on Saturday afternoon to see what it was all about and the place was packed. From Ducati motorcycles to junkyard instrument clusters, and from mobility scooters to autonomous RC test tracks, this feels like one of the most interactive villages in the whole con.

The Obvious: CAN Bus Hacking

When I think of car hacking, CAN bus is the first thing that pops to mind. CAN is the protocol used for the data network …read more

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Secret Riddle Retro Radio

When [the-rene] was building an escape room, he decided to have a clue delivered by radio. Well, not exactly radio, but rather an old-fashioned radio that lets you tune to a faux radio station that asks a riddle. When you solve the riddle, a secret compartment opens up. [the-rene] says you could have the compartment contain a key or a clue or even a cookie.

The outer case is actually an old radio gutted for this purpose. In addition, a laser cut box and a servo motor form the secret compartment.

The inside of the radio is decidedly modern. A …read more

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