Analogue «bomb» with Arduino
Making the physical bomb was a challenging and very rewarding experience. It’s created with Arduino placed in a suitcase. None in the group had ever touched Arduino before, and we only had one person who had a little experience with MicroBit, so huge props to @gyllenstendesign for figuring it out in the end!
Arduino
Since we had no experience with Arduino, we scoured the internet for tutorials. Initially we wanted to recreate this bomb made by Alastair Aitchison, but we unfortunately didn’t have the same exact materials that he used, and trying to adapt the code to fit the materials we did have would be too over-ambitious for this project. Therefore our quest continued for a tutorial that fit the electronics we had on hand. Eventually we began looking through GitHub and discovered this tutorial made by Raphaël Champeimont, which is what we ended up using in the end. We even got in touch with the creator, who helped us figure stuff out.
Suitcase
After the "guts" was settled, we began working on the "shell". We bought a suitcase off Finn.no, and created a wooden mount to place the electronics on. One challenge was that the breadboard we used had already been taped onto a lasercut frame by the people we purchased it from, so some of the wires which were not supposed to be cut were unfortunately visible. To signal to the players that these wires should be left alone, we wrote a note in the suitcase and color coded these wires black and red. Meanwhile the wires that should be cut, we made colorful and wrote a note telling the players that these wires could be cut.
To add to the narrative, we filled a soda bottle with green soap water and pasted a sticker on it to make it look like a biohazard bomb. We also used some gold and black striped tape, which added to the narrative flair.
Reflection
Given more time, we could have tried out connecting our bomb to a speaker, and thus added sound effects like the final explosion and the ticking countdown timer, which could make the game more responsive to user input.
As for the suitcase, we could have tried getting our hands on another breadboard, which would have allowed us to hide the guts fully underneath the "shell". Or even better, we could have gotten to actually solder everything together. Although we tried to avoid permanently soldering anything, because we wanted to preserve the parts for use in future projects.
We also had a little fun talking about glitter bombs when ideating the analogue bomb, and talked about maybe creating a confetti explosion. Since an actual glitter bomb is a bit much, and having glitter stuck everywhere forever probably wouldn’t be very popular with the people who has to clean it up.
Affiliates
@gyllenstendesign @williamdalsto
