The GPS tracker didn’t mark the first time hobbyist technologies played a pivotal role for Better Call Saul or Breaking Bad, and both Jason Delap and Joseph Ulibarri can point to more than a few favorite memories. For Ulibarri, he was responsible for perhaps Breaking Bad’s most infamous prop—the M60 machine gun that Walt uses in the series finale.
“By the end, I had that all controlled wirelessly so I could start the gun rotating back and forth, pop the trunk, and pull the trigger on the machine gun so it could fire,” he recalls. “It was a little less Arduino, more remote-frequency controllers like you’d use for a radio car. That was one of my favorite tech moments so far.”
Delap’s mind goes toward a bit of Roomba-hacking, also on Breaking Bad. “There was a party scene at [Jesse] Pinkman’s house with the Roomba, and originally I was steering that with my phone—we Bluetooth’ed that with an interface,” he says. “But it was a little iffy; it’d go out at times and I almost vacuumed up a girl’s hair who was passed out on the floor. So it ends up that was actually me pushing the Roomba—I’d go forward, back up. I had to mentally prepare for the role of Roomba, and it looks great. So sometimes the fanciest tech work is analog, and you still have to get creative. No matter how many things are out there to make our lives easier, sometimes they don’t work.”
– from Better Call Saul needed 3D printing and an Arduino to arm Mike Ehrmantraut
