An Homage to the Frustromantic - The 5x5 Box

I got into doing some very minor electronic tinkering, mostly involving bristlebots and LED throwies, right around the time team lowkey and Desert Taxi were working together to put on the Ghost Patrol game. I wished I had started a lot earlier since a lot of great ideas for GP went either unrealized or were less than fully fulfilled simply because I didn't have the skills to make them happen. Like many tinkerers, I became fascinated with projects based on the Arduino kits and IDE (integrated development environment). Basically, it's a simple microprocessor on an easy to use circuit board with an IDE based on c/c++ but way easier to write. I'd purchased an Arduino with the idea that the purchase would motivate me to learn to use it and to start a project. It didn't. I'm starting to see a pattern in myself. An object at rest...

I was nudged past my project inertia by a few really cool and creative projects that came across my news feed. The first, the Most Useless Machine, got me thinking about boxes whose purpose is initially unknown but which tempt the user into an interaction.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/01/leave_me_alone_box.html

The second points of inspiration were two projects, one I'd heard about some months back and another recently, that recreated that project. These were locked boxes that would only open at a specific set of GPS coordinates. Both of these projects used Arduino and a few fairly easy to find parts to create a truly compelling interaction with the user.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/10/gps-enabled_puzzle_box_opens_only_a.html
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/01/the_frustromantic_box_a_reverse_geo.html

Using these devices would force the user to triangulate a location on a map. Even if the user doesn't have experience with this kind of activity, the logic involved is not complicated and the user is compelled to work on the problem for the purpose of getting the box to do or give them something. What's in the box is almost secondary to the box itself which serves as a kind of interactive, fancy gift wrap but also as a gift itself. The experience of opening the gift is a gift.

I'd intended to simply copy the Frustromatic Box using the Arduino I already owned. Sitting on the couch one night, thinking about creating a cool wedding gift for my friends, Brian and Jenn (who I hope aren't reading this blog)(I'd wanted to recreate The Most Useless Machine for my friend, David's birthday but just didn't have the time and technical skills), an idea occurred to me. What if I could create a box that required the user to solve a deceptively simple puzzle to open the box and get the gift out? I'm pretty bad at coming up with puzzles, as anyone who worked with me on GP will attest, but this one occurred to me in a real ah-ha moment; the box would have six buttons and an LCD screen on top of it. One button would be separate from the rest and would serve as the on/initialize button. Five buttons in a row would serve as the puzzle input. All the user would have to do would be to turn the box on and then press the five buttons in a pre-determined order within a small number of attempts and with the puzzle resetting the order if the attempts failed. The interface would be easily deduced by the user and would be frustrating as well as frustratingly simple.

I drew this "technical" diagram to begin:

I surprised myself a little with how excited I was (and am!) about this project and I dove right in, trying to teach myself to program in the Arduino IDE by reading online documentation at the Arduino website and reading others' sketches from their projects. This taught me one important thing, I was in over my head. I had never programmed in any language before, not really (I'd goofed around with html and had done some stuff in basic on my C64 as a kid), and didn't understand a lot of the basics. So I ordered the Getting Started With Arduino book from the Maker Shed and most of the parts I imagined I would need.

I already had the Arduino but had failed to order the USB cable to actually upload sketches to it. I ordered the cable, the buttons and the LCD. I figured I could pick up a servo at any hobby shop when I needed it. I didn't get the LED lit buttons because they were considerably more expensive and I thought that the unlit buttons, providing less feedback, might be more mysterious.

So far, the only thing that's come in the mail is the book and yesterday I read it pretty much cover to cover twice and started to really work on my Arduino sketch.

I also know next to nothing about woodworking but I want this box to look really polished and beautiful, something you'd keep on your coffee table as a fun game even after it had been opened, something that would be a cool conversation piece. My younger brother, Dan, is a natural born, as well as highly educated and trained, engineer and I kind of just assumed he'd have these tools and this know how. Normally I'd got to Brian and Jenn for this kind of help but since this was to be their wedding gift, that wouldn't work. I'd mentioned some of my ideas to Dan a week earlier and when I emailed him for help he practically jumped at the opportunity to delve into the project with me, offering up his tools, his expertise, his time, and a copy of AutoCAD. Engineers love AutoCAD. Dan works for AutoDesk and has offered me AutoCAD to play around with before but I'd never had any need. Even now it seems silly to model a box in such a powerful program but I figure this is an opportunity to teach myself AutoCAD as well. Sure, this project may not be that complex but if its successful I could easily see myself wanting to tackle much more complex future projects.

As I work on this project, I will post more descriptions of what I'm doing, how I'm succeeding and failing and my open-source plans, schematics and Arduino sketches. I'm calling this project the 5x5 Box for a couple of reasons. One, the user will have 5 attempts to press the 5 buttons in the correct order before the device resets. Two, "five by five" in radio communications lingo means "I understand you perfectly" and that seems kind of fitting for an interactive little box that is easy to understand but (hopefully) hard to open.