Tar and Feather Gun

Going through my sketchbooks, I found plans for something truly dastardly (and potentially hilarious)!

Puzzle Ideas

I keep a couple of sketchbooks for my illustrations, poems, songs and puzzle ideas. This works well for everything except puzzle ideas. Puzzle ideas in my sketchbooks are rarely revisited. So I've decided to start archiving them here so I can easily access them later. Yes, I'm aware that this means others can access them. That's fine. If you see a puzzle idea here (or any idea here) and want to use it, feel free. This is an open source blog. :)

Okay, here's a good example. Apparently I had a puzzle idea last June that was so awesome I had to jot it down. Nearly a year later I have no idea what I was trying to communicate. If you can make any sense of this, please write this awesome puzzle!

At least with this one, despite having no supporting text to describe puzzle mechanics, I know what I was trying to get across. This would be an installation puzzle that would look like a campfire. It would use the popular illusion of fire created with strips of silk fabric, blown by a fan, lit be colored lamps. In this case, the campfire is haunted so the strips would have hobo symbols on them or something. I think the idea here is interaction. You could have sensors that trigger the lights and the fans. People would need to 'solve' how to activate the fire before 'solving' the fire itself. It's kind of a neat idea but I doubt I'll ever use it.

However, this idea for a puzzle mechanic is really cool and I really like it. I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel called "Weird or What?" and they were talking about the Voynich Manuscript and how easy it would be to create as a hoax by using a system that creates semi-random words and letter orderings. To achieve it you would draw your symbols/syllables out on a large grid and then move a "grill" with randomly cut holes in it to create words. Leaving blanks on the grid creates words of different lengths and adds spaces. The puzzle idea would be sort of the opposite. You'd first solve a puzzle on where to cut the holes in your grill. That initial puzzle could be built into the larger grid. Then you'd position your grill over the grid to pick out solve coding. Coding could be in letter or images or a mix. How about this: Teams get the grill and a large grid, the grill has letters and images on it that match a location on the grid, when placed on that location on the grid, the surrounding letters and images on the grid would tell the teams where to cut the holes in their grill, they'd then have to figure out how to navigate the grid with the grill for the rest of the solve. As I mentioned in the drawing, there is a lot of opportunity for solve layering with this mechanic.

So, yeah, I'm not good at writing the puzzle part of the puzzle but I think I have some pretty good ideas for puzzle mechanics that puzzlier people than myself could really run with.

My Triumphs, My Mistakes

Time to face facts. Well, really facts were faced days or weeks ago but for the sake of this blogpost, let's pretend like I'm facing facts today. Last weekend I finally broke down and told my friend, for whom I'm making the 5x5 box, that I was making it, failing at making it and that he wouldn't be getting it for his wedding. That took some weight off of me, especially because now I can share this blog and talk to other people about this no longer secret project.

Last weekend I made a big push. I went looking for supplies and I made do with what I could find. I salvaged some wire from old Ghost Patrol projects, which wasn't ideal to begin with, and I soldered that to the LCD I had to the pins I thought I'd need. I went down to The Shack and looked for header pins but they didn't even know what I was talking about. I also looked for some 5.7 ohm resistors so I could run the LCD backlight. I didn't know enough about resistors to find what I was looking for and neither did the sales people there. You know, it rarely occurs to me to use my phone to Google useful information in the moment. Anyway, the only thing I did find that I needed was a 10k potentiometer. Then I headed to the art supply store to look for an acceptable box or box substitute. I figured that I could at least find something acceptable to prototype on. I ended up buying a wooden box frame that people apparently use to paint. We used them to make the Ouija boards for Ghost Patrol and they worked great.

Here's what happened: I did some awful, awful soldering on the LCD. I used a super crappy Dremel rip off to try to drill and cut appropriate size holes in my wood box. It didn't work. I made one hole too close to the edge. I wrecked tons of bits on that awful machine and finally pretty much wrecked the machine itself. Wrong tool for the job. No doubt. I couldn't get the LCD to work at all. Not at all.

Here's what I learned: First, I remembered that power tools can be rented from the Berkeley Public Library. I could be using the right tools for the job. I also realized that if I wanted to really make this work, I had to go about it properly from the very beginning.

I went on SparkFun and ordered two new LCDs (I plan to make more boxes so...) and some header pins. I soldered the header pins to the LCDs. I also ordered some small breadboards but they only have 17 pins and the LCDs have 16 so I'll have to use them for something else as I'd really like to have the LCD, the potentiometer and the Polulu all on the same breadboard. Today I had my first modicum of success. I mounted one of my pinned up LCDs to the breadboard, used the tutorial I posted previously and voila, text!

I'm totally stoked just to have this minor success. I've ordered a beautiful wood box from a seller on Etsy and it should be here on Tuesday. I've devised, in my mind, an awesome self-latching system that requires no electrical bits to operate and can be opened just by sliding a credit card between the lid and the box. If I can make that work, that'll be super cool.

So I'm definitely going to keep working on this project until it reaches fruition. I had just about given up but now I have confidence I can eventually accomplish this and move on to another cool puzzle/project box idea.