Yea We’re Making a Bomb

is what we would’ve told you a week before Hack(H)er. Inspired by the bomb defusing game “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”, I was really hyped about the idea of making this game into reality. The initial plan was that we will recreate 4 modules from the game: cutting the right wire, pressing buttons according to manual, etc., and designed 2 new modules by ourselves:Morse Code, and Bit Shifter. (We did find out later that this idea is slightly ambitious)

We would have 6 Raspberry Pi Picos controlling each module and a countdown timer. We each got assigned one module to get started with, and I was in charge of the 16 segment LEDs that scrolls through the alphabet to make words. Having no prior experience in driving even a 7 segment LED, this module seems terrifying to start with, but luckily, almost all the components was covered ECE 124.

4pm: still sane and very happy

The LED had different letter correspond to each segment, and they’re numbered as well, making up a 16 bit long list for displaying each letter.

me translating the whole alphabet at 2am: slowly losing it

3am: almost losing it

6am-9am: don’t even remember how i did this

other modules! The countdown timer works, bit shifting module works as well.

After soldering and coding the Pico, only one LED works:( but we were on a time crunch so I had to present with it. I am currently working on redoing the wiring and soldering on a bigger protoboard to make it actually work.

At Judging! This has to be a vertical video for the vibe I’m going for sorry Baird ><

We were really proud of what we did in less than 24 hours (woke up late)! Overall it was an amazing learning experience and we all had so much fun!