RBCreation

Red Bull Creation Contest

Wat: Red Bull gave away mystery boxes to hackerspaces across the US, and challenged us to reverse-engineer them. HeatSync Labs did, and after many rick-rolls and dead ends, we found most of their easter eggs and registered a team, called

Ideas for projects:

• Virtual Babbage engine emulated in Arduino with analog brass output
• Self-moving reinvented wheel
• Virtual sun-dial with lots of photo sensors
• Virtual difference engine emulated in Arduino with analog brass output
• Punchcard compiler that makes Arduino code and puts it on the chip
• Old school census
• Arduino-powered radar

• Spinning wheel with length calculator and/or red yellow green yarn consistency meter
• Sextant with Aruino and GPS
• Abacus with digital readout
• Tweet a smoke signal generator
• Suit of armor with damage sensors and HUD
• 8-Track-Duino, full room sized pong game
• Ice Box with LCD and tweet to tell you when it needs more ice
• Flintlock with laser targeting range finder

• Retrofitting a paper stock ticker (like from the 1920s) to spit out hackerspace Twitter list tweets instead of stocks
• Retrofitting a phone to dial robot messages to people (via Twilio or Tropo, akin to loldialer)
• Old-style outdoor clothesline outfitted with a moisture sensor that buzzes or blinks or SMS texts when clothes are dry or fall off a clothes line
• Old-style typewriter outfitted to send e-mail (this will get really tedious given the mechanical nature of their keys)
• Arduino-powered open-hardware record (vinyl) player