Hi Friamers -- I have something I need help with. I want to build a version of the 80s toy "Simon" in the form of a 20' ring of four skulls.
Simon was a small handheld toy which had four buttons. Lights beneath the buttons would flash in a particular sequence, the player would press the buttons to copy that sequence, and if the player keyed in the sequence correctly, the player won the round, and Simon would start again with a faster, more complex sequence. In this implementation, each skull's eyes light up, and the skulls use Gumstix boxes (gumstix.org) with WiFi to coordinate the sequences of their flashes. The user runs from skull to skull carrying a wand, which contains either a fifth Gumstix or maybe a simple Bluetooth device, and the wand, by proximity to a given skull, triggers that skull to flash. Waving the wand at a given skull is therefore equivalent to pressing a particular button. Strictly speaking, waving the wand is not necessary, you just have to get it close to the skull, but the wand will be decorated and waving it will be encouraged. I should point out that these would in fact be animal skulls from Jackalope on Cerrillos, not human skulls. The goal here is basically an interactive art installation which is at once terrifying, silly, grotesque, and fun. The problem is, although software to trigger flashing lights in aribtrary sequences is obviously pretty easy to write, and Gumstix makes the hardware part easy too, I haven't figured out how the "magic wand" part will work. I really know absolutely nothing about how to solve this kind of problem; I don't even know whether WiFi or Bluetooth would make more sense for this. The ideal solution would be something incredibly simple, where a skull would only become alerted to the wand's existence if the wand was in a particular range of X feet, with X ideally being a small number like 5, and further, where the wand's signal could only be picked up by any one skull at a time. One suggestion I've gotten is to use a TV remote inside the wand, and add remote sensors to each skull, but I think more elegant solutions are possible. I just don't know what they might be. -- Giles Bowkett http://www.gilesgoatboy.org http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com http://gilesgoatboy.blogspot.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
