You could always tell who had friends with that one.

I liked it

@babble Ha! All your base are belong to us!

On a related note, this would be cool to use as some sort of door access system (if you could set up a timeout to prevent brute forcing). Another option would be to unplug the controller from the door (and carry it with you like a key). With the micro controller storing the last ten buttons even on a successful code entry, there’s a slight problem if someone ever gains read access to that array. But then again, I would go with a brute force attempt first knowing that you only have 8 buttons… we can infer that he’s pressing 10 buttons and then estimate that there are just over 1.073 billion options… given the UI, I would start the brute force at UUDDLRLRAB as a guess to try and shorten the number of combinations tried before success.

But who cares? This is up there with the external hard drive hidden in an old battery-less uninterrupted power supply. Nice work Joven.

16GB USB flash drives are as little as £17.50 (play.com), got 3 of them, very nice & very fast.

If you want to prevent someone from easily just bypassing the code you could cover it all with epoxy – sure it wouldn’t prevent the most stubborn but it would stop it being easy.

Despite it not being very practical it’s a nice hack, and some of the best ones aren’t practical.

Why a relay? Why not just run it off the arduino directly, or through a transistor? Not like it needs that much current…

@atrain: Most USB Thumbdrives will take upwards of 100mA when under full load (reading or writing). And, most microcontrollers can only source or sink +/-25mA.

As you suggest, a transistor would work, though wiring the power directly to the Arduino probably would not. A relay is a bit overkill, but maybe he wanted the satisfying click of it kicking in?

You could simulate the click with a small pizo speaker connected to the microcontroller…

Ow, stop throwing 500A contactors at me, analogue folk! ;)

Pretty cool.
I wonder if there is enough room inside the case to add a usb hub so it could function as a flash drive and as an NES controller for your PC.

This is a pretty cool idea for using your NES controller, although the flash drive is quite big.