Valentine’s Puzzle Box Makes You Work For What’s Inside

valentines-puzzle-box

Here’s a new take on a gift box which has been locked from the inside. I doesn’t rely on GPS coordinates or a real-time clock to unfasten the latch. Instead, the box itself acts as a puzzle. You follow the visual and audio clues, turning the box along three axes in order to input the unlock code.

There are three different difficulty settings. The easiest uses the LED heart to indicate which direction to turn the box next. This is accompanied by a beep for correct or a longer tone for incorrect movements. On the medium setting you can only go by the tones, but once you screw up the lights will aid you in getting back to where you where when making the mistake. The impossible setting doesn’t use the lights at all.

[Matt] took inspiration from some reverse geocache projects featured here on Hackaday. He already had an STM32F3 Discovery board on hand which he received as a sample. It’s driving all of the electronics inside, with the on-board gyroscope as the input device. Don’t miss the video after the break to see how well the thing works.

11 thoughts on “Valentine’s Puzzle Box Makes You Work For What’s Inside

  1. Awesome!
    Reminds me of something I did last valentine.. I already had a little home automation up and running, and one of the things I have hacked is my digital safe. I refitted a new board with an Atmega328 inside and a wireless module at MHz so it could be operated remotely (I implemented rolling code just like the remote car locks).
    My valentine were sleeping over in the holidays, and she had a little bit of programming experience from her dad. So I made up a valentine website on my local host, even bought a domain name and pointed it to my localhost and then went on writing tons of mazes and puzzles where she needed to break into the system just like a hacker would against a poorly secured system.
    SQL Injections, a little URL hacking, some Javascript decoding and a password where I left a comment somewhere in the HTML saying that it was the 258th prime.
    When she finally got through I invoked the Text To Speech in my room and had it congratulate her while opening the safe with remote unlocking and a small servo. Inside the box I had put some quite expensive jewelry.

    Believe it or not, the girl is an elite gymnast, pretty god damn hot and that trick TOTALLY got me laid, even through I had to help her a little… Can’t guarantee the same kind of success for other nerds haha. :D

  2. Wow…just like a real box on Valentine’s Day. You gotta add some finesse before it opens up…

    …as a bachelor, I don’t want it (I think I despise it). Though, I can think of a few married friends who would get “ooh’s”, “ahhs” and “happy endings” giving this as a jewelry box, though. ;)

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