A while ago, someone brought in a candy machine to AdaCore. Sometime after, [Fabien-Chouteau] was challenged to make it more… fun. So he decided to make it harder to receive candy — you know, to encourage knowledge growth — and discourage overeating of tasty treats.
The dispenser itself is pretty simple. It consists of a hopper containing the candies, a motor with a worm-gear for delivering said candies, and a small IR sensor that detects when you wave your hand underneath (in order to receive those sweet sweet candies).
He decided to leave the system operating as is, and only interrupt the connection to the motor feed. That way when you wave your hand underneath, you have to answer a skill testing question before you proceed…
[Fabien] added a touch screen using a STM32F469 discovery board to create a random question generator about either AdaCore or LadyAda — to make sure their candy-hungry-employees have been listening. If you get the question wrong — no candy for you! But nothing is stopping you from trying again…
If he wants to step it up a notch there’s always the Candy or Death machine we featured last Halloween…
Give me the damn candy, or I’ll smash you to bits!
B^)
Trump? What are you doing here?
Is that a reference to something in particular, or are you just making a joke about Trump that doesn’t make sense?
From my aussie pov, Trump doesn’t make sense and anything about about him.
I think he is poking fun at Trump’s irrational and quick to “smash things” attitude. Makes perfect sense to me.
I wasn’t “channeling Trump”,
it’s just me at times…
B^)
Hmmm, maybe it’s time to upvert my Dilbert M&M dispenser.
(P.S. the music in the video was a bit annoying (I should know, as I’m a bit annoying!)
I wish the video would have shown a bit of the “build”.
The build was not that interesting, however the hack/reverse engineering is all documented in the blog.
Is that a dispenser you’ve build or just merchandise somebody produced?
Here is a link to That Auction Site (TAS) showing one like mine…
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dilbert-Electronic-Candy-Dispenser-/272134266204?hash=item3f5c775d5c:g:Qu0AAOSwx-9WwQYE
“to encourage knowledge growth”
are all of the questions pointless?
The questions should get gradually harder, but with a timeout reset, say, about one hour or so :D
The real question is: Does LadyAda’s ego know no bounds? The first co-opting her handle from someone way more important to history than herself. You didn’t see Steve Jobs running around calling himself “Mr.Newton” or “GuyTuring”
Well, the HaD cartoon of her in the Pi Zero contest is nice…