[Sam Horne] adapted an old school landline phone to deliver clues to birthday party guests. When guests find a numerical clue, they type it into the keypad to hear the next clue, which involves decoding some Morse code.
The phone consists of an Arduino Pro Mini, a MP3/WAV trigger, and the phone itself, of which the earpiece and keypad have been reused. [Sam] had to map out the keypad and solder leads connecting the various contact points of the phone’s PCB to the Arduino’s digital pins. He used a digitally-generated voice to generate the audio files, and employed the Keypad and Password Arduino libraries to deliver the audio clues.
This seems like a great project to do for a party of any age of attendee, though the keying speed is quick. Hopefully [Sam]’s guests have a high Morse WPM or are quick with the pen! For more keypad projects check out this custom shortcut keyboard and printing a flexible keyboard.
It’s not that quick, is it? Personally, I’d have left out the spoken message and just went with the morse code, since I’d think the fact that it’s morse code would be very obvious, and that way, you don’t even need the WAV shield.
I wonder what the rest of the game was!
Spoiler: the clue is “stop sign”
Thanks for the comment, SparkyGSX!
That TTS voice was a common occurrence throughout the game, so it made sense to include it here.
This portion of the game was by far the most high-tech, but here’s a summary of the full clue sequence:
1. Rebus Clue leading to neighboor’s home
2. Key frozen in block of ice leading to wooden box
3. QR Code and book overlay transparency
4. Sidewalk chalk message “Q”
5. 26 QR codes (one for each letter). Only the “Q” code is correct.
6. Paragraph math problem, resulting in 4 digit code
7. Morse Code from Telephone leading to stop sign
8. Bonus picture challenge
Sounds like fun all around.
If you like this project, check out my other projects at https://samhorne.github.io