Among Us is a hit game of deception and intrigue. Those who have played it know the frustration of trying to complete some of the intentionally difficult tasks onboard the Skeld. [Zach Freedman] decided to recreate some of these in real life.
[Zach] built what are arguably the three most frustrating tasks from the game. There’s the excruciatingly slow upload/download station built out of an old Samsung tablet and an NFC tag, and the reactor start console created using a Raspberry Pi 3B, Teensy 3.2, and a custom mechanical keyboard. But perhaps most annoying of all is the infamous card reader. Built with another Teensy, it requires the user to swipe their ID card at just the right speed, except that speed is randomly generated for every swipe. Also, the machine fails 20% of good swipes just because. Perhaps what we love most is the way [Zach] recreated the classic VFD look by putting an OLED display behind bottle-green plastic and using a 14-segment font.
It’s a fun homage to a wildly successful indie game, and we could imagine these props would be a hit at a makerspace party. We’ve featured other Among Us themed builds before, too. Video after the break.
I tried to play this game multiple times. And for some reason I suck at it big time.
You gotta play it with people you know IRL. With just randos it’s not great.
I know nothing about Among Us but
> [Zach] recreated the classic VFD look by putting an OLED display behind bottle-green plastic and using a 14-segment font.
… I am stealing this idea right now thank you very much.
Fooled me! From the picture I really thought that was a real VFD
Same here! That’s a really cool trick.
Yeah, that’s definitely an awesome trick to keep in mind.
Guess I can trash all those VFD displays I’ve been hoarding over the years. I’m keeping my TIL311s though.
Verifiably False Displays https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyaGDLBsmdY
Sweet! I have been enjoying that game for the past few weeks. As others have noted, I am also forking that vfd knock off :) Fun project and video :)
Wow, really thought that was a vfd from the pic. Very convincing, will have to give the trick a shot in a future project (though I have a few real vfd’s I should probably use first)
I met Zach about 10 years ago at HOPE conference, v cool dude, was delighted to come across his youtube channel recently, his trademark head mount display is neat and gone through many iterations since then.
wow! i think i will try.