Hack Your Hike With This Arduino Puzzle Geocache

May 3, 2017 by Dan Maloney 12 Comments

For those who love to hike, no excuse is needed to hit the woods. Other folks, though, need a little coaxing to get into the great outdoors, which is where geocaching comes in: hide something in the woods, post clues to its location online, and they will come. The puzzle is the attraction, and doubly so for this geocache with an Arduino-powered game of Hangman that needs to be solved before the cache is unlocked.

The actual contents of a geocache are rarely the point — after all, it’s the journey, not the destination. But [cliptwings]’ destination is likely to be a real crowd pleaser. Like many geocaches, this one is built into a waterproof plastic ammo can. Inside the can is another door that can only be unlocked by correctly solving a classic game of Hangman. The game itself may look familiar to long-time Hackaday readers, since we featured it back in 2009. Correctly solving the puzzle opens the inner chamber to reveal the geocaching goodness within.

Cleverly, [cliptwings] mounted the volt battery for the Arduino on top of the inner door so that cachers can replace a dead battery and play the game; strangely, the cache entry on Geocaching.com (registration required) does not instruct players to bring a battery along.

It looks like the cache has already been found and solved once since being placed a few days ago in a park north of Tucson, Arizona. Other gadget caches we’ve featured include GPS-enabled reverse caches, and a puzzle cache that requires IR-vision to unlock.

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Python Solution To A Snake Cube Puzzle

January 5, 2017 by James Hobson 11 Comments

Puzzles provide many hours of applied fun beyond any perfunctory tasks that occupy our days. When your son or daughter receives a snake cube puzzle as a Christmas gift — and it turns out to be deceptively complex — you can sit there for hours to try to figure out a solution, or use the power of Python to sort out the serpentine conundrum and use brute-force to solve it.

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Solving Hackaday’s Crypto Challenge

November 16, 2016 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

Although I’ve been to several DEF CONs over the past few years, I’ve never found time to devote to solving the badge. The legendary status of all the puzzles within are somewhat daunting to me. Likewise, I haven’t yet given DefCon DarkNet a try either — a real shame as the solder-your-own-badge nature of that challenge is right up my alley.

But at the Hackaday SuperCon I finally got my feet wet with the crypto challenge created by [Marko Antonic]. The challenge was built into a secondary firmware which anyone could easily flash to their conference badge (it enumerates as a USB thumb drive so just copy it over). This turned it into a five-puzzle challenge meant to take two days to solve, and it worked perfectly.

If you were at the con and didn’t try it out, now’s the time (you won’t be the only one late to the game). But even if you weren’t there’s still fun to be had.

Thar’ be spoilers below. I won’t explicitly spill the answers, but I will be discussing how each puzzle is presented and the different methods people were using to finish the quest. Choose now if you want to continue or wait until you’ve solved the challenge on your own.

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Wooden Puzzle Book Will Twist And Dazzle Your Brain

October 20, 2016 by James Hobson 22 Comments

In what might be one of the coolest applications of laser cutting, joinery, puzzles, writing, and bookbinding, [Brady Whitney] has created the Codex Silenda — a literal puzzle book of magnificent proportions.

[Whitney] had originally conceived the idea of the Codex for his senior thesis research project at Iowa State University, and the result is something for almost everyone. On each of the Codex’s five pages lies a mechanical puzzle that must be solved to progress to the next, while an accompanying text weaves a story as you do so. These intricate pages were designed in SolidWorks and painstakingly assembled from laser cut wood. Breaking the fourth wall of storytelling by engaging the reader directly in uncovering the book’s mysteries is a unique feat, and it looks gorgeous to boot.

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Puzzle Alarm Clock Gets Couple Up In The Morning

February 13, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

[BrittLiv] and her boyfriend got in one too many fights about who set the alarm. It’s the only argument they seem to repeat. So, true to her nature as an engineer, she over-engineered. The result was this great puzzle alarm clock.

The time displayed on the front is not the current time. Since the argument was about alarm times in the first place, [BrittLiv] decided the most prominent number should be the next alarm. To hear the time a button (one of the dots in the colon) must be pressed on the front of the clock. To set the alarm, however, one must manually move the magnetized segments to the time you’d like to get up. Processing wise, for a clock, it’s carrying some heat. It runs on an Intel Edison, which it uses to synthesize a voice for the time, news, weather, and, presumably, tweets. It sounds great, check it out after the break.

All in all the clock looks great, and works well too. We hope it brought peace to [BrittLiv]’s household.

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Crosswords Help You Learn Regular Expressions

January 31, 2016 by Al Williams 18 Comments

Regular expressions might seem arcane, but if you do any kind of software, they are a powerful hacker tool. Obviously, if you are writing software or using tools like grep, awk, sed, Perl, or just about any programming language, regular expressions can simplify many tasks. Even if you don’t need them directly, regular expression searches can help you analyze source code, search through net lists, or even analyze data captured from sensors.

If you’ve been using regular expressions for a long time, they aren’t very hard. But learning them for the first time can be tedious. Unless you try your hand at regular expression crosswords. The clues are regular expressions and the rows and columns all have to match the corresponding regular expressions.

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The Hackaday 2015 Omnibus: A Puzzle So Dense, Even We Don’t Know The Answer

December 23, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Print is dead, so we put a skull on it. That’s the philosophy behind the 2015 Hackaday Omnibus, the printed collection of the best Hackaday has to offer.

We have a few ideas of where we would like to take the print edition of Hackaday. Mad magazine-style fold-ins are on the list, specifically a fold-in style schematic that does two completely different things. Remember when records were included as a magazine insert? Those are called flexi-discs, and there’s exactly one company that still does it. All of these and more are plans for the future, and for the 2015 Hackaday Omnibus, we chose to include something we’re all very familiar with: a puzzle. This is no ordinary puzzle – even we don’t know what the solution is.