December 22, 2015

Badge Challenge Build Part 3

In this post I will cover the design of the console.

The second big idea was to have the end-game as nuclear launch.

How hard can it be to build a nuclear launch console?… If we are having a game, we need two teams, and so two launch consoles. A console will need some kind of keypad, some keys to turn, a big red button. I had a raspbery pi sitting around, so I got a keypad off Adafruit.

The electrical stuff looks easy, next was to write some code… I haven’t written anything but unix shell script in the last 15 years, so I decided to do it all in shell script, that plan lasted all of 30 seconds, as my partner Alzeih told me that this would end in nothing but problems. I decided that Python would be the best choice, I needed to learn Python. I copied the basic code for working with the keypad from stackoverflow, half a day later and I had a keyboard that gave debug output on the command line.

LINKS: Adafruit Keypad