Keep Talking Arduino

Inspiration

We enjoyed playing the computer party game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes with our friends and decided that a real-life implementation would be more accessible and interesting. It's software brought to life.

What it does

Each randomly generated "bomb" has several modules that must be defused in order to win the game. Here's the catch: only one person can see and interact with the bomb. The other players have the bomb defusal manual to defuse the bomb and must act as "experts," communicating quickly with the bomb defuser. And you only have room for three errors.

Puzzle-solving, communication, and interpretation skills will be put to the test as players race the five-minute clock while communicating effectively. Here are the modules we built:

Information Display Sometimes, information is useful. In this display module, we display the time remaining and the serial number of the bomb. How can you use this information?
Simple Wires Wires are the basis of all hardware hacks. But sometimes, you have to pull them out. A schematic is generated, instructing players to set up a variety of colored wires into six pins. There's only one wire to pull out, but which one? Only the "experts" will know, following a series of conditional statements.
The Button One word. One LED. One button. Decode this strange combination and figure out if the button saying "PRESS" should be pressed, or if you should hold it down and light up another LED.
Password The one time you wouldn't want a correct horse battery. Scroll through letters with buttons on an LCD display, in hopes of stumbling upon an actual word, then submit it.
Simon Says The classic childhood toy and perfect Arduino hack, but much, much crueler. Follow along the flashing LEDs and repeat the pattern - but you must map it to the correct pattern first.

How we built it

We used six Arduino Unos, with one for each module and one for a central processor to link all of the modules together. Each module is independent, except for two digital outputs indicating the number of strikes to the central processor. On breadboards, we used LEDs, LCD displays, and switches to provide a simple user interface.