Pipeline of Peril

Traffic Lights
Morse Code Clicker
QR Communication
Light Interpreter

Inspiration

Sometimes, the modern internet works just too well. These darn digital websites have no warmth or feel compared to their analogue counterparts of the early 2000s. We set out to solve this problem once and for all.

What it does

The Pipeline of Peril serves to transmit data from one computer to another, via the following mediums (in this order):

E-Mail (an authentic GMail inbox)
Morse Code (via comp-soc's finest hand-picked servo motor)
Discord (one of two bots compete for the task of transporting your treasured information)
QR Codes (travelling through the fine North-Eastern air as visible electro-magnetic radiation)
Google Keep (a staple of the modern lifestyle)
Chrome Extension (a cutting edge Manifest v3 implementation)
Minecraft (authentic hand-crafted blocks carry your data with care)
WiFi (a touch of wireless technology for spice)
Traffic Lights (sourced from the land of E-Bay, and trained with a fine homebrew encoding algorithm)
OpenCV (to read the majestic flashes of the highway equipment)

After your message has been touched in it's own unique way by each of our carefully selected nodes, it is sure to impact you in ways you had never previously thought possible.

How we built it

We wanted to explore as many technologies as possible within the 24 hour window, and what better way than to touch each of them briefly. A non-exhaustive list of things we did to get this working is as follows:

tackled GMail developer APIs
implemented OpenCV to read binary data quickly from real bulbs with dimming curves (tricky!)
created our own morse code encoder (C++) and decoder (Python)
worked around many limitations in minecraft/java APIs to encode/decode messages in block form
devised a process for transmitting data reliably through a traffic light
experimented with chrome plugins to scrape website changes and update websockets
worked with python to emulate mouse/keyboard events to interact with various apps
encoded and decoded data in QR codes
implemented a web server in a traffic light (C++)
stuck a servo to a laptop (blu-tac)

Challenges we ran into

More than we can list! Hopefully other sections here give you a sense of the challenges in making things work together that were not designed to...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how visual many aspects of the project are, such as the servo tapping the key of a keyboard, being able to watch as messages are typed into discord, and seeing the light status interpreted by OpenCV in real time.

What we learned

All in all, this project taught us more about each of the technologies than we ever could have expected. As each platform had to interact with another in some way, we were able to share knowledge in areas each of us were more confident in with others to get closer to everything communicating!