The Goonies Game
Behind the Scenes

Bully Blinders

Read the clue description first.

This clue was originally inspired by those little ping-pong ball sized, white orbs that had two metal contacts on the bottom, and when you touched them both, it would glow. And also those little stuffed-animal baby birds that would make a robotic chirping noise when you held them in your hand, touching the two contacts on the base. These toys gave us the idea of building a clue that required using people as conductors. Naturally, we immediately latched onto this idea and for months, we referred to it as the "people as conductors" clue, even though we had no idea what the encoding would be. Fortunatley, an idea for an encoding came about.

We came up with the idea of using midpoints of small sets of line segments as dots for a braille character. We then took this a step further and defined each line segments as a pair of dots, realizing that the endpoint-dots could overlap as they do in the 5-LED braille diamond that we ended up using.

After scouring many toy stores looking for those old toys we so fondly remembered and failing, we decided to do the electronics from scratch. We put together a circuit loosely based on the last circuit of this lab, that sent less than 0.001 milliamps at a teeeny voltage through all you nice folks, and picked it up like a champ!

The Braille diamond was made up of 5 LED lights that were driven by a BasicStamp2 project board. We also threw in a voice recorder kit from Radio Shack to play the Goonies clip at the end of the clue.

Other ingredients included a BasicStamp2 chip, a BasicStamp2 project board, this BasicStamp2 code, one 220 Ohm resistor to drop the LED voltage, and 2 transistors and a few huge resistors for the people-as-conductors switch, a 9-volt battery, a bunch of wire, some solder, some tape, a big chunk of double-thick cardboard, and a pair of gloves from Goodwill.