That tip of serial Printing the file and date is AWESOME, thanks for so much. BWT I saw once some candle flick LED's on aliexpress, I haven't tried them yet but seem promising for projects like this. Thanks again for another great video
Thanks for the awesome video! I made this circuit with 5 candles for a halloween themed escape room that I am doing soon. I'm having an issue with the candles getting "blown" out accidentally though, and if I adjust the sensitivity much more they are very difficult to blow out. I'm a very new coder, and was wondering if you know of a simple way that I could put a reset timer on it? Like, if a second candle hasn't been blown out within 30 seconds, then the whole puzzle resets?
It's not intended to be a random sequence - if it was, players would have no way but luck to get the puzzle correct, and nothing to learn from previous attempts. Perhaps I didn't explicitly say it, but the assumption is that players would be clued the correct order from elsewhere in the room.
I’d love a video on how you got started in this game making business …I am interested in getting started in escape room creating as well. Did you go to school for programming or are you self taught ?
I never formally learned programming at school or university, but I have been employed in various jobs in a programming capacity for much of my adult life, so I guess you could say it was from practical experience!
Hey i had some problem with the code , it wont work for me , even when i use the arduino without connecting anyting i get these : "Puzzle Reset! Candle #0 correctly extinguishe! Candle #1 incorrectly extinguished! (should have been 2) Candle #2 incorrectly extinguished! (should have been 1) Candle #3 correctly extinguished!" he keeps running with the same result , can you help please
Does the amp rating on the power supply matter for these projects? I have wall plugs that are rated at 1amp, 2 amps and 5 amps. Does it matter which one I use?
The rating on a power supply gives you the *maximum* current it is capable of delivering. So long as that exceeds whatever your project requires, that's fine (a typical Arduino project might only draw 0.5A, but if you powered it via a 1A, 2A, or 5A supply, they would all be fine, since the Arduino will only draw as much current as it requires)
To be honest, given the current state of global logistics (i.e. a complete nightmare), I've pretty much stopped shipping any physical hardware builds. Whereabouts in the world are you?
Thank you so so much for this tutorial! I have been making escape rooms in our garden shed for my family and some friends - and wanted to make these blow out candles for my next room (a halloween theme!), but didnt want to spend an arm and a leg on a pre-made version (especially because I can reuse these parts in the future if i make it myself) I have never coded anything in my life or built anything electronic for that matter. I worked solely off this tutorial and was able to make a fully functioning 3 candled escape room puzzle (without the mp3 function because I wanted to keep it simple for my first project). I had to tweak the code a bit, because for some reason my mag lock was powered differently and I actually needed to code the power source to LOW until the puzzle was solved and switch it to HIGH to open the lock (it took me a few hours to troubleshoot that lol). Apparently the power source to my mag lock works when the arduino board isnt plugged in, but stops working/cuts power when the arduino was plugged in - no idea why?? I definitly learned a lot from this and now have a super fun element for our next escape room, so thank you so much!
It's very hard to say because I don't create a single project from scratch all in one go - I've been making these projects for many years now, so a lot of the time I might have leftover ideas from previous projects, or commissions that didn't work out, and I often use those as a starting point. Sometimes I have an idea and it just works first time but, more often than not, I have to go through several versions on the way and (mostly!) I never show those failed early attempts. In this particular tutorial for example, I spent at least three or four days learning and experimenting with different sorts of sensors before settling on using these simple microphone sound sensors, for example. But, although you'll never see those sensors used in this particular project, I don't regard that time as wasted because maybe in the future a new project will come along and I'll be able to think "Ah-ha - I know just the sensor for that!" ;) The programming itself does not take me long - my background is as a software programmer, so I can confidently write the code to get the behaviour I want very easily. The problem is almost always on the hardware side, because in escape rooms you're often trying to use components in slightly unusual or novel ways, and there's not a whole lot of precedent as to the best way to make an exploding wall, or convincing dragon's breath, or a fortune teller's ball that you can read a clue from etc. etc. so it just takes some trial and error.
