Today, we bring you the latest in our ongoing “Darn, I Wish I’d Thought of That” series. I’m sure you’ve seen a mechanical puzzle box at some point in your life – a small container, usually made of wood, that requires you to push, pull, slide, twist, tilt, or turn the box in various directions in order to open it. (My wife has a really clever one in the shape of a little house.)
I heard on the Podcacher Podcast today about an altogether new spin on the puzzle box – one the brings puzzle box out of the world of 18th century Japanese craftsmanship and into the modern technological era. Check it out here – Buzzle: The Morse Code Puzzle Box.
The box has a power outlet, a button, and two LED lights. In order to open the box, you have to play a game of hangman using Morse code. The box will pick a word at random from its dictionary, then buzz the number of letters in the word using Morse code. Using the button, you key in the Morse code of your guess for the first letter of the word. If you get it right, the green LED lights. If you get a letter that is elsewhere in the word, the yellow LED lights. And if the letter is nowhere in the word, the red LED lights. Once you’ve guessed a letter correctly, you move on to the next letter. Get ten letters wrong (10 red LEDs), and it’s game over – the box stays locked, and it picks a brand new word (which may have a different number of letters).
According to the builder, the inspiration was the Reverse Geocache puzzle – a box that won’t open until it arrives at the proper location, but will only tell you how far away the proper location is from where it currently lies.
So if you’ve got a soldering iron, a table saw, some sandpaper, and some engineering know-how, why not build your own puzzle box?
