We're Team Team, a group of highly dedicated and highly skilled electrical engineers who are changing the world one invention at a time. Recently, we were contacted by the US government to design a CIA training device to increase reaction time for nuclear button pressing.
Team selfie 😛. From left to right: Chase, Chris, Alex, and Eddie.
Whack-a-moleApplications
The Whack-a-mole was designed for use beyond a CIA training device. In the hands of an everyday user, it can relieve stress and anger while simultaneously perfecting the user's hand-eye coordination. With animals, training with Wack-a-mole allows them to develop a level of sentience and intelligence never before seen beyond humans.
Monkeys have been known to properly use technology after training with Wack-a-mole.
TheDesignProcessandHowItWorks
Alex working on the bread boarding.
We began our design process by planning out the hardware components we would need to create the Wack-a-mole. We knew we would need 3 buttons and 3 LEDs to indicate which button was to be pressed. We decided on a large RGB common anode LED to display the game state:
Blue: a button is waiting to be pressed
Green: the correct button was pressed
Red: the incorrect button was pressed
Chris, clearly not a CIA trainee, attempting to beat Whack-a-mole while Alex, a former CIA agent, laughs.
If the user can correctly and quickly press 30 times, then the RGB cycles through all 3 colors and the smaller LEDs randomly flash to show the player has won the game. If the player presses the wrong button or takes too long to press the correct button, the LED will flash red while the Piezo buzzer sounds. A switch was added to allow the player to restart the game if they have lost. To be able to use all of these components and still have the game be played comfortably, we decided to connect 2 breadboards. On one breadboard, we have the tilt switch and the 3 buttons. On the other, we have the 4 LEDs and the Piezo buzzer.
Demonstration of Wack-a-mole
Alex failing his training exercise. A few years out of the CIA clearly takes a toll on your ability to press buttons.
ADesignChange:IncorporatingtheTiltSwitch
About two weeks into the design process, we were contacted by the US government and asked to include one of the most cutting edge devices on the market today: the tilt switch. In the original design, the tilt switch was replaced with a regular switch, allowing the user to flip it to restart the game. With the new and improved tilt switch, the user simply has to tilt the game to restart, saving precious time for new CIA trainees.
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