Week 2: Software & Electronics Team

Last week, software and electronics team tidied up the assets that the stuff still can be used from last year’s escape room. We separated the assets into two huge storage boxes. One of them stores the holiday stuff like Christmas hats and gift boxes. And the other one stores the tech related stuff like cameras and lights… and some more!

This week, we took time to take pictures of the assets one by one with Adryen. She also helped us to do the measurement. Even though Adryen suggested us to put the stuff on the floor and take one picture. And then use Photoshop to edit the photo like cut the equipments one by one to several separated pictures. However, we found it is a little bit hard because we need a bigger space to put all the stuff on the floor and a wider angle lens to take the picture, but what we got is an old model of iPhone.

While taking the picture, we found it is really easy to find stuff that we need if we categorized things well. For instance, put all the webcams in one box. It is way easy to find the exactly stuff that we need and it is easy to count the number of the assets to see if it matches with the equipment list. Besides the things about categorization, there was one more challenge. Last year’s escape room is about Christmas and Santa. We got bunch of Christmas mini lights. Nine boxes total and 6.7 meters long for each. The good thing is the mini lights in the boxes looks fine but there was some of them been opened, and it was really hard to separate them. They are all twisted together. We need to find time to separate them if we will use the mini lights this year as well.

And there is one thing changed on the equipment list. The night vision webcam we found last week, it was actually the WYZE webcam’s substitute. We guessed it might be the lens that we can change if the original one is missing or broken. And one of the teammates did some tests to see if the webcams can work fine. Three of the webcams that comes from the same brand can work pretty well. But the night vision one (the WYZE webcam) has to download the company’s mobile app. And connect the webcam with wifi. This is the only webcam that has the night vision functionality and it has small stand. It doesn’t need webcam tripod. However, we couldn’t connect the webcam through the mobile app. The app asked us to type down the school wifi’s password. But nobody knows the password. We will bring the webcam to ask one classmate that might know the school’s wifi password. And do the test for that night vision camera after that.

Even though it took us a while to take the pictures but we learned something from Adryen. She told us the Christmas bell can be painted to black and disguised as speaker. We can hide the real speaker in it. Or the Christmas green and red plates can cut into half and use for other purpose. It looks like the Christmas decorated stuff that left from last year can really be used this year and not just for decoration. Things will get changed and might be fun if we reverse thinking and look for opposite ideas. That is what we learned this week.