The main gag in the room is the vacuum and hoses, which light up whenever you connect the hose to the right locker. As you can see there are different sized hoses, which correspond to different lockers. The timer on the locker tells you how much time you have left and the other display tells you how much money you are collecting. To actually suck in the money you must crank the hose, after which you can see the dollar bills floating around that you’re sucking in! Success for the game means connecting the hoses, cranking the vacuum and filling the container with cash before the police arrive!
Within the gag we planned on utilizing RFID sensors and chips to detect which hose is attached to which locker and to designate the corresponding rates money that will be sucked up through the vacuum. We were able to achieve this in a smaller scale where wires were shorter. Each RFID tag had its own unique ID assigned to it and the RFID sensor could assign what each tag could mean for the sensor. For the project we were able to assign a different action for each RFID tag (hose) that set off the RFID sensor (Locker) to show that different hoses would have different reactions to being detected. To create visual feedback, whenever an RFID tag was detected by the RFID sensor a strip of green LED’s ran down the hose to show that money was being collected, and whenever the RFID tag was not being detected the hose was lit up red. The RFID also had a set action that would go along with the screen. The screen displayed “Cash __” where the blank would be the amount of money collected, and the amount of money would increase depending on what hose or hoses were detected. Each hose had a different rate of addition associated with it so the larger the hose the faster the cash value would change.
Integrating the RFID into the final prototype became an issue due to the length of the wires. Having wires that are longer and stay together for the distance that they run means that there is a greater chance of losing the signal throughout, and since the RFID required 5 different wires to run the distance we could not keep them separated throughout the distance to not lose the signal. In future iterations we would have an add-on that would be able to send the signal wirelessly so this issue would not happen. To mitigate this in the presentation we used switches that achieved similar actions as the RFID but they could not tell the differences between the hoses, so the hose that gave feedback and the rate that the money increased by were set.