On Behalf Of Justin Richards >It would be great to see behind the scenes and see what ideas others have come up with their escape rooms. >I am sure i will encounter many issues that are common. I've only been involved with a couple of local game rooms. Based upon what I've seen, it's not that hard to make things better than the owner expects or even hoped. I was initially hired by a room because I could solder and the carpenter that was building the scenery found out that it was harder than he expected. I was instructed to build things exactly as designed. The theory behind the props was okay, but I could see that the real world aspect was going to lead to serious reliability problems I tried to pitch a better way, but had to do what they were paying me to do. Honestly, I thought the whole concept was kinda cheesy and that the owner would be broke in a month or two. I knew little about the concept of escape rooms or how popular they were. I was seriously wrong about the viability of the concept, the owner is making real money. I wasn't wrong about the reliability though. When they expanded, he called me back to talk about "my way" some more. He was a little less skeptical, and I was more than a little nervous since I've really only been a hobbyist. I've done a lot of home projects and experiments and also learned a ton of valuable info from my years spent reading the piclist. This is a great collection of real-world workers that have solved an amazing array of problems, and I truly feel blessed to have been privileged to talk with these guys over the years. I don't remember when I joined, but it was at least ten years, maybe fifteen. It's kinda sad that the piclist activity seems to have dwindled down over time. It was a great place to debate all manner of science and electronics. Where else could you cause an insurrection by asking if ..9999999R really was exactly equal to 1? LOL When I reexplained the benefits of using microcontrollers to do the heavy lifting, the owner gave me the chance to show him "my stuff". During the expansion, I reworked several of his troublesome props in the older part and he was quite pleased that things were a lot more consistent and reliable. Microcontrollers take this stuff to a whole new level. It didn't take the owner long to start stepping up the game complexity over the simple designs that he'd purchased. Now he's planning a "Christmas" room overlay of another game. It's only going to be up for a couple of months, but it's going to be the most complex stuff I've done so far. He only purchased the game concept this time, no electrical designs fortunately. I'm getting to do the whole thing. Amongst the normal things, this one involves weighing (load cells) and RF (probably NRF24L01 boards since we'll probably be using some batteries this time to eliminate wires). He also likes the idea of using the ESP8266 modules to allow them to force a prop remotely and do remote resets. As for common issues, your biggest problem is going to be customers that come to the game with screwdrivers in their pockets. If this is your first experience, you'll see what I mean soon. I'm talking like I know what I'm doing here, but it's very much a learning process for me too. Don't be too nervous, it's not hard to impress the owner unless he happens to be an embedded engineer. You really bring a lot to the table with the skills you apparently have. If you look around, you'll see that there are guys trying to sell generic game modules that are somewhat programmable and theoretically simple enough for the game room owners to implement. They are quite costly, confusing to set up and don't have the flexibility that you have by just piecing together one off designs. This industry may be a fad, but it also might just be the next kind of amusement park. By that, I mean it may last a good long while. The players of these games come from all walks of life and ages. They seek rooms out and corporations seem to like to use them for team building events. I don't see a reason for this "fad" to die as quickly as something like paint ball or fidget spinners. There is literally no end to the types of rooms that can be put together. There doesn't seem to be much shortage of people willing to pay $25-$35/head to spend an hour trying to solve puzzles. --=20 http://www.piclist.com/techref/piclist PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .