Case 06PHYSICAL SYSTEMS
Hardware & Puzzle Engineering
Puzzles and room systems for award-winning escape rooms, from the first sketch to the final relay. Custom electronics turn what players do with their hands into sound, video, light, and open doors, and an open-source device SDK lets any venue connect its own Arduino props to Escape Director.
- Role
- Puzzle Engineer & Hardware Developer
- Timeline
- 2017 – Present
- Status
- Shipped
- 0
- Manual resets needed between games
- MIT
- Open-source device SDK
These systems live inside working rooms, so the details stay hidden to keep the puzzles fun.
01 Design constraints
Every room I design starts from scratch, and every puzzle has to feel like magic to players while staying dull to maintain: it resets itself between games, recovers if something goes wrong, and lets the game master see what's happening from the desk.
02 Signal chain
From a player's hands to the game master's screen.
Sense
Sensors, switches, and magnets pick up what players do with the props.
Decide
Arduino or PLC logic checks the sequence and knows when a puzzle is truly solved.
React
Raspberry Pi systems fire video, audio, light, or a lock release at the right moment.
Report
The Escape Director device SDK sends state and completion to the live dashboard.
03 The device SDK
Keep your puzzle code. Add the Room.
Your sketch, now part of the game
The Escape Director device SDK is an MIT-licensed Arduino library. A builder keeps their own puzzle logic and declares beside it what the Room should see: each prop's signals, commands and state, and what counts as solved. The SDK handles Wi-Fi, pairing, reconnecting and stable IDs, and the prop shows up on the game master's dashboard with its controls.
Built for a live room
Games keep running when the network doesn't. Inputs are sampled by the SDK, so a lever pulled during a reconnect still counts, timed outputs like a five-second door release finish on time, and stale signals from an earlier game are dropped. Test mode lets staff safely try every prop before players arrive.
Open to any board
Adapters for the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and GIGA R1 WiFi ship with it, other boards need only a small adapter, and anything else can speak its documented MQTT protocol directly. It even includes a brief for AI coding agents, so a builder can hand over their sketch and get it connected without rewriting it.
04 Parts bin
- Arduino
- C++
- MQTT
- Raspberry Pi
- Python
- PLCs
- Sensors