Lighthouses
About the project
This project is made in collaboration with Reality Hack at MIT, an organization I have been a part of for 4 years. I help with event design, experience, and I get to teach some seminars on hardware hacking as well!
In an effort to make the location of specific hackers apparent to organizers, judges, and mentors, these physical "lighthouses" act as a way of wayfinding during the hack. One hundred lighthouses were made based on the 3D printed enclosures I designed, and the 2025 hack was the first year we ran them.
The lighthouses worked beautifully until signals on the 2.4 GHz bands became extremely busy due to the number of hackers in the rooms and the small antennas on the PCBs. So unfortunately, the devices worked splendidly only when fewer people were in the room :(
This year, we are planning to upgrade the boards with LoRaWLAN, changing the frequency of the signals to hopefully lessen interference.
