[Beep! Beep! Beep!] [Blowing on card] [Beep! Beep! Beep! Beepbeepbeepbeep!] [Beep!] [Body Discovered musical sting from Among Us] I'm Zack Freedman and I'm a freelance prototype
developer. I'm not really supposed to talk about my clients,
but I got this job that's just too weird to keep to myself. I had my lawyer look at their NDA and he says
it's probably not enforceable. Either way, let's keep this... among us! Eh? Ehhh? [cut off] These clients are weird. They won't show their faces, they'll only
talk to me on Discord, and I'm pretty sure one of them thinks they're an apple. They want three projects in one week because
they just let one of their colleagues go. [Unlucky Crewmate] Goddammit If you ask me, the whole thing is kinda sus. They want me to build the most thoroughly-hated
tasks on their spaceship, The Skeld - an upload/download station, a reactor starter console, and a
card swipe reader. I only have one week to build three projects
- it's going to take every dirty prototyping trick I know. Let's bum-rush straight into our first task:
uploading and downloading. To complete this task, the unfortunate crewmate
uses the slowest tablet in the universe to collect data from Comms, Weapons, or for
some reason, the Cafeteria, and then upload it to HQ. This is going to be a two-part project. We need to build the tablet, as well as its
wall-mounted access point. The number one rule of prototyping... is to cheat. Don't engineer something if you can fake it,
and don't build something if you can just rummage around in your storage room and find
it, like this ancient Galaxy Note 3. This thing is loaded with so much Samsung
bloatware it's ALREADY slow as hell! It's perfect. My first thought was to download an off-the-shelf
phone case and then build the tablet around that, but Fusion 360 handled that about as
well as hardcore gamers handled The Last of Us 2. That means it completely failed, melted down,
and perpetuated toxic stereotypes! We gotta do this the hard way, so let's import
the reference artwork and bust out the calipers. Well, that was easier than I expected. The model is pretty simple - it's just two
pieces that bolt onto the phone and add cosmetic elements like the ridge to make it look more
like the in-game tablet. I didn't see any buttons on the tablet...
like, I'm not even sure the clients have arms in the first place... so I just added this
little pokey hole to access the power button. These hex-head screws self-tap right into
the plastic because heat-set inserts cost money and these guys are paying me in exposure. With that, the models are done, so let's get
the printer printing while we design the access point. The in-game access point is just a little
sprite on the wall and there isn't any high-res artwork of it, so I took some artistic license
to flesh out the details. The light-gray areas and the red thingamadingus
will be 3D-printed to give them some thiccness, and I'm just going to paint the dark areas
onto the panel. By the power of vector art, we can reuse this
one drawing to laser-cut the plate, etch the guidelines, and generate our 3D-printed overlays. I cut the main plate on the Fat Cat Fab Lab's
laser, I painted it up, and then I got going on the appliques and the frame. Then, I accidentally left my screen recorder
running for 41 consecutive hours and completely filled my hard drive. [Juicy death noises] Whoopsie! I assembled the tablet... Looks rad! I let that thing charge while I... uh... [Tinnitus whine of suppressed rage] I ran off another tablet with a hole for the
USB cable. Heh heh heh... By now, the paint was drying, so I glued the
frame together with some Zap-a-Gap and I used some contact cement to mount it, along with
the wi-fi symbol and the red wangdoodle, to that plate. I then slipped in the secret ingredient: an
NFC tag. [REDACTED] This little plastic disc has a self-powered
transceiver embedded right into it and it lets the phone recognize the access point
without any battery, circuitry, or baloney. The neat thing about NFC is that it's near-field
communication - the phone needs to be nearly touching the tag to power it up and get the
data. This will be important. Real programmers write assembler with eight
DIP switches and a clock button, but I'm on a schedule, so I used Java. The tablet just runs a simple app that constantly
sniffs for the NFC tag and plays the appropriate upload or download animation. The clients insisted that the tablet can only
work while the user holds it right up to the access point, making sure their back is exposed
and their vision is occupied. That sounds downright aggravating, but the
client specifically requested all of this in 22-point bold underlined italic highlighted
Helvetica, and that's the most serious font of them all. Let's give it a squizz! Let's have the whiteboard stand in for the
weapons room, let's mosey on up to the access point, and initiate the download. It always takes exactly 9.7 seconds, but feels
like a sad, lonely, and wasted young adulthood. It'll delete the data and start over unless
I hold it in this exact position, so uh... Let's upload this data at the other access
point here in the cafeteria, and by 'other,' I mean 'I moved it,' and by 'cafeteria,' I
mean 'don't expect production value from a channel that doesn't make a nickel.' Note how it will delete all the data and start
over if I so much fart during the transfer. Hypothetically, this would leave you really
exposed to some sort of sneak attack. It's a little stuffy in here... I hope the vent isn't clogged again. [Ominous rumbling] Oh, by the way, I don't build a lot of cosplay
and props like this, so this is kind of new territory for me. Which in-game items would you like to see
me build next? Don't worry if it's physically impossible,
because it won't be when I'm through with it! Let's see how this... goddammit. [Cellular impact noises] Next task: start the reactor. This is the control panel to the nuclear fusion
drive that generates the juice to fuel the engines, maintain life support, and bathe
the ship in carcinogenic gamma rays. Maybe I should wear one of those suits too... I'm not totally comfortable dealing with gigawatt
nuclear equipment. I'm kind of worried the client will put my
project straight into production, which will make the reactor dangerously easy to sabotage. But then again, like, they signed a waiver. The activation sequence is five random keys,
and if the user messes one up, it starts over with a new random sequence. Yeah... I gotta bite my tongue if I wanna get that
exposure. The easiest way to prototype this was to build
two separate devices that talk to each other. I made models off the concept art, and yes,
I learned my lesson from the weekend projects video, and this time I test-fit everything
and it HELPED. The left side is really just a case for a
Raspberry Pi with a display, and the right side is the cutest li'l mechanical keyboard. This is a lot to print - it's two bottom pieces,
two top pieces, ten LED lenses, and nine keycaps. I printed the top parts first, and then while
the printer chooched, let's move on to the electronics. The left side has a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and an
Adafruit PiTFT display. I am aware that the Raspberry Pi 4 exists
and that my display is cracked, but this project does not exactly demand top-shelf hardware. I mean, it's just like a Bython script that
displays squares and lights the LED's with Pygame. These aren't real LED's by the way; they're
just cutouts and they get illuminated by the display behind them. Sneaky, huh? The right side has more spicy electronics. I popped in nine extra-clicky Kailh Box White
mechanical keyswitches and five RGB LED's. The microcontroller is a Teensy 3.2 - it's
basically like a super-powerful, super-tiny Arduino - and I added a buzzer for sound effects. The keypad is a 3x3 button matrix, which means
that the keys are connected in a grid. See how each row and column is wired together? In a way, we're using code to connect one
group of buttons at a time, so we can read more buttons with less wiring. I soldered all those wires to a bit of stripboard
and added the Teensy and all the resistors and transistors we'll need. The eagle-eyed smartasses among you will probably
notice that my prototype doesn't light the keys up the way the real thing does. That is correct, and it actually used to be
in the plan. I made the keycaps translucent and I bought
some blue LED's, but we were running a little low on time at this point, so I cut the feature. Finishing projects means making sacrifices,
because a simple finished project beats an ambitious pile of parts in a shoebox. Final task: swipe the card. This card reader will go in the ship's Admin
Room and allow crewmates to swipe their ID badges. [Beep beep] You see, the life support system
is free-to-play, [Beep beep beep] and if a crewmate doesn't buy a microtransaction every
30 minutes, the ship will disable the toilets. [Beepbeepbeepbeep] [Extremely compressed audio of a middle-aged
gentleman pwning his CRT] See, this is just a prototype, so the card
doesn't actually need to store any data. I just made myself into an Among Us dude with
one of these dress-up websites. I forged an ID on my photo printer, and I
got to work tracing the game into Fusion 360. A neat little aside: I made sure the project
dimensions were correct by calibrating the image. This tells fusion 360 that the ID card in
the reference art was 85 millimeters wide, so it scaled the image to the correct real-world
dimensions. You'll notice I made my version a bit shorter
than the real thing, because my display is slightly smaller. You'll learn why in a sec. The model is in two main pieces. We have a baseplate that holds all the electronics,
and a faceplate that displays the results. The faceplate is decorated with these two
little LED lenses, an arrow decal, and a bottle-green display filter with a brace glued to it to
line the displays up. The filter is laser-cut, but everything else
you see is 3D-printed. I added another Teensy for braining, a beeper
for buzzing, and LED's for blinking. In the game, status messages are displayed
on a 20-something-digit 14 segment display; ain't nobody got time to wire that [REDACTED] up. I just threw a pair of OLED screens in there
end-to-end and displayed the messages in a font that LOOKS like a 14-segment display. The hardware here is pretty simple - the card-swipe
machine just has two optical interrupters that detect the speed of the card as it swipes
through. Ignore this groove here because the card actually
swipes sideways. I dunno, man. These clients are weird. An optical interrupter is just an infrared
LED pointed straight at a light sensor. When the card passes through, it breaks the
beam and notifies the microcontroller. By starting a timer when the card enters the
first interrupter, and ending the timer when the card leaves the second interrupter, we
can precisely calculate how quickly the user was swiping, down to the microsecond. If you've done this task before, you know
exactly where this is going. I programmed the card reader to pick a random
amount of time and reject the card unless you swipe within 40 milliseconds of it. Of course, it will also reject the card if
you don't swipe perfectly straight. Even if you nail the swipe, I programmed it
so it still rejects the card 20% of the time because [REDACTED] YOU. That is everything we need, so let's put our
prototypes to the test by donning some protective headgear and doing a real life speedrun of
The Skeld! [Surf rock] [In-game footstep sound effects. Clang clang clang!] [Beep boop, beep boop bop] [Beep boop bop bip FAILURE NOISES] [Boop bap bip beep bop] [Boop bap bip... beep SUCCESS NOISES] [Footsteps, clang clang clang clang] [Whip crack!] [ v a p o r w a v e r e m i x o f ]
[ r u n n i n g i n t h e 9 0 ' s ] [Surf rock!]
[And footsteps, clang clang clang clang] [Whip crack!] [ m o r e v a p o r w a v e ] [Samsung smashing noises]
[SMACK!] [Surf rock resumes]
[Clang clang clang clang clang] [Tire-screeching-to-a-halt sound effect] [THUD!] [Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!] [Ominous rumbling]
[Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!] [Body Found musical sting] [Blue,] Gentlemen, someone
killed Orange in the cafeteria. I didn't see anyone go in or out; they must've
jumped in the vent. [Red] It was definitely Zack. [Zack] ...WHAT?! [Red] I was in Admin swiping my card, and
I saw Zack vent. [Zack] ARE YOU SERIOUS?! I was swiping MY card! [Blue] Cafeteria vent goes straight to Admin... Zack's looking miiighty sus. [Green] Yeah dawg,
hella sus! [Zack] Whoa, guys, hang on. How did Red even know about the swipe machine? I just installed it, like, two and a half
minutes ago! [Purple] Zack's, like, got a point man. What was Red even, like... doing there? [Red] The real question is, Zack's not even
a member of this crew. Where did he get an ID to swipe in the first place? [Purple] Whoa. That's like... sus. [Green] That's MAD sus, my dude. [Blue] Sus City Sarsaparilla. [Zack] Guys, I printed it myself. Like, here, take a look. It's it's not even real - [Green] IT'S ORANGE! SWEET BATMAN'S NIPPLES, IT'S FRICKIN' ORANGE!! [Red] That's, like, Orange's ID card! [Purple] Not cool, man. [Blue] You sick sonuvabitch. [Zack] Oh come on. I made this portrait on a dress-up site! It has my hair! I even Photoshopped a little
heads-up display on it! [Blue] So killing orange just wasn't enough. You dun rustled his wallet. [Zack] I didn't rustle any wallets! I have my own wallet... oh crap,
I threw it over my shoulder in Admin. [Red] Yeah right. I've heard enough. I'm voting. [Voting chime] [Green] Oh, it is ON! It's votin' time! [Voting chime] [Purple] The plurality of relevant testimony,
like, totally corroborates red's allegations. [Voting chime] [Another voting chime] [Blue] I'm with you,
pardner. [Zack] No, no, wait... Guys! I'm innocent!
I was working for exposure! [Voting-is-over chime] [Red] You're getting some exposure...
to the cold vacuum of space. [Blue] Got any last words, you backstabbin'
squirtbag? [Zack] Uh... thanks for watching, and I'll
see you in the future! AAAAAHHHHHhhhhhh
