WATCH: Former NASA engineer invents 'glitter bomb' to ward off porch pirates

this guy took a package from my porch and now he's about to open it in his car but what he doesn't know is this is a custom-built bait package that is recording him on four different cameras and it's about to unleash a pound of the world's finest glitter along with some other surprises but I understand how he got to this point first we need to rewind a bit about seven months ago I noticed a package being reported as delivered but it never arrived so when I checked our security cameras I noticed this lovely couple out for a stroll as you can see they have backpacks on and they're just going around the neighborhood making an afternoon out of this if you ever been in a situation like this you just sort of feel violated and then I took this to the police and even with the video evidence they said it's just not worth their time to look into so then you also feel powerless I just felt like something needs to be done to take a stand against dishonest punks like this and then I was like hold up I built a dartboard that moves to get a bull's-eye every time I spent nine years designing hardware that's currently roving around on another freaky planet if anyone was going to make a revenge pay package and over-engineered the crap out of it it was going to be me so I started with a sketch and some CAD and then I hit up my buddy Sean who was really good with this type of small electronic stuff and we got to work ultimately when they open the package I just wanted to celebrate their choice of profession with the cloud of glitter because I mean who doesn't love glitter that's easy I could just do that passively with like a spring when it opens but I also wanted to record their reaction and that's what makes the engineering here an order of magnitude more difficult because if you think about it this thing has to sit on a porch all day and it can't be plugged in and you have no idea when someone will come and pick this up so it's not like you could just hit record on the camera and then put it in the box because you're gonna run out of battery and storage space on top of that I need some way to recover this footage in case I never get the big package back so after six months and lots of design iterations and so much testing here's where we landed [Music] this custom printed circuit board is the brains of the operation it has a built-in accelerometer and when it's jostle dit will check the GPS signal to see if it's been moved from the porch and if so it sends a signal to all the phones to wake up and start recording and I'm using four phones that have a wide-angle filming mode and are angled back and this 3d printed portion is contoured this way because it represents the field of view of the phones so as you can see I'm guaranteed to capture their reaction no matter which way they open it from and nestled in here we've got a can of fart spray no joke you can clear a room with one spray of this stuff so we made a cam on a small motor that sprays it five times and not only is this just a nice touch but we keep repeating five sprays every 30 seconds until they throw the package out of their car or house before they realize there's four phones inside this increases our chances of finding it because we always know the package location at all times due to the GPS on the phones but even if we don't recover it all four phones have LTE data plans so they upload the footage to the cloud so I can still see what happened and then for the PS they resist all's we have a cup here on top that spins from a motor underneath so once you load in a but ton of the world's finest glitter the motor spins really fast and the centrifugal force fires it evenly in all directions then we cut holes on the side of the lid and cover them with one-way film so two of the cameras can see them as they walked away and then finally to make it look like an actual delivered package we added some shrink wrap and a delivery label which is perhaps my favorite part of the whole thing because if the thief wasn't in such a hurry they'd see that the package is actually coming from my childhood hero and inspiration for this project Kevin McCallister I even looked up and I'm using the address of the actual house they filmed the movie in and of course it's being shipped to his boys Harry and Marv and there's a charge port in the bottom because if it doesn't get stolen in a given day I can bring it in and then recharge all the batteries in the system overnight so the idea is the bad guy comes and takes it off your porch then lifts the lid and these two limit switches tell the circuit board brain inside that the lids been removed and then that sets everything in motion and I may be biased but sometimes a well engineered design is beautiful because the phones have GPS we created a virtual geo fence around my house so I get a notification when the package has been moved off the property so I put it out on the porch and now all that was left to do was wait okay so I was at work and I got a notification that the Geo fence we set up had been tripped so then I checked the cameras and sure enough the package is gone so I checked the GPS and sort of tracked it and it appears there in a car because they seem to leave my house pretty quickly but it seems to have stopped in a parking garage which is where I'm headed to now and if you're new here this isn't a prank channel so I am completely out of my comfort zone and there she is [Applause] this is like recovering the black box of a crashed airplane it would still work even if I didn't get the box back then footage would upload to the cloud but it's just faster to plug the phones in so I'm gonna go home and find out how this somehow ended up here so it appears he was walking down the sidewalk and then suddenly makes a hard left then he takes the package and gets in his car and eventually makes it to this parking garage where this glorious sequence unfolds [Music] [Applause] look at my car dude everything oh my god my friend Cici has also had some packages stolen so she has to leave it on her porch for a few days too [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the moral of the story is just don't take other people's stuff not only is it not cool but on the plus side you'll never find yourself in this situation or perhaps even worse this one who you had this video was all about protecting your packages from bad guys with this six-month over-engineered monstrosity but lucky for you it's way easier to protect yourself from online bad guys thanks to the fine folks at Nord VPN who also happened to be supporting this video as you know VPN stands for virtual private network so you could surf the web anonymously your location stays private and your data is encrypted and even though I'm not a bad guy with something to hide I generate a spinning glitter cup of data online every day which I would prefer not to be used against me like you reading a lot of the news stories lately and as a bonus if you ever get a message about a video not being available in your country technically which is the click of a mouse your computer can virtually teleport to any country you want groggy and Norview PN is the best because they're super fast with thousands of servers across the globe and they also have Apple and Android apps for mobile browsing which are free with your account so if you travel internationally or give in today's headlines you're ready to start taking your privacy more seriously you can go to Noor VPN comm slash mark Grover or use the link in the video description for 75% off their three year plans so it's nor VPN com slash mark robber and if you use the code mark Grover at checkout they'll know I sent you and they'll give you an extra month free thanks for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: BRProud News - NBC Local 33 / Fox44

Views: 304,509

Rating: 4.4853802 out of 5

Keywords: video

Id: bUaehcUjGZA

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018