LED Track DIY Escape Room Puzzle Tutorial

In this video tutorial, I'll teach you how to build an escape room puzzle that requires players to guide LED particles down a series of "tracks". Particles of different colours appear at the top of the track at regular intervals, and players must flick the correct toggle switches to direct them to the matching elemental symbol (similar to the way that a set of points are used to direct a train on a railway track). Once a certain number (configurable in code) of matching particles have been received at the end of each track, the puzzle is solved, and e.g. a relay can be activated releasing a maglock and granting players access to the next part of the escape room. This puzzle is a hi-tech puzzle which could be themed to match many escape room scenarios - the LED particles could represent trains on a railway, packets of data on a computer network, or energy required to power a mysterious alien device, for example. It is easy to customise, and requires relatively little hardware, all of which can be purchased online for well under $50 (see links below). 00:00-02:22 Introduction and Demonstration 02:23-07:19 Explanation of Components Used 07:20-10:41 Wiring Diagram 10:42-52:10 Arduino Code 52:11- Wrapup, Theming, Customisation, and Accessibility In terms of hardware, this project is actually pretty straightforward. I'm using: 1x Arduino Nano (you could use pretty much any sort) ~$5 from e.g. https://www.banggood.com/custlink/KvK... 3 metres of WS2812B ("Neopixel") LED strips ~$15 from e.g. https://www.banggood.com/custlink/3G3... 1x 5V 40A Power supply ~$20 from e.g. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/DC-5V-24V-... 4x Toggle Switches ~$5 from e.g. https://www.banggood.com/custlink/GmD... 2x 10V 1000uF capacitors 1x 330Ω resistor The software - i.e. the Arduino code - is where all the magic happens in this project. I'll explain all the code line-by-line in the video, but it includes some relatively advanced coding concepts, including: Custom C struct to define the related properties of each particle Multidimensional arrays to describe the track of LEDs Object pooling to avoid creation/destruction of objects at runtime (bad for memory management of constrained-memory devices like Arduinos) Sub-pixel animation to create smooth transition between LEDs The code is extensively commented, and available for subscribers to download (alongside the wiring diagram etc.) from my Patreon page:   / playfultech   You can see more of my escape room tech tutorial projects here:    • Input Sequence Escape Room Puzzle