Goonie Box Interactive Furniture! by Guido Bonelli

Goonie Box- Interactive Furniture

As seen in

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What's interactive furniture you ask? Well... sit down folks and let me show you what happens when you mix a bit of Arduino mysticism with the epic game "The Room" from Fireproof games and a healthy dusting of the classic movie GOONIES! (I know right????) Without further adue my Arduinonaughts, I give you.... wait for it... GOONIEBOX!

Goonie BoxTM Intro Video

Go ahead, you can ask. How on earth did you come up with that??

Well, much like my previous build (“Orbis, the Amazing Kinetic Sculpture”), I wanted to create a unique piece of furniture for my home which my guests could interact with.

This time however, I wanted it to be something which I wouldn’t have to explain how it worked. Instead, I wanted mysterious scriptures scribed all over the sculpture to intrigue my guests.

To lure and enchant them like a moth to a flame. But, where would I come up with something like this? I needed a muse.

What inspired me was a puzzle from the first installment of the game “The Room”.

If you have never played it, after reading this blog post head immediately over to Google play or the Apple store and download all three games.

They are jaw dropping in graphics, mind bending in puzzles and infinitely unique in game play. Behold… here is the puzzle which inspired it all.

Could you imagine walking into a room and seeing this intricate piece of furniture sitting there with unassuming elegance?

Adorned with buttons, gears, and secret doors hidden throughout its structure screaming to be inspected. Immediately upon playing the game I thought, “I must build one!” It wouldn’t be till years later that I came up with a design worthy of this puzzle.

Below is a video of actual game play. Click on my friends!

Goonie Box Game Play

At the heart of GoonieBoxTM is of course an Arduino. An Atmega2560.

Effortlessly whisking away my artistically written 0's and 1's into a symphony of movement, sound and game play.

Taking approximately 800 hours of build time, GoonieBoxTM is my greatest accomplishment by far in the world of Arduino.

Goonie Box The Build

So... what do you think? Drop me a line in the blog and let me know.Oh one more thing...When are we getting a remake of The Goonies Mr. Spielberg???

Want to build something like this for yourself but not sure how to get started with the electronics.

Want to know how I did it and what made Gooniebox possible to build in the first place?

In a word, Dr.Duino a Starter Kit for the Arduino Uno. But Let me warn you, this is deceptively powerful and will be your go to tool everytime you develop with Arduino.

If you are interested in getting started with Arduino, or are an expert user already and just want to get better at it, you may want to have a look at my Dr.Duino shield.

While of course, I am biased that its a great tool, GoonieBox simply wouldn't have been possible without it.

The reason is because most of the time I didn't have the hardware with me but still wanted to code.

With the Dr.Duino shield I was able to write almost all of the code before hardware had even arrived.