The Sunken Chest is a fun halloween dispenser that works using an app and answers to riddles. The idea for It came during a challenge my college president had where she asked students to design a candy dispenser for halloween this year. The inspiration for it came from other candy dispensers i've seen around but i wanted to add my own mini-treasure hunt twist.

Step 1: Supplies

Cardboard box X 2

Raspberry pi 3

Black spray paint

Servo motor

Measuring tape

Scotch tape/ black masking tape

Multi tool

Glue

Step 2: Making the Main Chest

To make the main chest, cut one cardboard box into plank like strips using your multitool (or scissors or box cutter) then glue or tape them onto a one of the other larger boxes. Extra strips and parts from the cut box can be used to make the top of the chest.

Make sure to also have a bottom exit hole with a door for candy.

Step 3: Adding Decal to the Box

To make the box look worn out, use your multitool (or a screw driver) to scratch and cut up the surface to make the planks look worn out and cut up.

Then after that, spray paint the chest lightly with black spray paint. Spray from a distance of at least 3 feet and make sure that some of the cardboard's color still shows through the paint to make the planks have a dirty look.

Step 4: Adding Riddles and Instructions

You can make your own riddles and instructions or use ours (these are found on this google slide ). Print out the slides you will use. Place a tea bag in hot water for 5 minutes.

One by one, drench and paint the instructions and riddle papers using the tea and place them in the microwave for 3 minutes to dry.

Step 5: Place Papers on Chest

Tear off the edges of each paper to only leave the main middle sections with information and stick the papers to the chest. You can add more decorations to the chest like fake jewels or fake gold at this point too.

Step 6: Servo Placement

Place the raspberry pi into the chest and protect it using some extra cardboard layers. Make a hole for candy to come out of the chest from and place the serve motor below the exit so that the servo horn can be outside and below the hole.

Attach a flap of cardboard or stronger material to the servo horn to act as a door.

Step 7: Program Rpi

Make sure your raspberry pi is connected to the internet.

To program the raspberry pi you can find the python scripts at this website. You can also write your own. The logic is simply that the raspberry pi looks at the inbox of a special email address made for this app and finds out if there are any new emails.

If the latest email has a subject that is the answer to a riddle or the word 'treat', then make the servo motor open the door.

Be sure to change the username and password on lines 26 and 27 to your own or use :

username: halloweenthunt

password: halloweenthunt123

Step 8: MapBox App

The app is available on the google play store. To make it, I followed the MapBox Location Based Game example just to add some Razzle Dazzle 🤗

*insert jazz hands*

You don't need it though. Basically all it does is use smtp to send an email to the special address in the raspberry pi's scripts. The email will have the subject 'treat'.

To make something similar you can use this script.

Step 9: Finished

To make everything work, run the huntMotor.py script on the raspberry pi and fire up the app on your phone.

If you submit the word 'treat' the chest's bottom door will open. Before it would open if the word was an answer to a riddle but i removed that just to make things simpler.

Hope you enjoyed and thank you for your time.