Kiwicon 2038AD - Badge Challenge - Part 4

SMS and a scoreboard.

For kiwicon 9 we built a scoreboard that gave points to players when they txt in codes (Very CTF style). That was built around a USB vodafone vodem that has a web interface to send and recieve txt messages.

About 4 weeks out from game day we unpacked the hardware and found a problem, the Spark sim card would not connect to the network. We have used this combonation in the past and so this was a bit odd. After a day of cursing it seemed that Spark had changed something and we needed a new plan.

We got a new USB stick, but it had a serial interface to an AT command set. We had to write software that could do GMS 03.40

The day before game day and we had code that seemed to work. Then on the Thursday, when we should have been doing final testing, we found more bugs. At a loss as to what to do next we tried the old hardware and it worked (So much more cursing). As far as we can guess, we had a location based issue, some cellsites supported the vodem and other did not.

This left us on game day and about 4 days behind in building the scoreboard. If you send a txt to the control number on the Thursday then it got lost.

We designed all the game logic at 6pm on Thursday and did a final text at 8am on the Friday.