Bomb Squad
For this exhibit, we installed 1/3 of an actual car and hid a “bomb” in the back floorboard. There was a bomb-handling robot in the pen that the visitor could control from the panel you see below. But we wanted two modes of operation: line-of-sight and blind. So to obscure the visitor’s view, we made a “Blast Shield” that could be raised to force the visitor to use the monitor on the control panel. Observe the video at the bottom of this page.
Control Station.
Close up. You can see the antennae for the control panel sticking up in the middle. Note the "Blast Door Control Panel" on the left, in red. More on that in slide #3.
Close up of the control panel, The mechanism you see BELOW the plexi is what came from the manufacturer with the robot. What I built was the device you can see OVER the plexi. We had to have a way for the visitor to interact with the control panel, which was WAY to fragile to allow the visitor to touch, without destroying it.
So here's story: When I first installed the Bomb Squad control panel, the visitors would simply stand there and run the Blast Shield up & down, over and over. So I had to put in a delay that would make the visitor wait between operations, thus destroying the joy of just pressing the buttons. But the visitor had to have a way to know that the Blast Shield was temporarily defeated. Thus the indicator.
This video shows the operation of the Blast Shield. Pleased note that the status panel changes from “Enabled” to “Standby” as soon as the Blast Shield is operated (see explanation above). Also note at about 40 seconds, you can see the actuating magnet come into view and set of the limit switch that stops the lowering of the door.