How building a portable escape room made me a better developer
summary
Built a portable IoT escape room using ESP8266 devices talking over MQTT/Mosquitto, with a messaging bridge to RabbitMQ for durable queuing and analytics. Difficulty autoscaling comes from a distributed saga state machine that tracks an escape run and shifts puzzle difficulty; Simon Says uses UDP primary election across five boxes. Problems include single‑threaded chips, MQTT not being a real queue, and multiple hardware rewrites; after several iterations kids finish around 55–70 minutes and the system proves reliable in repeated runs.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:21Portable escape room design
- 7:31Building puzzles and hardware
- 13:26IoT programming with ESP8266
- 18:02Monitoring distributed devices
- 27:33Aggregate roots in puzzles
- 35:02State machines for flow
- 41:40MQTT limitations and bridges
- 46:41Building escape room reality
- 50:38Lessons learned
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