(warning:  I have absolutely no musical ability. Absolutely. No. Musical. Ability.)

How it works:

  1. Record self playing Black Sabbath's Iron Man on a flute (recorder) imbued with the magic of Harry Potter, Gandalf and Avril Lavigne.
  2. Build Nicodemus by hacking an automatic cat feeder and installing a sound system so that it will dispense food and play music at the same time.
  3. Place Nicodemus in random places where there are lots of rats (Brooklyn) and dispense food while playing a recording of IRON MAN on the magic flute (recorder).
  4. This will train hoards of rats to associate Iron Man with food, allowing you to summon hordes of rats by playing the magic flute (recorder).

It is essential to use a magic flute (recorder), otherwise the horde of hungry rats will eat you alive. The combined magic of Harry Potter, Gandalf and Avril Lavigne is more than sufficient, but other magics might also be used.

Nicodemus incorporates a raspberry pi 3b, Pi camera, SDCard MP3/amplifier module and a motion sensor. The Cayenne IoT platform is used to create a remote dashboard from which the audio and food dispensing motor can be controlled. The dashboard also allows for real-time rat activity monitoring by way of streaming motion sensor data. Video from the hacked automatic cat feeder will be live streamed over YouTube.

If there is anyone in Brooklyn who wants to collaborate on this let me know - seeing it all the way through will take a lot of work and I have tons of competing projects. There is every reason to believe it will work; there have been tons of operant conditioning experiments done on rats that involved rewards associated with environmental cues like music. Rats were the experimental subjects of B.F. Skinner's (the guy who first systematized operant conditioning) original experiments. Nicodemus is essentially a Skinner Box. Imagine using the flute on the doorstep of Trump Tower or Wall street during an IPO!

Here is some relevant research/background:

Nicodemus, the IoT Musical Hacked Automatic Cat Feeder

What is hope? Is it making the world a better place? Helping people? Inspiring people? I have built several projects for the Hackaday Prize that assume so - but what if I'm wrong. Consider that everyone you know and love will die and be forgotten - just as you will be. We live in a world defined by matter and energy interacting in a deterministic fashion according to fundamental laws of physics. In other words we are nothing more than a giant game of atomic pin ball with no more free will than a scientific calculator. Since we have no free will and no material significance, ethics and morality are nothing more than arbitrary conventions perpetuated by the world's most complex computers. And yet we persist... Why? Mostly by ignorance, but also by will. Life is absurd, but the first step towards freedom, even if it is an impossible freedom, is the recognition of absurdity. To stare into the abyss without flinching. Albert Camus once said "at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity". Nicodemus is a celebration of absurdity. Rats and humans have so much in common. For example, we will both die and be consumed by worms. But not yet. Now in this moment rats and humans are alive, frolicking. Dancing. Rats and humans, arm in arm, dancing towards the heat death of the universe. In other words, hope.

At first glance this project may seem like nothing more than an ingenious implementation of operant conditioning and behavioral psychology. It is so much more. When I first described this project to my wife, she said that it was a horrible horrible horrible idea and that I should instead invent a way to make rats run away from me. She has a valid point - if you don't take magic into account. 

Summoning rats by playing Black Sabbath on a flute (recorder) is one thing, but the trick is to control them and bend them to your will. For this, a Magic Flute (recorder) is necessary. Who would have thought the instrument I was so bad at in 3rd grade would come in handy now? The Magic Flute (recorder) is imbued with the power of Harry Potter, Gandalf, and Avril Lavigne. These are some of the most mighty magics ever known. The magic allows you to control the rats. 

HARRY POTTER MAGIC: In the early 2000s, the Harry Potter books were the subject of several book burnings (https://www.polygon.com/2017/2/1/14474054/harry-potter-books-burning-jk-rowling-twitter) by Evangelical Christian groups that believed they encouraged witchcraft. Harry Potter books were banned from schools in numerous areas of the USA. Most people scoffed, but the deranged book burners were onto something! Harry Potter magic is real! The best way to learn about it is Harry Potter fan fiction. I had to read about 47,000 pages of Harry Potter fan fiction to learn a sufficient amount.

GANDALF MAGIC: Gandalf, better known as Olorin in High Elven, is the most powerful of the wizards ("Istari" in High Elven). There is much to say of Gandalf, but a good place to start is the passage "on the nature of wizards" in Tolkien's Silmarillion. It would also help to learn High Elven (offered as an elective at Oberlin College). For our purposes however, it is sufficient to use the "G" rune as shown.

AVRIL LAVIGNE MAGIC: Most people know Avril Lavigne as the greatest music artist of her generation. This is just where Avril Lavigne begins. All of Avril's music contains secret magical messages. Avril has a special (slightly slanted in a brand-able way), magic star symbol. It is tattooed on her wrist and recurs in many of her music videos (you should watch them all). 

Once you have burned the magical symbols into the flute (recorder) as I have shown in my YouTube video, you must take the flute and play it while staring into a mirror. As you play Black Sabbath on the flute (recorder) you must, in turn, say "Harry Potter", "Gandalf" and "Avril Lavigne" 100 times. This must be done while you stare intently into your own eyes and it must be done with great passion.

The end goal for Nicodemus is a real time live-stream from the Pi cam that anyone can view paired with a publicly available web interface for controlling the food dispenser motor and audio through the Pi. I'd like to make it so that anyone on the internet can trigger the audio and food dispenser while watching live video. This would be on a first come first serve basis with a 1 hour recharge delay between manual triggers.

I'm using YouTube for live streaming because its easy and rock solid. I'd like to make use of the NYC Subway free wifi at some point and YouTube would be a solid bet in that context. I've gotten YouTube live streaming working on Nicodemus using this great docker image and tutorial: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/youtube-live-streaming-docker/

I'm using Cayenne for the web interface because, again, its easy but also has a public facing web interface in addition to the normal user interface with normal ('admin') privileges.  I'd like something with customizable user privileges in the long run so I can let anyone on the net trigger Nicodemus without also giving them the ability to screw everything up.

ELECTRONICS

The electronics aspect of this project is super easy. You are dealing with three GPIO on the Raspberry Pi 3, all of which can easily be setup on Cayenne. Cayenne even has native support for the PIR motion sensor. As far as the motor and MP3 player are concerned, you might as well be turning LEDs on and off.

There are tons of tutorials showing how to do all this - no need to repeat them. For starters...

1) Install Raspberry Pi on Cayenne: https://www.instructables.com/id/Cayenne-Raspberry-Pi-IoT-Simple/

2) PIR motions sensor on Pi on Cayenne: https://community.mydevices.com/t/using-motion-sensor-with-raspberry-pi/1977

3) GPIO on/off on Pi on Cayenne: http://www.raspberry-pi-geek.com/Archive/2016/18/Cayenne-for-Raspberry-Pi

4) YouTube streaming on Raspberry Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/youtube-live-streaming-docker/