An even more evil version, dated early 80s or even earlier, used cmos counters and gates to make a piezo buzzer emit a cricket like sound (1). The evil touch was adding a photoresistor and a timer circuit, so that it kept inactive until there was dark, then it waited for like 10 minutes and started chirping, only to stop immediately as long as someone would turn on the lights. That made it the best prank to hide in someone's dorm room: super hard to locate and awfully annoying:)<p>(1) a realistic cricket chirp can be made by driving an oscillator using 3 or more outputs of a binary divider; a cd4060 could be used alone by setting the internal oscillator to a few KHz frequency, then sending it to an amp (bjt, mosfet etc) keyed combining some of the 4060 binary divider outputs, so that the continuous tone becomes an intermittent chirp.
> The devices seem like they are handmade, said Dennison, who was in the Statler lounge when Simcox found the device. “Some person smarter than I am is manufacturing those out of their dorm room,” she posited.<p><a href="https://pedroliska.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/building-your-own-annoy-a-tron-with-an-attiny85/" rel="nofollow">https://pedroliska.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/building-your-ow...</a><p>EDIT: Code for those who don’t want to read the article: <a href="https://github.com/pedroliska/ATtiny85/blob/master/watchdog-wake/watchdog-wake.ino" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pedroliska/ATtiny85/blob/master/watchdog-...</a><p>With great power comes great responsibility, friends.
On the 33c3 (last year‘s Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg), some folks brought their self made directional loudspeaker, mounted on a camera tripod.
They set it up so it hit the ceiling right above an escalator, so everybody on the escalator was rickrolled, but only for like 2-3 seconds. Short enough to get confused, but not long enough to be sure it was actually meant for them.<p>At the top of the escalator was a growing crowd of confused people looking around for what the hell did just happen ;-)
When I was at Cornell in the mid 2000s, one of the frats did a prank similar to this--though all it took was a roll of quarters. They loaded up the jukebox in the Ivy Room with quarters and set it to play Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on repeat. The brilliance was that the song faded out for about 30 seconds and with all of the noise in the dining hall, it sounded like the madness had finally ended. And then it would start again...
I liked the Rick-Roll access-point:<p>* <a href="https://github.com/idolpx/mobile-rr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/idolpx/mobile-rr</a><p>Pretends to offer free WiFi, but once you connect redirects you to a audio/video of Rick singing. I built my own version and it was a lot of fun to watch the count of "victims" increase :)
MIT has a history of doing similar things:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...</a>
These are the "LED Throwies" of the current generation of hacker misfits:<p><a href="http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/" rel="nofollow">http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/</a><p>.. or, for you 60's/70's-era greybeards, the "seed bombs" of the digital generation:<p><a href="http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggseedbombs.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggseedbombs.html</a><p>I sit here wondering whats next .. maybe one day, when AR/VR gets the consumer uptake it needs, we'll be seeing 'fiducial bombing' graffiti or whatever the equivalent would be .. I wonder what it is?
"Never heard of the term 'rickrolling" before." - one of the comments on the page.<p>The fact that there are college students that haven't heard the term rickrolling before makes me feel super old.
I’m reminded of the time I took the little gimmick out of a NUC box (which would play the Intel tune when you opened the box) and hid it in the ceiling next to the overhead light of an office mate.<p>Every time he came to work and flipped the light switch he was greeted with:<p><a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=-ihRPi4wcBY" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=-ihRPi4wcBY</a><p>Took him a couple weeks to figure it out.
Tippy Turtle did it first! (This is actually the premise of a Saturday Night Live cartoon from 1984.)<p><a href="http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tippi-turtle/n9255?snl=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tippi-turtle/n9...</a>
<a href="https://clyp.it/01ylefbr" rel="nofollow">https://clyp.it/01ylefbr</a>
I like how its truncates at the end making it harder to identify what it is that you're hearing exactly. Smart move, if it closed with the last handful of notes I think it would have dawned on folks a lot sooner.
We were lazy . We just charged the capacitors in electronics class so the next class would get a nice jolt when they needed to use them.<p>I did also try out the session command to 'everyone' on the Novell system on my first day of school. They were not amused.