For a 2019 senior prank. More details to follow.
Runs on an Arduino Leonardo, which can pretend to be a keyboard. HC-05 Bluetooth module connected to Serial1. MIT crAPP Inventor 2 app will connect to said bluetooth module and issue the typing commands.
Reading this because you are snooping on my GitHub repos? In retrospect, this could've been done with just Chrome Remote Desktop in my case, but this was more fun to create because it works on any Windows computer. I was afraid that people would see the mouse moving with Chrome Remote Desktop, so went with this instead. The code in this project isn't anything impressive, and perhaps the story would be more interesting if you were there when it happened.
I don't feel the need to paste my deprecation notice into this repo like I did the others because I think this code will forever be perfect. These years later, I don't think the prank itself was the most important effect. Instead, I had an excuse to quote Rick Astley during my graduation speech. As do most college grads, I'm intending to bury most of my high school memories, but I think this one deserves to live.
- Plug this into the back of the journalism computer and log on with my admin account.
- Install Chrome Remote Desktop (backup plan)
- Prevent sleep mode.
- Unplug the peripherals and put tape over the USB port.
- During period 3 AP English Language and Comp (or period 8 backup), they will be powerless to stop the ultimate rick roll.
I am fairly certain that teachers and admins at my school will laugh hysterically at this given the circumstances. This may not be the case at your institution.
It was far from perfect but still went well (or so I'm told). Someone turned off the monitor despite my note explaining not to, but the speakers were still plugged in and the other conditions on the sticky note were abided by (they probably figured that "video rendering" didn't require a monitor if it was "in the background"). Two friends and I walked outside of the target door, pressed the button on my phone, and heard the beginning of the song through the cinderblock walls and heavy door. We ran down the hall and could still hear it until we shut the door of the classroom we were supposed to be in (our classmates were wondering what we were up to after barging in and slamming the door halfway through the class period).
A few minutes later, a student from the class knocked on our door. She knew that it was me, but somehow I convinced her to go back to the class and tell them that it wasn't me. I don't know if I convinced her that I didn't do it or if she wanted to help with the prank.
I received a couple of witness reports, some of which acted like nothing happened, and some of which were very impressed, but I gathered some common facts.
- It was very, very LOUD. This makes sense because I could hear it down the hall and the doors were closed. Some people actually told me it was so loud they couldn't tell what song it was.
- The girl closest to the computer was immediately blamed.
- While they were busy blaming her, no one took the initiative to try and stop Rick Astley.
- The song blasted at full volume for about a minute before the teacher walked over, found the speakers, and unplugged them (the monitor was off and the keyboard and mouse were hidden).
- They didn't immediately know that it was me, but the aforementioned girl publicly blamed me before coming to find me down the hall.
At the end of the period, I walked into the teacher's class, saying that I heard of some "technical difficulties" and was there to help. I reset the device, turned on the monitor, and walked out of the room, pressing the button again on my way out. This time, it was stopped very fast (it wasn't intended to be the main event anyways).
When I finally had the teacher as schedules, she was actually very interested in how I went about creating the Rick Astley appearance. By the end of the day, the MicroUSB port broke off of my Arduino Leonardo, but it worked long enough.
Looking back, it would've went a lot better if I had more setup time. My school has a designated senior prank day, which is totally unofficial but agreed upon by the student body. I wasn't told about senior prank day until the end of the previous day, so I had minimal time to arrange everything and my setup was constrained to the first 10 minutes of the school day before classes started (luckily, my first period teacher was late, the teacher that I Rick Rolled was getting coffee and standing outside of the door the most of the time, and I was the webmaster of the student publication, so she didn't question it when I was on the journalism computer and in the wrong class. Hence, she didn't even blame me until I did it the second time). My improvement ideas were:
*
For some reason, I never finished the above sentence until 2023. But here are some fun "Over-Engineered Rick-Roller Device" ideas I would've implemented if I was told about senior prank day earlier:
- Monitors controlled by a relay so they could be switched on remotely, and they wouldn't come on at all if someone tried ignoring my sticky note warning.
- WHy wAS thIs BULLET deLETED AFTER I committed it??? Why is it so difficult to list my improvement ideas?? Could this be a bug with GitHub? Is this why my attempt from 2019 also failed and looked like a mistake? I had to unarchive this repo just to fix it.
- Anyway, the idea was a companion script on the computer to open the video programmatically instead of emulating a human at the keyboard. The Arduino would still be necessary since the school network wouldn't let me communicate from my phone to the script, so it would be Phone -> Bluetooth -> Arduino -> Serial -> Script
I'm adding an extra line down here so that GitHub doesn't delete my bullet point again.