Bloop Box is a collaborative project for an NFC-tag based convention game.

The original idea for this game was invented by NordicFuzzCon in 2017, known as Blip Box. Two years later, in 2019, Furvester implemented a very similar system which was called Boop Box. In 2020 both cons decided to join forces and create a common system, which would eventually be open-sourced and made available to any convention which might be interested in it. While the development was on-hold for two years, the entire system eventually realized close to the end of 2022. The name of this joint system is a combination of the prior independent projects.

Enough history lessions for now, what is this game about? Well, to put it simply: Every attendee has an NFC tag assigned to them. In the case of our two conventions, the NFC tags are integrated into the convention badges, but that's is not a hard requirement.

Attendees can scan their NFC tags at the Bloop Boxes and receive achievements for different tasks. These can be for example blooping after the Guest of Honor, blooping a hundred times in ten minutes or even more obscure challenges. The limit is really only your imagination.

By collecting achievements, attendees can gather points over the course of a convention. What the convention does with that is of course completely up to them.

The hardware is primarily driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. Several PCBs have been developed to integrate everything into a neat package. At the moment, the following repositores cover all PCBs:

• Mainboard: The primary interface between the Raspberry Zero W and all other components.

• Tailboard: Power input, volume buttons and status LEDs.

• LED-Board: Multi-color status indicator with I2C.

Housing of the components is at the moment up to each convention, as theming of the boxes is naturally very important to most cons.

The software side contains two major components. The first one is a client application written in Rust. In consists of the following components:

• Bloop Box Client: A small application handling all client side logic.

• Bloop Box Data Example: An forkable example project to supply convention-specific audio files for the client.

• Bloop Box Config: A PWA utility which allows you to configure your Bloop Boxes with NFC tags.

On the other side there is the server component. The following repositories cover that:

• Bloop Server Node: A server library implementing the Bloop Box protocol in NodeJS.

• Bloop Server Tester: Utility for testing requests against a bloop server.

• Protocol Spec: Specification of the Bloop Box protocol for when you want to write your own server from scratch.

A side project to ease ease registration of NFC UIDs. This is a standalone project which comes with the following components:

• Hardware: PCB and case design.

• Firmware: Firmware for the RP2040.

• Browser SDK: SDK for integrating the NFC scanner into browser applications.