One of the larger puzzles in the escape room is the bed puzzle. The premise of this puzzle is that there are two balls inside the bed, that must be nudged around an obstacle course and out of an exit hole using a remote controlled car… The catch is that the controls for the car are on opposite sides of the bed, too far for one person to reach, which means that team work is essential!

The bed puzzle is constructed from recycled hardwood and the bedhead slats have been adapted from a daybed frame that I had in my scrap timber pile. The base of the bed is plywood, and the obstacle course is formed from bent 3mm plywood. The lid is another piece of stained 12mm plywood with a cutout for the window, which is made up from two 3mm sheets of poly-carbonate. I made a cute little mattress and pillow out of some foam rubber and fabric to finish the whole thing off nicely.

The design evolved a little bit with the type of car and background fabric changing to more suit the final look of the room. The industrial control switches for controlling the car were also replaced with arcade joystick style controllers as they had a more snappy feel and were much tougher.

The circuit board is pretty simple and incorporates the remote control circuit from the toy car, a spare usb charging port for the car, and a relay which activates the puzzle when triggered. I used self adhesive 5 volt strip lighting to illuminate the puzzle area.

The final version of the puzzle incorporated a delay timer and an MP3 playback module to play a sound alerting players to the puzzle, as some people were not noticing the activation.