I’ve always subscribed to the Rube Goldberg School of Engineering Design, the philosophy of which is “simple, elegant solutions are for the unimaginative”. These are words I can live by. Overengineered designs are where Art and Science meet, eye each other up a bit, sink a few pints, and head off to Science’s apartment to see his etchings. I tip my hat to Mr. Goldberg, using a machine that tips hats in 22 steps, starting with cracking an egg.

Here, then, is my humble contribution to the rich tradition of overengineering – the Mechanical Hit Counter. To operate it, open the webcam window
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So, when you ping salem, you’re actually hitting my firewall, which redirects ICMP type 8 (Echo Request) so the board, whose internal address is 192.168.0.2.The BX decodes the ping request and asserts a TTL output high for 50ms. This turns on the transistor, which fires the relay, which cycles the power, which increments the counter. Then, the webcam takes a picture of it every 5 seconds and stores the image in the www directory. Voila!