> I was told that I had the second biggest crowd, second only to a Pokémon bean bag game (which did look pretty cool). Some adults were curious, but most importantly, a handful of questions from kids who wanted to know how I built it. It was especially rewarding to show one off one of the extra targets I brought. One kid even recognized the ESP32 chips and said, “Oh, these are the ones you can make drones out of!”

That paragraph really stood out to me. Apparently, where OP lives, people casually make stuff even cooler than a laser shooting game for a one-off school event, and elementary-school-age kids recognize specific types of microcontrollers.

This took a few evenings to make :)

Full source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/statico/imposter-attack-2024

Great timing. I've been wanting to learn how to do projects like this, but been so unsure what types of microcontroller I should get and what else could be needed. Similar in the software world where we all have our preferred tech stacks, I was so uncertain of what stack to use for these projects that it definitely causes a hurdle.

His mention of the ESP32 and how

>While working on the game I used my newfound ESP32 skills to do some other projects, such as automating the remote-controlled blinds in our bedroom as well as a motion sensor that would send Pushover notifications to my phone.

is absolutely what I'm wanting to be able to do. Learn the tech needed for one controller that can be used on tons of different places. That, plus that talk with MicroPython (and other parts) gives some confidence about learning this hardware stack.

Super impressive project, especially for what seems to be your first embedded project. I haven't played with microPython/uOTA so this was an interesting read.

Since you mentioned the water meter Flume, I wanted to shamelessly plug my open source water meter that I'm currently developing. It also uses the ESP32 so I thought you might be interested.

Main page. https://y-drip.com/

Docs: https://y-drip.com/docs/site/v0.4/

> I might try a different theme than Among Us

This might've been thrown out for being too obvious, but did you consider Ghostbusters? Swap the magic wand for a proton pack wand and it seems to fit almost too well.

Liked the reference to uOTA - OTA updater for MicroPython

https://github.com/mkomon/uota

This might be one of the coolest maker projects I've seen. Congratulations!

Very, very cool-looking project!

It would be very cool to somehow make a laser tag variant, and build a persistent game and multiple players, StreetWars style.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151026121204/http://www.sfgate...

So cool and a great write up. Thanks for sharing!

Hard pass on Among Us. I heard it makes kids murder CEOs when they grow up[0].

[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ironic-suspect-unitedhe...

We put Show HN in the title (the convention for sharing your own work on HN, which this certainly is! - https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). But putting that in pushed MicroPython out the end of the buffer (which is fixed to 80 chars).

If MicroPython is more interesting than ESP32, we can swap them...

(Submitted title was "Imposter Attack – Among Us-themed infrared game made with ESP32 and MicroPython")