A couple of years ago I came across the a web video showing a device called the 'magic switchboard'. I was an active member of the picaxe forum at the time and posted it asking "how does this thing work and can we make a picaxe do it". Of course the 'trick' was quickly solved and it's quite simple to program with any microcontroller that has at least 8 I/O pins. Just thought I would re-post it in case anyone would get a kick out of making one. I didn't make one as the price for those screw in lamp basis were kind of outrageously expensive and I couldn't figure out a cheaper lamping solution that still still allowed the 'player' to manually change the lamps around.
So check out the video and see if it doesn't make you smile and try and 'solve' the solution.
http://picaxe.pertneer.com/magic.htm
Lefty
There's a little man underneath the table controlling it? He's the micro controller.
So what's the trick? I noticed the the "victim" never actuated the switches himself, and the three switches without the color handle still turned on lamps. It the trick the order of actuation? But how does it know which bulb is which? You could perhaps hide a small resistor or diode(s) inside the base of the bulb, but that would be pretty tricky.
It's all about timing. The program has two modes, learning and running. After a suitable 'time-out' delay (say 30 seconds) with no change of switches the program enters learn mode, where the first switch you throw will light the far left lamp, the second switch the next bulb, etc. After it's 'learns' all four switches is enters running mode and simply turns on or off the lamp that the switch was assigned to during learning. If nothing changes after 30 seconds (or whatever timeout period you give it) then it re-enters the learning mode. So the person running the trick needs to have a cleaver dialog going so that the time delay between changing switch or lamp colors takes long enough to allow the program to reenter learning mode without it being too obvious. Like any good magic trick it also requires a cleaver presentation and slight of hand/time for best effect.
Lefty
"cleaver dialog" and "a cleaver presentation ", well that would take your mind off the time elapsing for sure! Kind of like chainsaw juggling I suppose.
Sorry Lefty 8)
I thought someone was pushing the remote. 