breadcrumbs

payton@pschwarz:~/art$ ls projects/
breadcrumbs/

payton@pschwarz:~/art$ cat projects/breadcrumbs/README

Been putting time into some art projects lately. The main one right now is called Breadcrumbs.

The concept: salvaged payphones, stripped of their coin mechanisms and telco boards, rewired around Raspberry Pi Zero 2Ws and linked into a self-contained mesh network — no internet, no cell service. Scatter them across a festival site and you’ve got a weird lo-fi telephone system that shouldn’t exist.

Two modes:

• Message drops — dial a group code, leave a voice message. Your crew picks up any other phone on the network, punches the same code, hears what you left. Coordination without pulling out a phone.
• Sidequests — phones ring at random. Answer one and you get a cryptic prompt, a riddle, a set of directions. Follow it and maybe you find something hidden, or a secret performance, or just a really good bench.

payton@pschwarz:~/art$ ping breadcrumbs.local
PING breadcrumbs.local: 56 bytes of data
64 bytes from 10.0.0.1: seq=0 ttl=64 time=3.2 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.2: seq=1 ttl=64 time=2.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.3: seq=3 ttl=64 time=4.1 ms

Each booth is self-sufficient — LiFePO4 battery plus a small solar panel on top keeps a Pi and its radio running for days without any power cables. Directional antennas punch through festival RF noise between nodes. The mesh self-heals; if one phone goes down, traffic routes around it.

Still early. Currently sourcing phones and prototyping the Pi + handset integration on a workbench. I’ll mostly be covering the project over at wiggleroom.art/projects/breadcrumbs — check it there for updates.

payton@pschwarz:~/art$ █