WOPR
By Ashley Whittaker. Posted
Ah, the WOPR – or ‘War Operation Plan Response’, for those who enjoy abbreviations that sound like a robot from the future, only less like a friend and more like an overzealous maths teacher.
The WOPR is the supercomputer from the 1983 movie WarGames. It doesn’t understand sarcasm, it can’t sense when it’s being pranked, and it certainly doesn’t know when it’s been told to ‘play a game’ – much like our Maker in Residence, Toby, who built it to delight and entertain all visitors to the Pi Towers Maker Lab.
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What’s inside?
• Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2
• 5 V / 30 A power supply
• 615 Adafruit NeoPixels
• Bluetooth speaker
A script runs on boot, which twinkles the NeoPixels in the traditional 1980s supercomputer colours: yellow and red.
Another script can be run to play a short clip from the film WarGames on the Touch Display 2 screen, explaining the WOPR. At the press of a button on the Touch Display, our faux WOPR also parrots famous lines from the film, such as: “Shall we play a game?” and “How about a nice game of chess?”
For those who wish to linger a little longer in the Maker Lab, Toby devised a game in which clips from 1980s films and music videos flash (a little too fast, in our opinion) up on the screen, with your job being to enthusiastically shout out where each clip is from.
Authentic enclosure
The body of the WOPR is a combination of 3D-printed plastics and laser-cut MDF painted in industrial grey, with Cricut silver lettering on the side. Everything is glued together, and a great deal of sanding was required to make it appear as though it is a sleek and very fancy contraption from the future.
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