Box Round 2
Taking a break from visual search for a little while, but I hope to write up some stuff (and maybe release some more code) on different methods for creating vocabulary trees which are commonly used.
The box goes a bit foggy
For now though I have some news about my first completed project! After giving Matt and Katherine the box, they opened it in 24 hours and Matt requested the source code for it. I obliged, sadly realizing that someone else would see the hacked together mess of code that I used to get that thing working.
Not a week later we were at my in-laws place and the box was waiting there, locked and enabled! We decided to try and get the puzzle done as fast as they had completed it but there were a couple of changes that they had made. The trickiest of these was that it now had a variable distance output in some.. interesting units. It would randomly decide between rods, links, chains and fathoms. Translating these all into miles and feet, it led us over to Crystal Springs reservoir on the peninsula:
Box Location Area
More specifically to a little bench just a ways down the Sawyer Camp Trail:
The actual destination for the box
So we overshot the bench by a couple hundred feet and all of a sudden the box started exiting out of it's control loop early! This was an indicator that the GPS wasn't turning on correctly because the batteries had been worn down. I wish I could figure out why the EM-406A doesn't turn on correctly with less than 9V, so if anyone out there has seen this let me know. We took a photo of the beautiful location, called them to confirm we were in the right spot, then I took the box home and used the emergency unlock to get the goods 
Here is a quick overview of the journey:
At the Camp Sawyer Trailhead
Deer!
Us checking to see if we are there
Actually at the bench!
Thanks Matt & Kathe! It was fun to get out (even if it happened to a bit foggy that day).
Code which runs the box
In case this helps anybody out with making their own, the code is available here. I borrowed from a couple of people's Arduino libraries to get this done, notably NewSoftSerial from Arduiniana and the GPS Parsing code from the Arduino website for parsing the NMEA strings.