The Matrix code

One late night many months ago, we had a great idea! While finalizing the design of the Crazyflie box we decided to include a faint binary pattern in the background on the box. Taking a closer look at the box you will probably see it. After looking at it for a while you might notice a pattern emerging. The pattern reads 1011 1100 which equals 0xBC in binary, well most of it anyway. In some part of the code we decided to insert a message. We placed it in a way so it would be “easy” to notice the break in the main pattern. Now, this was well after midnight and we didn’t foresee all the problems that might occur.

Fast forward a couple of months and we get the first box from production in our hands. Turns out the binary pattern wasn’t as crisp as on the computer screen (doh..) and that it was shifted a bit from where we originally place it. To make things even worse the design had probably been panellized and the pattern wasn’t in the same place on all the boxes. This would never have caused any problems, except for the code that was hidden there…

We forgot about this for a while, but then we finally posted something about it. Then we sat back and waited for it to be found. But nothing happened. So we decided to finally sit down and try to decode it from scratch. Turns out that it takes longer to find and decode than Neo took to decode the code in the Matrix…. So we decided to make it a bit easier :-) Below is a scan of one of the boxes with a little Gimp-magic to improve the visibility. If you start looking at the 0 above the “y” you will probably find something interesting. It’s not easy, so if no-one finds it by next week we will keep giving clues.