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Tampa Bay area bomb squad members are making Easter possible this year for the blind.
"A basic switch, a little beeper or buzzer and then a nine volt battery and it's just a basic circuit that we sauter[sic] together and we build into the eggs."
Bomb squad members took a break from their usual training and turned their focus to Easter eggs and kids with disabilities.
"This gives these children the ability to [go] out and hunt Easter eggs like all the other kids. Just gives them that little bit extra ability to be able to locate the eggs utilizing the beeping Easter egg," said Sergeant Jarrett Seal with the Tampa Police Department bomb squad.
The hunt will benefit close to 50 kids who are visually impaired.
[...] Not only will kids get to have an Easter egg hunt, but they'll get to have one whenever they want.
"This year [they're] all going to take home a bag of Easter eggs donated by the bomb squad and now they can do it whenever they want to, and they can go to grandma's house and have an egg hunt or they can go to the community egg hunt and have one there," said Mongelluzzi.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @01:06PM (10 children)
Or is it donated by the taxpayer?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by lentilla on Friday March 09 2018, @01:38PM (9 children)
Oh come on. Five bucks of componentry, and likely an hour's worth of donated time per egg. A clutch of two hundred eggs comes to a grand.
Got to be one of the cheapest ways I've yet seen to maintain and build team morale.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @02:08PM (2 children)
It's easy to belittle them for complaining about it, too.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @02:38PM (1 child)
Show me the evidence they are donating other people's resources, your fucking eyed-shit!
(Score: 3, Funny) by Osamabobama on Friday March 09 2018, @05:31PM
All of these words are valid spellings of real words, and the hyphen suggests that some care was taken in assembling this phrase, but I'll be damned if I can extract any meaning.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SparkyGSX on Friday March 09 2018, @02:24PM (3 children)
Nah, more like a 50 cents to a buck for the parts (the battery is probably the most expensive), and after the first few, someone experienced with a soldering iron can probably do 10-20 an hour. If you really want to do a lot of them (giving 50 kids a handful to take home translates into quite a lot), I'd have used a coin cell instead, and designed a small and really simple PCB that you can get produced for less than 10 cents each. You could even use a NE555 or something to make it beep briefly every few seconds, those things cost about 8 cents each in bulk. The switch and buzzer they used now look expensive and labor intensive to wire up.
I really do applaud the idea and effort they put into it, but I'm a bit disappointed about their apparent lack of knowledge of electronics and engineering. This could be so much easier to scale if they had just asked pretty much anyone with an electrical engineering background or teamed up with a hackerspace or something.
It is kind of ironic that the bomb squad is making "scary beeping electronic things" to hide, while they usually get called out for such things, especially in the US. Remember the Boston Bomb scare? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic [wikipedia.org]
If you do what you did, you'll get what you got
(Score: 5, Funny) by JNCF on Friday March 09 2018, @03:57PM (1 child)
"Wait a minute, if you're defusing an Easter egg... where did we put the bomb?"
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 09 2018, @05:33PM
Especially since you or I could get arrested if caught carrying one of these things anywhere that attracted police attention. They'd call the bomb squad to " disrupt" it.
Didn't they do that for throwies?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Osamabobama on Friday March 09 2018, @05:34PM
Also, as this is for sight-impaired kids, they can save money on the eggs by buying the grey and black ones that nobody else wants.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @03:11PM (1 child)
It's easy to belittle them for complaining about it, too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @04:46PM