A group of three friends and I spent a bit over 12 hours over four sessions to finish the game. We were impressed with the creative puzzles and level of detail baked into this product. Thank you Sparkfun for taking a chance on this concept and I hope there are more coming in the future.

I used a windows 10 pc and had no issues connecting to device. I did not have a windows 7 pc to see if issues occurred like previous reviewer stated.

The puzzles were good. Sometimes I would get stuck and spend a lot of time trying to resolve it. I learned that when I became stuck it was best to just take a break. I typically then was able to figure it out after coming back to it the next day.

Took me a few nights to complete. It seemed to end sooner than I thought it would. But I learned some new things and still greatly enjoyed it. I hope that in the future there are other similar releases. When completed you get access to the design files and such. I liked looking over all those to see how it was done. Gave me a few ideas to try my own.

It didn't require any specialized or expensive tools to solve. But you may need some basic tools such as a multimeter, resistors, wire and soldering iron.

Also when complete it shows how to reset so you can pass it along to someone else or try it again.

It's a pretty cool thing so far. It's taken me from basic soldering through a basic translation cypher and then onward to using an SDR to find some morse code. It's been fun... but now I'm well and truly stuck. The last bit was decoding some memory to find a bitmap and now I'm stuck staring at the SparkFun site trying to guess a code. I might eventually figure it out but this one has me stuck at the moment.

Either way, it's a fun widget to spend some time on.

When I saw this item appear on Sparkfun I was intrigued. As with most people, though, I was taken aback by the price point. But I read the blog post by SparkX and got on-board.

When I received the item it definitely did not feel like $60 of hardware, but I can understand that the cost of something can be in the development time and not just the hardware. I did note that there is an 8-pin DIP socket on the board and hoped that it would require a common IC (555, etc.). After trying endless things to get the serial connection to work I found that I had to order a unique (re-branded) 'Serial IC'. Approximately $3 for an 8-pin IC and $9 in shipping and I received the part. Now the bill is up to ~$75 and still no COMs. That is where I am at the time of this writing.

In writing this review I wanted to understand how others felt about the item and I found a very different consensus on the product page. To be honest this shocked me. Luckily, though, a comment by Member #50532 indicated that the serial drivers don't work on Windows 7...which is what I am using. Now (after a lot of lost time) I must find a Windows 10 computer to continue this journey, and to be quite honest I am almost ready to throw this thing in the garbage and save myself any additional cost/frustration. I honestly don't know if the IC was even necessary, all I know is that if this thing requires me to pay $9 to ship another re-branded part from DigiKey I am done.

All of that said, I am not your modern SparkFun buyer. This is the first item I have bought from the site in quite some time. I am an Adafruit convert through-and-through. I think I was once spoiled by Sparkfun and since then have become disenchanted by your products and posts. I live in CO and entered the maker scene when you all were still doing Free Day, Yearly Open House, and non-Educator SparkFun Classes in state (back in the day I took soldering basics with Nate in the ITLL, the Zigbee class with Robert Faludi, and plush toy making with a CU prof/TA). As SparkFun has grown all of this has changed - only some of which is understandable.

Maybe just be open about the additional cost and the OS pre-requisites for this item and get back to basics for the rest of the site. I would love to see some awesome classes or community events rather than people embedding RFID tags under their skin and making their own tattoo guns. Edgy/unique is not always fun, and while this device is unique to the field I am not having fun. :(

While the price is a little steep, it's essentially resettable, so you can pass it around to a few friends to try out. Even if it's just for yourself, I still think it's worth the cost if you're a real electronics and/or puzzle enthusiast. Decent backstory, variety of puzzles that require electronics and computer know-how.

The HARP is definitely unique, and I spent a lot of time on it. There were many frustrating moments, but I eventually got through them. You do have to know a bit about ciphers, think outside of the box, and know a good amount about electronics. You need to understand binary operations, know how to not release the magic smoke, be able to read a datasheet, use a serial terminal, and identify components and their functions. However, as I got to the last stages of the puzzle, I encountered some problems. A bravenet password gate did not function properly because the account expired, and some of the hints were very hard to get past. Also the BIOS IC that goes into the slot is no longer available.

Just finished the "game". Very much enjoyed playing through it. Good level of puzzles that make you think a little - but don't stop you for too long. Would highly recommend this guy. Looking forward to more like it!

Kudos to the folks who put this together!

Hoping this is a first effort in a long series, as I enjoyed the experience thoroughly and am already looking forward to the next one.

I wanted to get the HARP for a while, but like others wasn't quite ready to put down 60$. I got it as a birthday gift and I'd say it's well worth the price. I worked on it in my spare time rather than all at once, which was useful for mulling over some of the puzzles I didn't get right away. The game is structured in an interesting way; some parts can be solved in any order, others follow a more linear progression. There are a couple of red herrings, but solving the individual puzzles felt pretty rewarding. I'm moderately skilled with electronics but still learned some interesting stuff from going through the game. Without spoiling anything, the reward for completing the game is a really nice bonus as well.

I do think the product description page should make it more clear that the HARP does NOT work with Windows 7. I didn't realize this until I tried to use the HARP on a Win7 computer and couldn't get it to work. My home computer uses 10 which works fine, but 7 is still prevalent enough that it should be made more clear.

The HARP is really unique. I haven't seen anything else like it on similar electronics sites, and it sets an interesting precedent. I'd really like to see a sequel to the HARP; I think the framework that went into the Prototype could really be expanded upon.