March 23, 2009
KapaLa Moksha: Microcontroller based Quiz Buzzer
A few months ago, I conducted a Kannada quiz for the Sacramento Kannada Sangha. Since people were fond of buzzer rounds, they requested me to have one. I hate buzzer rounds because it is very hard to arbitrate who hit the buzzer first. To solve this problem, I rigged up a micro-controller based Quiz Buzzer which talks directly to a computer via RS232 and clearly displays which team hit the buzzer first! Since we had a huge screen and a projector set up at the location, the entire audience could see the team number as soon as someone hit the buzzer.
I got some overwhelmingly good response for the buzzer and I decided to make it available for download. You can read more about it here:
KapaLa Moksha — Quiz Buzzer v0.1
This is how the hardware setup looks(ed)
and it comes with software which can display the team number which hit the buzzer first on a Windows based computer. Here is a screenshot
More info and downloads here. It is released under the GNU GPL v2.
All feedback welcome!