TriviaBox – a DIY quiz show setup @Raspberry_pi #piday #raspberrypi
Maker Sandy Walsh made these great trivia buzzers using a raspberry pi.
Just before the holidays, my wife said “We should host a trivia night, it’ll be fun!” … of course, I turned this into a crazy project with custom buzzers and software. Some day I’ll learn.
I settled on using my Raspberry Pi with the PiFace GPIO shield for inputs. Initially I was going to use the Pi for the GUI and an Arduino for the input processing. My thinking was the Arduino could constantly monitor the inputs while the RPi did other things. But it turns out the RPi was fast enough to do both, so the end result was much easier to deploy.
The coding was a different matter, but fortunately I could work on this before the buzzers were all completed. I wrote the game in Python and used PyGame to handle all the graphics and input handling. The game is written such that the buzzers could be simulated with 1-4/5-8 for inputs so I didn’t need a PiFace for local testing.
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