--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, ZAMM_Phaedrus <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > About a week ago, I got spammed by a company called LearningWare. One > of their webpages included a five-team wireless buzzer system to go > with their "gameshow" software for the low price of $1,995. > > Now, in the past, I've suggested in coversation that someone should > build a buzzer system that can be plugged into a laptop. Mike > "Hairboy" Sorice has told me that writing a computer program to handle > the buzzer system is trivial and that a buzzer can be designed from > parts costing easily less than $100 and that it wouldn't take much > time to do so. > > It'd be nice. Heck, long-term, the software can be designed to allow > electronic tabulating of stats from a computer/buzzer system in each > room over a network. You can have customized sounds for buzing in and > have all the bells and whistles that wow some and annoy others. > > So, not having expertise in electronics, I toss this out to the list. > Anyone have ideas? > > Anthony I'm a computer science major, and in the fall I'm going to be working on web-based software that I've already started on that would be useful to moderators in tournaments (basically retrieves questions from a database, keeps real-time stats during the game and stores them in a database) for my senior project. Before I started working on it, I did think about a buzzer system that would plug into the printer port of a laptop with a wireless network card, but that's a little more complicated than I want to go (I'm not as hardware oriented). The actual buzzer system part is easy... it's a simple state machine, the only thing you can really worry about is ties, which rarely happen. The complicated part is designing a device driver that translates the electronic signals that the buzzer would send into the computer into usable code for the application. But the idea is certainly feasible. Joe Grimes
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