I think Edmund has a reasonable idea here, although I'm pretty sure he means to run the output of the counter into the select input of the mux. You'd also need some state logic to handle the serialization and flow control, of course, and to freeze the state once someone had buzzed. Also, you can't run the inputs from the switches directly into digital logic. You'd need to run them though a comparator of some kind (A Schmitt Trigger, for instance) first (for de-bouncing purposes, amongst other things). Then again, you could do the whole thing with just a priority encoder, although people might get fussy over the fact that certain buzzers had a built-in advantadge in ties (although I'm positive the knot-style quiz wizard buzzers are built this way, whatever they may claim). Then again, I don't believe either of these systems would be at all useful for the system under discussion, which is a wireless buzzer set. My main point in posting is to assert that this won't be as cheap as Anthony/Hairboy has claimed. First of all, the Laptop is going to put you over $100 right away (although one could certainly build a wireless buzzer system without a laptop). Second of all, 8 or 16 wireless transmitters and a common reciever are not, to my knowledge, going to come cheap. Also, each of the individual buzzers would have to be battery powered, since they couldn't be run off of the main supply anymore (imagine the horror of a battery dying in mid-tossup). I think I know how the recieve logic would work (although wireless isn't my thing). One would have to cycle each of 16 different frequencies into a mixer, and see which one matched what was appearing on the antenna at a particular time. Of course, the software would be easy to write. shocked that he got sucked into this conversation, J.p.
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