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Web/App-based Buzzer System
Six
Caches Tweets in the mainframe cyberhexRegistered User regular
Caches Tweets in the mainframe cyberhexRegistered User regular
I'm helping set up a teambuilding exercise for an event in a couple of weeks and I'm looking for a cheap buzzer system for a quiz bowl-like game. We'll have ten teams of 7-8 people, and I'd like for each team to be able to "buzz" in and notify me/whoever's running the game. If I can't find anything, we'll just do "first team to raise their hand," but I'd like something more elegant.
It needs to be really cheap and/or free. I found this link to a homemade buzzer system, but that seems to only scale to 8 players and would still probably cost too much.
An app or web-based solution would be great. Each team will have plenty of laptops and we'll have wifi. Ideally, we could just have a page where all the teams could access and just click a "buzz" button, which would then let me know what order everyone buzzed in.
There's an iphone/ipad/desktop app that seems to do this, but I haven't been able to try it (it requires 4.2 which I'm not on yet), and the reviews dont inspire me with a lot of confidence that it will work.
Anyone have any ideas for something like this? My Google-fu is turning up lots of physical buzzing systems, but nothing simple and web-based.
It needs to be really cheap and/or free. I found this link to a homemade buzzer system, but that seems to only scale to 8 players and would still probably cost too much.
An app or web-based solution would be great. Each team will have plenty of laptops and we'll have wifi. Ideally, we could just have a page where all the teams could access and just click a "buzz" button, which would then let me know what order everyone buzzed in.
There's an iphone/ipad/desktop app that seems to do this, but I haven't been able to try it (it requires 4.2 which I'm not on yet), and the reviews dont inspire me with a lot of confidence that it will work.
Anyone have any ideas for something like this? My Google-fu is turning up lots of physical buzzing systems, but nothing simple and web-based.
can you feel the struggle within?
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The reason the button and basic light circuit were used and continue to be used is because they're foolproof, they're hardwired and basically trigger the indicator instantaneously.
Taking a look at the link you posted, they trigger mechanism looks like a basic normally open single throw single pole pushbutton, so you could theoretically wire in as many triggers in parallel as you wanted for each circuit (eg 8 individual buttons, any of which would trigger one of the LED's, you could have 8 triggers for each team). The only downside to that is that you would only know which team buzzed in, but not which individual.
I dont need to know individuals, just which team buzzed in - though if there were a way to do individuals, that would be great. So if individual A from Team 6 buzzed in, I know it. but if individual B buzzes in next, I don't care - it's just team 6 that's first.
Then pretty much instructing each team to yell "BUZZ!" and smack the table is probably your best bet. Any tech solution that doesn't work 100% perfectly in a game like that is probably just going to wind up frustrating the players.
Something like that is my fallback if I can't find a better solution.
The stakes here aren't really high - it will all be in good fun, and if the system isn't 100% accurate it won't matter, and may even add to the levity.