And make it wireless. The switches right now come with a simple 1/8" mono plug which sends the signal. They have a neat little lock out circuit that only allows one person to ring in at a time.
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for making this wireless. Hopefully I can scavenge parts to save money. There is already a wireless version of the game that retails for $90 but I would love to be able to do this way cheaper. I’ve seen some people using the page button off of a cordless phone to do some cheap wireless stuff. I need to get 6 of them going together.
I’m kind of novice but wouldn’t mind going with an arduino or microcontroller but I just don’t know where to start.
I would be interested in other views, but I don’t think you are going to be able to do this satisfactory for less than $20-25 per button on the low side.
The big challenge is mitigating collisions caused by everyone buzzing in at the same time is such a way that the system is responsive. The low cost transmitter/receiver pairs use the same frequency and having 2, 4, or 8 players jamming on the buttons at the same time would be problematic. The commercial wireless systems that I’ve seen use Nordic or XBee based modules and can handle 16 or more players at a time. They are able to do this because all the modules are time-synced so even if the transmitter has to retry, the proper time will be retained so the first person to buzz in will be recognized.
Keep in mind that the lockout circuit only allows one person to ring in at a time. It isn’t like those fancier game show buzzers that take a ring in order. There is a main switch that resets for the contestants to ring in again if there is an incorrect answer.
1- If you can get the simple OOK RF transmitter/receivers with 6 different frequencies then these could just replace to wired buttons.
2- Use one receiver and 6 OOK transmitters where each transmitter send a different code. Then on the receiver a small processor (8 pin PIC comes to mind) to decode the first received code.
3- Use modulated IR instead of RF in either of the two methods above.
I’m still thinking about this project. I just came across thison ebay, hopefully the link still works for it. http://cgi.ebay.com/6CH-Wireless-Superr … 344wt_1133 Their company sells transmitters as well. It looks like all could be had for $30 or $40. Do you think this would work for my application. Basically I just want to close that circuit momentarily to register a button push and I have 6 channels that I need to do it to. The buzzer system already is doing the rest, I would just hack this onto the existing unit.