mechtopia

The Busk-o-matic 3000

Ever since attending my first karaoke night, I've wondered if I can harness the power of the wailing and catterwalling masses for the good of mankind.

So I created a device, which I have called the busk-o-matic 3000

Here's how you use it:

• Each singer is given an RFID chip that uniquely identifies tham as a singer.
• The singer places an RFID chip on the back of the unit at the beginning of the song.
• As the song progresses, the audience puts money in one of two slots, depending on their positive, or negative reaction to the act.
• A running balance of positive and negative contributions is indicated by the arrow.
• If the arrow should move into the red zone before the end of the song, it will be ended prematurely.
• At the end of the night, prizes can be awarded to the best singer, the singer that raised the most money etc..

Here's how it works:

Coin counting is done by a pair of Mars Electronics Cashflow 126 coin mechanisms. These are nice mechs in that they have a nice simple parallel interface mechanism, which is pretty cheap and easy to interface with. I've used a phidgets USB 16/16/0 interface board to interface with the computer.

The RFID reader is a phidgets USB RFID board, which reads the unique 125khz em4102 tags

The arrow is moved by a standard rc servo, via a usb phidgets servo controller.

The brains of the operation is a java program that maintains an internal database of all of the deposits made. This can be queried for winner reports.

The unit has been tested in a real environment. In an hour and a half, 11 singers raised 67 pounds for charity.

First Test Run

Here are some charts generated by the Busk-o-matic's internal database after the first test run.

Improvements to be made:

• Improve coin validation. About 30% of the coins were rejected. Some coin path modifications would address this.
• An audible and alarm when the singer has reached the low threshold
• Make better use of the coin sorting mechanism offered by the mechs.
• The unit could be made more visible in dark lighting enviroments
• Nicer looking case
• Enclosed arrow, so that people don't try to break it off!
• An embedded motherboard. I have plenty of spare ITX boards on which I can run Linux

Watch this space... coming soon, the busk-o-matic 4000!

Posted at 10:57PM Oct 06, 2009 by ohp in Projects  |  Comments[0]