Hey folks. The Texas Pinball Festival is coming up and they are in need a of a “tournament notification system” to prevent having to shout at everyone through the PA system.
Basically I envision something like one of those restaurant cupholder vibrating thingies strapped to your wrist and lights up when it is your turn to play.
TPF would pay for all materials for this project. DMS would of course receive ample praise and recognition for the system which might eventually be deployed to all sorts of other tournaments in the future… not just pinball.
Electronics peeps gimme 2c on this… or does this kind of thing exist already?
It already exists*, but maybe not in that form factor?
What is your target cost for each wristband, and how many of them do you need?
Is there anything else it needs to do other than notify the user? Is it sufficient to have a number printed on it to serve as a way of entering a person in the queue? Are you expecting the bands to be able to ‘talk back’ to the system?
Simple and low-tech as possible, really. No need to talk back. One-way is cheapest and best. Just needs to be wearable, light up, and vibrate when called. Restaurants use a radio transmitter to do this cheaply.
Essentially if you’re in a tournament and need to be notified to play, you get buzzed. I’m guessing maybe 30-40 people might be wearing one but could be more.
I can think of two reasons, which boil down to “unreliability”.
In many venues, especially reinforced-concrete or steel-frame buildings, further especially with lots of electronics operating in them, mobile phone reception is marginal.
Not only do variable delays sometimes occur with SMS messaging, but new message alerts are not always noticed, & some people let their batteries run out. Hence, even with perfect reception, a player may not get (or at least know that he has gotten) his notification in a timely fashion.
SMS can experience delays and phones aren’t attention-getting enough in a noisy environment. Also, not everyone wants to hand out their phone numbers, etc. I assume this is why restaurants are sticking with the simple tried-and-true pager system.
What are the constraints for this? How many devices will you need, how much per unit at they willing to spend. It sounds like a huge challenge to design and produce 50 units that work wireless and reliably with lights and vibration.
The Miband might be an option, it’s cheap too. I have one that I got for about $16 on tinydeal. It vibrates strong enough to wake me up in the morning. Has colored LEDs.
Lights & vibration are easy. Pretend this is something like a TV remote-control, but instead of IR, you use RF. A transmitter working at permitted power on a general-use band sends out a pulse train, encoding a number — they can be long pulses, several milliseconds, & the train can be repeated 4 or 5 times. Each unit is programmed to recognize a particular number, that is, sequence of pulses. It’s really straightforward as a design problem.
Probably a bit over budget at $25/sensor node, but http://mcthings.com/ has a really neat system. Range is about 50-100 meters. This system uses the newer Nordic chip with the ARM Cortex-M0 instead of the venerable 8051.
Projected ship date is/was February, although I don’t know if that’s still valid.
