NSS Pick A Charity
| Client project for NSS; Game show buttons plus display setup. You can find the project by clicking the Github icon. -> |  |
Objective
The NSS (National Student Survey) wanted to do something in collaboration with the university to keep students excited about completing their survey. They would be setting up a kiosk and would love a display and setup to not only attract students, but engage them.
The idea was once a student completes the mentioned survey, they would pick one of three charities and the NSS would donate £5 on their behalf.
National Student Survey
The NSS is your opportunity to give your honest feedback about what it has been like to study on your course at your university or college. It is published every year and is a rich and influential source of information about higher education. The survey is a key component of the quality assurance and wider regulatory landscape in UK higher education.
Design and Development
As part of a group project, our Creative Technology class took on this project. While they handled the woodwork and overall design, I partook in the development of code and some of the hardware elements.
We started with discussing the equipment and technologies to be used.
Requirements:-
- Controller
- Database
- Display
The final technologies agreed upon were the
- Raspberry Pi - to control all the interactions between the buttons and the display/database
- Google Firebase - A real-time, cloud hosted NoSQL database to store the (daily) values
- Python/Matplotlib - preferred scripting communication on the Raspberry Pi
Using Python, a simple script to display a message on a button push was created. This was further implemented (as trial and error) into connecting three buttons. Next, this was connected to a database to store the updated values as well as get them from the database.
Rather than creating a script to draw up a graph, Python's matplotlib library was used to plot a simple bar chart with the three charities.
The game show buttons were then connected to the raspberry pi and nested into a wooden box.
Final product with connected buttons
Noah's Ark - "We stand side by side with families as they face the unimaginable. We cannot change the diagnosis, but we can do everything we can to help them make the most of their time together."
Mind - "We provide advice and support to empower anyone experiencing a mental health problem. We campaign to improve services, raise awareness and promote understanding."
Homeless Action in Barnet - "Our mission is to work with vulnerable people so that they gain access to housing, health and other services in order to achieve dignity; to make effective choices; and to express themselves as independent members of society."
Evaluation
Project video; development
The technologies listed above were all new and working with the raspberry pi, although intimidating and annoying, was very interesting, especially working in a Linux environment. Given more time, it would've been of interest to further explore the technology.
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