January 30, 2014

The Arduino-powered "Vote-O-Matic"

After looking for a new way to count votes for meetings, the folks from Head Labs turned to the Arduino development platform and created a novel solution. They built a panel with three small holes, each leading to a marble run - and votes are posted by inserting a marble in the hole for the desired outcome. The marbles are then detected as the roll down the run by a light sensor, which is monitored by an Ethernet-enabled Arduino.  

The vote data is tallied by the Arduino and made available via a simple webserver sketch, which is then polled by a web application that can be monitored by the staff in the office. This is written in node.js which makes GET requests to the Arduino and interprets the incoming HTTP responses. 

This system is a novel and creative use of the Arduino platform, and more details can be found on the Head Labs website. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

When putting together your next Internet-enabled Arduino project - save time, space and money with the Freetronics EtherTen. Apart from being fully Arduino Uno-compatible, it has onboard Ethernet, microSD socket, full USB interface (so you don't need a costly FTDI cable just to upload a sketch!) and supports optional Power-over-Ethernet.

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