Raspberry Pi and Mega-Tiny Arduino
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A trivia vending machine made with a Raspberry Pi
As an educator working at a public library, I keep my eyes peeled for interesting uses of the Raspberry Pi. From where I sit, the Trivia Vending Machine project out of Dallas, Texas, is one of the most creative and interesting uses of these amazing devices. Using a Raspberry Pi to replace the coin box on a food vending machine is a stroke of genius by Greg Needel and his team. The potential uses of this idea are far-reaching. Check out this short YouTube video to see the Trivia Vending Machine in action.
The original Trivia Vending Machine focused on science questions, but you could build a Trivia Vending Machine with any questions—history, civics, literature, and so on. The most engaging uses will be if you encourage students to write their own questions—and answer each others' questions. And consider this: Instead of disbursing food, the vending machine could disburse coupons to local businesses. One way I earn a living is by teaching guitar lessons, and I'd gladly donate a guitar lesson as a coupon for a Trivia Vending Machine. However, a student must rack up a suitable amount of points to earn one of my guitar lessons.
Stretch your imagination a little further. Would it be possible to have logic puzzles for students to solve to get food (or coupons) from the vending machine? Yes, that would not be difficult to create. Maybe Sudoku puzzles, Wordle, KenKen, Sokoban, or any other puzzle. Students could play these puzzles with a touch screen. How about chess? Sure, students could solve chess puzzles to get food (or coupons).
Did you notice in the video that the original Trivia Vending Machine is large and heavy? Designing a smaller one—perhaps one-third the size that fits on a rolling cart—could make for easier transport between schools, libraries, museums, and maker faires.
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A Mega-Tiny Arduino
Integrated circuits, chipsets, memory modules, and all kinds of other transistor-based technology continues to get smaller, cheaper, and more energy efficient as time moves on. Not only are the components themselves smaller, but their supporting infrastructure is as well. Computers like the Raspberry Pi are about the size of a credit card and have computing power on the order of full-sized PCs from a few decades ago. The Arduino is no exception to this trend, either, and this new dev board called the Epi 32U4 might be the smallest ATmega platform we’ve seen so far.