How I built a quiz with 3D printing, a Raspberry Pi, React, Firebase and some confetti

At Kyan we have a tradition of volunteers creating and hosting lunchtime quizzes. I think I was the inaugural quizmaster back at the beginning of 2014. It was the standard pub quiz format; teams with pen and paper, quizmaster calling out questions but with the addition of some projected presentation slides to add a little ‘tech’.

Kicking off my first Kyan Quiz. With fish and chips. — January 2014.

Digitising

Almost two years on, as part of our 2015 Christmas Party, we went to see The Force Awakens. Between the cinema and dinner we had some time to kill in the pub, so I created a small quiz to keep us entertained. This time I used it as a project to learn some new tech. I built a Star Wars quiz with NodeJS, utilising Websockets. Everyone would go to a URL on their phone, enter their name, and as quizmaster, I could push out the the questions, highlight the correct answer, receive the user selections and keep tracks of everyone’s score. It was pretty basic and extremely flakey, but it just about worked on the night.

Going out with a bang

Other quizzes were hosted, all with their own themes, twists and clever rounds but mostly with the same “pub quiz” format. I wanted to create another quiz as an excuse to try out some of my new interests; 3D printing, electronics and things that would be handy to learn for the day job, namely React & Firebase.

HQ Trivia had been an office fad for a couple of months and I thought that would be a decent project to try and emulate for my quiz. The AQ Project was born.

Without boring you with all the decisions made along the way, the final component parts of the quiz were:

Using both The Road To React by Robin Wieruch and the React Udemy Course by Academind/Maximilian Schwarzmüller I got myself up to speed with the basics of how React works and how to integrate it with Firebase. I created three views for the app:

The combination of React’s state-based rendering with Firebase’s Realtime Database synchronisation made updating all the players’ displays at once extremely straightforward. It also made including a barebones “chat”, like the real HQ app, a trivial addition.

The quizmaster view allowed me to control the quiz. For example, starting the quiz, showing the correct answer, moving to the next question and triggering the quiz assistant to play an audio clip. I originally planned the assistant to use Dialogflow to make real-time interactions with voice recognition, but the latency in testing and potential audience interference steered me to take a simpler route of pre-recorded audio clips. These clips were manually triggered when I needed them, except for the winner action which worked via voice. I found a voice over artist on Fivver and commissioned her to record a bunch of snarky comments that related to particular questions. Thanks, Ashlee! A very simple Express server on the Raspberry Pi would respond to the requests and play the clips.

3D Big Rainbowhead coming to life.

The Raspberry Pi was also connected to a relay through the GPIO pins, so I could trigger four hidden confetti cannons for the eventual winner. The confetti cannons, while intended for use with a proprietary launcher, would also fire when connected to a 9V battery. When the final audio clip was played the four relay switches would turn on and fire the cannons.

All of the physical parts were housed in/on a basic wheeled box that I built from a sheet of 12mm MDF. It ended up quite a bit larger than I had envisaged after ordering an A0 foamex board printed with an “AQ” logo. A0 is massive! The assistant was on top, passing the speaker wire into the box where the Raspberry Pi, relay, four 9V batteries & confetti cannons were all mounted on 3D printed mounts. Black paper stuck over the holes with spray adhesive concealed the four cannons and would break free when they fired. The foamex board was velcroed onto the front to show the AQ logo and doubled as a “giant prize cheque”, with a mock Amazon gift card printed on the back which was revealed when it was peeled away from the velcro.

The quiz was played during lunch on the day of the Kyan Christmas Party, and it pretty much went according to plan, with no major hitches. But it did run a bit longer that I hoped. Maybe 100 questions was a bit ambitious for an hour slot. A few final thoughts: