Building an Open Source "Clicker"?

fieldtest asks: "Most Slashdot readers have read about "clickers", remote control style devices that students use to wirelessly answer a teacher's questions. Unfortunately, as a college student, I have had less than stellar experiences with these clickers. I hear complaints from my professors and fellow students often as well. So, I want to build an open source clicker system for all universities to use. I believe that this is a prime opportunity to show how powerful free software can be. So, what do the talented people of Slashdot recommend?"

"The problem is this: a clicker system requires...clickers. What I need are remote controls that have a minimum of 6 buttons (for users to select options with). The sticking point comes when a button is pressed -- the remote must send the option choice, as well as a unique ID specific to the remote, so the clicker software can distinguish between different students.

I've experimented and Googled around. I've tried standard TV remote controls combined with an USB-UIRT receiver, but the range was too low. Googling shows some interesting programmable remotes, but they're far too expensive ($100+) to have each user purchase one.

How should I go about building the perfect clicker and receiver system? Any suggestion is welcome, from IR to radio, from Bluetooth to ZigBee based communications. Recommend a commercial product, or a do it yourself solution. Please also recommend a receiver device, and a way to connect it to a computer. Also, if you recommend that I just build a custom circuit board for the remote control, please give some references and examples of how it should be implemented."

Try these Cypress chips

[Savantissimo]

www.cypress.com
CY7C601xx
CY7C602xx
About $3-$5 in quantity
Development kit: CY3655 $350

(also check out their wireless USB products)
* Wireless enCoRe(TM) II -"enhanced Component
Reduction"
o Crystalless oscillator with support for an external crystal or resonator. The internal oscillator eliminates the need for an external crystal or resonator
o Configurable IO for real-world interface without external components
* Enhanced 8-bit microcontroller
o Harvard architecture
o M8C CPU speed can be up to 24 MHz or sourced by
an external crystal, resonator, or signal
* Internal memory
o 256 bytes of RAM
o Eight Kbytes of Flash including EEROM emulation
* Low power consumption
o Typically 10 mA at 6 MHz
o 10-A sleep
* In-system reprogrammability
o Allows easy firmware update
* General-purpose I/O ports
o Up to 36 General Purpose I/O (GPIO) pins
o High current drive on GPIO pins. Configurable 8- or 50-mA/pin current sink on designated pins
o Each GPIO port supports high-impedance inputs,
configurable pull-up, open drain output, CMOS/TTL
inputs, and CMOS output
o Maskable interrupts on all I/O pins
* SPI serial communication
o Master or slave operation
o Configurable up to 2-Mbit/second transfers
o Supports half duplex single data line mode for
optical sensors
* 2-channel 8-bit or 1-channel 16-bit capture timer. Capture timers registers store both rising and falling edge times
o Two registers each for two input pins
o Separate registers for rising and falling edge capture
o Simplifies interface to RF inputs for wireless
applications
o Internal low-power wake-up timer during suspend
mode
o Periodic wake-up with no external components
* Programm

Re:Wireless?

[rknop]

My question is why does it HAVE to be wireless? why couldn't you add it on to the desks/tables/etc.? it'd be much simpler/cheaper to design it to work over wires (though it would still take alot of wires for a sufficiently large classroom). This would prevent any problems with range or interference from other students that IR or RF can have.

Yipers. You're talking about redesigning a room. With a wireless solution, you can bring stuff in and just set it up. The most work you'll have to do is hang wireless receivers various places. There's many fewer of those to deal with than every individual desk. -Rob

Re:Address space required?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

URLs for the hardware I talked about:

Clicker: http://www.x10.com/automation/x10_kr22a.htm [x10.com]

Reciever: http://www.smarthome.com/4017.HTML [smarthome.com]
Computer Interface: http://www.smarthome.com/1132U.HTML [smarthome.com].

Mr House software for Linux would also be a good start- it's very scriptable and would eliminate the need to write your own drivers.

TI-83s

[figment]

The easiest way to do it is to just not go wireless in the first place. Once you get rid of this criteria, wiring a lecture hall with the cable for a connection really isn't that difficult.

The subjects in which clickers are mainly used (physics, engineering), everyone already has a graphical calculator, and they're generally of either HP or TI variety. Thus you only have two (ok maybe 3, TI-85 line is quite different from 83's), but then you have no mandatory extra cost to the student, since everyone in these disciplines has a suitable calculator already.

No hardware issues, no support issues, you basically just wire a minijack to every seat, and you're set.

I know the physics program at uiuc has experimented with this about 5 years ago, prior to them becoming the new fad. You probably want to check with their physics education group http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/research/per/ [uiuc.edu]
about the plus/minuses with it. IIRC they eventaully went with commercial clickers -- I'm pretty sure there's a good reason why, you probably should check with them.

Unlike the majority of these posts that you're going to read from /., these guys actually did the experimentation, are intellectually capable of rolling their own project had they desired, and made a decision based on their experiences. They're very nice people and will probably share their experiences with you, particularly prof. Mats Selen, who afaik headed the project.

Re:Actually, this is a poor solution

[aardvarkjoe]

You missed "4. The people who take their education seriously and will raise their hands." You know, the kind of people that we should be encouraging to attend universities.

The only place that I've seen these clickers marketed to is huge freshman classes where everyone still acts like they're in high school anyway. The students either grow up or get out after the first couple semesters anyway.

Clickers are a solution looking for a problem.

Re:Missing the point, really.

[i.r.id10t]

Just wondering if you've tried a setup yet. We got one at work a few days ago, but after the glitches were worked out (not enough units, more units keyed to a different reciever), they did everything the sales drone said they would - collect answers and display a graph/numbers/whatever.

Of course, it is still up to the instructor to ask the right questions, and give reasonable answers to choose from. And its up to the students to answer honestly when it counts (do you understand this or do we need to cover it again? y/n)

If you have an instructional technology department you may want to ask them, or check one out at a conference or just call a sales drone. They'll be happy to stop by and show you a nice setup I'm sure :)

Yummy, a problem desiring a solution!

[stienman]

Alright.

First, a normal infrared remote won't work. You'll need a custom programmed microcontroller remote and a receiver to handle such. In order for the receiver to detect all the remote's answers (given a one way system) each remote, when the button is pressed, would send its message, pause a random amount of time, send again, pause random again, etc. This would go on for a second or so during and after the button press so the receiver has a chance to catch it in the midst of all the other remotes sending their data. The data burst would have to be *very* short to increase the bandwidth and decrease the collision rate.

A one-way RF system would be very similar.

If you do a two way radio, there are a few more options. Ideally you'd do a two-way network (such as zigbee) since it would be very expandable - it could accept a variety of clickers from the simple credit card remote to the full keyboard and display.

A simple 2.4GHz custom network could be designed using Nordic Semiconductor's nrf series of chips. The nRF24E1 chip would be perfect - includes microcontroller, 2.4GHz transceiver, and is very low power.

-Adam

Re:Actually, this is a poor solution

[rknop]

Clickers are a solution looking for a problem.

In fact, research has shown that using clickers to help enable "Peer Instruction" techniques can greatly improve the quality and durability of learning.

Hopefully, some empirical evidence outweighs what you think ought to be true.

schoolforge.net? opensourceschools.org?

[j-beda]

I wonder if http://www.opensourceschools.org/ [opensourceschools.org] or http://www.schoolforge.net/ [schoolforge.net] have anything to say?

I think that St Francis Xavier physics http://www.stfx.ca/ [www.stfx.ca] was looking at a WiFi system that was pretty inexpensive, and I remember UIUC physics doing some investigation of building their own.

Re:Actually, this is a poor solution

[Dr. Zowie]

Well, the last time I chimed in with experience from lecturing, I was modded down "flamebait" -- but I'll come back for more. The clickers (in my experience) really help the middle third of the class -- the people who aren't coming back as majors, and therefore will only learn whatever they glean from this particular class: it is the last time they will encounter this material formally.

The future majors will probably do just fine anyway -- it's the history majors in astronomy class, or the engineers in art history class, who need help. The clickers have been shown to help those students focus and assimilate material.

Submitter Here - Source Forge Project.

[fieldtest]

Hi, I'm the submitter of this story. If anyone wants to help, I've set up a SourceForge project here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/acaclick [sourceforge.net]

Re:Uh, no.

[MrJack5304]

It's actually unbelievably odd that I saw this article up here on /. I am a CS major at RIT(Rochester Institute of Technology) and there is a pilot going on here with a few teachers, using a "clicker" to answer multiple choice type questions during the lecture. I find that the clickers are a great idea, inspiring more students to answer questions due to being anonymous. It totally eliminates the blank silence after the prof. asks any sort of question. As a matter of fact it actually helps hold my attention more and really lets the teacher spend more time on the topics people aren't understanding rather than what he thinks students should understand.

But there are some drawbacks, one primarily being the cost($60 is awful considering the other expenses associated with class), and the other being that the technology is in it's infancy and the software is definitely a few releases from being truly ready for primetime.

This technology can really take off, if the clickers become a part of the desks, or worktables or whatever and are totally funded by the university. Ultimately the price and the glitchy software will hold this back from being well implemented in schools even though it has some clear advantages.