Certamen practice quiz machine

thingiverse

The Certamen quiz team competition from the Junior Classical League involves challenging quiz questions on Greek and Roman subjects. Individual contestants press buzzer buttons as soon as they have an answer ready. The machine keeps track of the order in which buttons were pressed, following a crucial rule that once a player on a team presses a button, the other players from that team do not count. Our machine was designed for three teams of four players each. Additionally, so that other school groups could use the machine as a standard quiz machine, there is an option to disregard teams and just keep track of button order. The school Certamen team needed a machine to practice on, but the official machine costs $545 for the standalone system, or $435 for a variant that plugs into a computer, both of which were budgetarily infeasible. Plus obviously overpriced! So I designed a much cheaper one based on an Arduino Mega. It's not approved for official tournaments, but it's good for practice. This project contains the main box and the button boxes. Firmware is available at [https://github.com/arpruss/certamen](https://github.com/arpruss/certamen). Build instructions are located at [https://www.instructables.com/id/Certamen-Quiz-Practice-Machine/](https://www.instructables.com/id/Certamen-Quiz-Practice-Machine/).