Homemade Presentation Timer: Raspberry Pi and Automation HAT

It’s February 2023 and SUmmit, The SU’s main mechanism for student input, is halfway through its second year of existence. It’s objective is to

The Problem

Breakdown of Issues:

• We want as many people to talk as possible
• Sessions always run over time and it’s difficult to tell someone to stop talking
• Speaker timers are expensive – and not in the budget!

The Solution:

From my time with student radio, I knew that a simple switch or ____ could be used to control a LED. Our ‘Mic Live’ lamp in the studios is connected to a logic system ‘pathfinder’ which turns on or off a 24v line output when the studio mics are live or brought down to 0.

Create a mechanism to keep a speaker informed that they have been speaking for a set time, without having to ask them to stop.

Conclusion

Whilst it was fun to create and did have a great impact on timings, ultimately this is not a long-term solution. My programming knowledge at the time was limited, meaning that for each speaker, I was manually stopping and running an instance of the programme.

I enjoyed this project and