Check In Box

During my time on my college campus, I worked in a maker space within our engineering building. This space was highly equipped and for that reason a bit expensive to keep running. In an attempt to gather more funds from the school, myself and a few colleagues built this physical surveying box to collect data on who was using the space and for what reason. We were then able to use this data to leverage funding requests across campus.

Before starting the project, I knew that I wanted to use a raspberry pi and large arcade buttons, so designed my CAD around those design requirements. Additionally, I knew a wooden chassis would look good for this project, so I focused on making the whole think capable of being laser cut.

After laser cutting the wood, I began assembly. The wiring was very simple, with each button getting routed to it’s own GPIO port on the Raspberry Pi. Each button had a predetermined value, so an surplus of labels were used to stay organized when wiring all this together.

After closing up the case and pushing the respective code to the PI, the check in box was done. It now resides near the front door of the space and collects the data of every person stopping by. This is done by having each person push a button for their respective school and their reason for stopping by.