tl;dr: For the things with-buzzers series we have integrated a Jeopardy! Game show frontend to have a good time with friends. Check it out at things with buzzers: Jeopardy!. Start playing today, and have a fantastic time!
If you like this article, you might want to read things with buzzers: building them and things with buzzers: a sports competition as well.
things with buzzers
Inspired by Hacker Jeopardy from the Chaos Computer Club, we got motivated to build a Jeopardy! Game and have fun with friends and colleagues. We 3d-printed game show buzzers, created a custom printed circuit board, and wrote software to connect with the hardware to play games like Jeopardy!
Finally, we open-sourced everything. Check out the things with buzzers series hardware and websocket.
This article is about a Jeopardy! Frontend. For more context about the hardware, I recommend reading the things with buzzers: building them article.
A Jeopardy! frontend
When we started this frontend, we asked ourselves if we wanted to develop the game from scratch or build upon something existing. One of our goals was to get this game ready for a specific date. Creating such a game from scratch will consume a few weekends.
A quick Jeopardy search on GitHub revealed many repositories containing this game already. I love open source! We tested ~ten different game implementations and decided to go with theGrue/jeopardy as a foundation.
The base functionality of this project is excellent, but to integrate it correctly with the game show buzzers, we had to do some work. We forked it into andygrunwald/things-with-buzzers-jeopardy and started coding. A few things that we have done:
- Modify the app that it can run offline.
- Connect to things with buzzers: websocket and react on pressed buzzers.
- Enable our own sets of questions/answers.
- Added documentation on how to use the Jeopardy! game in the context of things-with-buzzers.
The frontend itself is a NodeJS application with an AngularJS frontend. We installed it on the Pi and started it next to the WebSocket server.
Start your game today
The complete project is available on GitHub: things with buzzers: Jeopardy!.
The repository contains all instructions you need to set it up, create your own set of answers/questions, and play a session with your friends.
Playing it
In the meantime, we played it a couple of times at smaller events and farewell parties. Below you find a few insights from the first event.
The official event video from trivago. The Jeopardy! game is visible from 0:59 min to 1:04 min.
Credits
The main acknowledgments belongs to theGrue, btford + contributors for their work on theGrue/jeopardy and btford/angular-socket-io-seed.
Thanks a lot! You created a huge thing.