Spin to Win
A physical wheel-of-fortune like installation controllable from the web browser
Spin-to-win was an experiment in interacting with a physical installation via the browser. The wheel-of-fortune was installed at the reception of Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, the office where I used to work. Employees could then spin the wheel by hitting a button in a web app that relayed a camera feed of the installation. The sector in which the arrow would stop would be calculated, and the appropriate score would be displayed on an iPad installed above the wheel.
My role was to implement the electronics for rotating the wheel in response to a command coming in from the web, and automating the score calculation. For that we made a really simple rotary encoder with a spoked wheel and an IR proximity sensor to count the number of sectors the arrow rotated through. That figure modulo 8 yielded the final sector.
I hooked up an Arduino to talk to a motor driver on receiving commands from the web and receive the sector information from the proximity sensor. Here are a few behind-the-scenes shots:
