Lucky Winner Selector Device

Inspiration

On New Year, We friends had a gathering and during the celebrations we also had an Giveaway session where lucky winners would win Recharge Cards but it wasted a lot of papers to write numbers in it as well as picking the papers for the lucky winner led to quarrel among us so we (Me and Saras) thought how we can digitized this process so that we should not use papers and the Winner will be decided automatically on Single Push of a button. Then we thought to build up a project using Oled and Push Button to Select Winner from the Given Entries.

What it does

It is an Interactive Display that allows Giveaway manager or anyone else using it to pickup random Entries from the Total Entries and Display Winner in the Oled Display. Moreover, It can also be used to generate Random Numbers for the Bingo Game during Parties or other grand Events.

How we built it

First of all, we programmed the Oled to Generate Random Numbers from the Total Given Numbers inside Arduino Software using Arduino UNO board then for the animation part, we first made a simple gif image with the Number Counter and then Converted it into Hex values that can be understood by Oled to display the pixels on the screen. Then we attached a Pushbutton and added a conditional to Search for Random Number between the Entries which runs after the animation loop we created.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest part of the Project was to add animation to Oled. The Arduino Board was running out of space because we exceed the number of bytes that can be stored on Arduino Board as our code was big due to the animation hex strings. But, we figured out a way to optimize it and then we decreased the size of our animation pixels and then again converted into hex codes which solved the storage problem of Arduino. Also, while filming the Demo video, there was some hardware malfunction which led to unresponsiveness of Oled due to which we had to compromise little bit with the video quality filming Oled for Demo Purpose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we at least made something that is useful to people and moreover it was related to New Year Theme so we are proud that we got to build and learn new thing at the very beginning of 2021.

What we learned

Both of Us, we hadn't used Oled till now but since the project we thought was to make it interactive and interesting we both tried our best to learn the functioning of Oled aswellas we learned how we can display animations too on simple Display device like 96'' oled by using Frames and converting it into Hex Values.

What's next for Lucky Winner Selector Device

We are planning to do Web Scraping of Google Forms and Connecting This Device with NODE MCU so that we can do live Lucky Winner Selection Online through Entries we get form Google Form and then store it on Excel or Google Sheets

Built With

• arduino
• groove-kit
• oled
• push-buttons